Curriculum
Creative Curriculum® for Preschool
The Creative Curriculum for Preschool is an award-winning curriculum for preschool success. Comprising The Foundation, five research-based volumes that provide the knowledge base of the curriculum, and the Daily Resources, which offer step-by-step guidance in the form of Teaching Guides and additional daily teaching tools, The Creative Curriculum for Preschool is fully aligned with the Head Start Child Development and Early Learning Framework and state early learning standards. Using exploration and discovery as a way of learning, The Creative Curriculum for Preschool enables children to develop confidence, creativity, and lifelong critical thinking skills. The Creative Curriculum for Preschool is based on 38 objectives for development and learning, which are fully aligned with the Head Start Child Development and Early Learning Framework as well as early learning standards for every state. It presents knowledge-building volumes and daily practice resources in tandem, giving every educator the “what,” “why” and “how” of early childhood education. It also offers daily opportunities to individualize instruction, helping teachers meet the needs of every type of learner and addresses all the important areas of learning, from social-emotional and math to technology and the arts, and incorporates them throughout every part of every day. The curriculum also offers daily, built-in opportunities for observation, helping teachers and administrators clearly see the strong relationship between curriculum and assessment, as well as complete support for working with English- and dual-language learners, including detailed guidance that helps to build teachers’ knowledge about best practices. ALso included is guidance for working with all learners, including advanced learners and children with disabilities.
Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum
Heggerty is used in both the 3 year old and 4 year old classrooms. The 3 year old classroom focuses solely on nursery rhymes and the important pre-literacy skills that include singing, saying nursery rhymes and the repetition of the rhymes.
The 4 year old classroom uses the entirety of Heggerty which includes includes 10 components that are taught within each lesson, eight phonemic awareness skills and 2 additional activities to develop letter name and letter sound recognition and language awareness activities. During the language awareness activities, the students learn nursery rhymes. The lessons can be used for instruction within a half‐day or full‐day Pre‑Kindergarten program.
Through the daily lessons, students engage in activities teaching early skills such as rhyming and onset fluency, basic skills of blending and segmenting sounds, and working with the complex and advanced skills of adding, and deleting phonemes, and the skills of substituting phonemes is taught in Weeks 19 and beyond. The lessons are taught with explicit teacher modeling and scaffolded support to meet the needs of all learners in a classroom. The skills taught are supplemental to the literacy curriculum that is currently in place. When the lessons are taught consistently each day, teachers see improvement in students reading, spelling, and writing, as the students learn to hear the sounds in words.
Read It Again is a program provided to our district through the support of the Grant Wood AEA and is used around the country. Read It Again is a supplemental emerging literacy curriculum that is designed for use in preschools. The four areas of emerging literacy skills that are the focus of Read It Again include: narrative, vocabulary, phonological awareness and print knowledge. Each of these areas has six objectives that are covered throughout the year. During a typical lesson, two of the skills are emphasized either before, during or after reading the storybook. There are two lessons per week so that all four skill areas are covered each week.
Handwriting without Tears is our handwriting program that supports the children's development of identifying letters and transfers this to handwriting. This program was developed by Jan Olsen, an occupational therapist. It's based on years of successfully teaching handwriting to children of all ability levels. It's developmentally based, and incorporates visual, auditory, manipulative, tactile, and kinesthetic teaching strategies. It's implemented in the classroom through large group and small group opportunities.
Pre-K Math curriculum is a 35 week math curriculum that includes lesson plans that break down a 60 minute block math time into these sections {movement, rhythm, whole-group lesson, small-group lesson and apply & practice}. The units will also include any and all cards needed to make the lessons successful! You will just need to provide the manipulatives like teddy bears or cubes!
Pre-K Math units are teacher-created, kid-tested, and most importantly kid-approved! Pre-K Math takes away that monotonous way of teaching math where students sit and listen to the teacher TEACH math. Instead, Pre-K Math encourages guidance from the teacher while the students TEACH and LEARN math through hands-on and engaging math activities with their partners. Pre-K Math units are made up of 10 instructional days each, but can be adjusted to fit your classroom needs.
The units include assessment pieces as a way to ensure student growth over the unit.These are just a few highlights you’ll see using the Pre-K Math Units; kids talking about math, kids using manipulatives, activities that are fun + engaging, learning that requires critical thinking!