Preschool

Preschoolers at Wise Owl Academy  enjoy a curriculum that promotes physical and cognitive development through play and exploration.  Learning and creativity are incorporated into free and structured activities during a preschooler’s day. A kindergarten-readiness based curriculum continues to strengthen academic skills while small and large group activities promote the development of social skills.  Preschoolers are divided into three and four-year-old groups.  Within each classroom, preschoolers are further divided into primary care groups for small group activities.

Unique Preschool Program Benefits:

• Teacher-child ratio: 1:10
• Primary care groups to better meet the individual needs of the child.
• Teachers dedicated to the development of trust, security and emotional growth through prompt, nurturing and responsive care
• A curriculum designed to foster learning through stimulating sights, sounds and physical exploration.
• Daily classroom schedule providing for a mix of teacher-lead activities, such as circle time, creative expression, language and literacy projects, as well as child-initiated activities such as role playing in the dramatic play center or sensory explorating in the sand and water table.
• Twice daily visits to the developmentally and age appropriate playground (weather permitting), equipped with an outdoor art center, tricycle path, and literacy center.
• Detailed individualized reports on each child’s activities, completed daily and sent home weekly
• Bi-annual parent-teacher conferences (additional conference available upon request)
• Open door policy for parents

Preschool Program Learning Objectives – Social / Emotional

Preschoolers will learn initiative and social relation skills by:

• Making and expressing choices, plans and decisions
• Solving problems encountered in play
• Taking care of one’s own needs
• Expressing feelings in words
• Participating in group routines
• Being sensitive to the feelings, interests, and needs of others
• Building relationships with children and adults
• Creating, experiencing, and enjoying collaborative play
• Dealing with social conflict
• Engaging frequently in “role playing” activities

Preschool Program Learning Objectives – Physical

Preschoolers will engage in many gross motor activiites such as:

• Moving in non-locomotor ways:  anchored movement — bending, twisting, rocking, swinging one’s arms
• Moving in locomotor ways:  non-anchored movement — running, jumping, hopping, skipping, marching, climbing
• Balancing easily on one foot
• Acting upon movement directions
• Moving in sequences to a common beat

Preschoolers will engage in many fine motor activiites such as:

• Cutting along line with scissors
• Copying letters with accuracy and writing many intelligibly
• Lacing shoes
• Drawing  with purpose and design
• Manipulating small pieces to make designs
• Working a minimum of a  twenty four piece puzzle

Preschool Program Learning Objectives – Cognitive

Preschoolers will enhance their understanding of numbers by:

• Comparing the numbers of things in two sets to determine “more”, “fewer”, “same number”
• Arranging two sets of objects in a one-to-one correspondence
• Counting objects

Preschoolers will develop seriation skills by:

• Comparing attributes such as longer and shorter; bigger and smaller
• Arranging several things one after another in a series or pattern and describing the relationships (big/bigger/biggest, red/blue/green/green/red/blue/green/green)
• Fitting one ordered set of objects  to another through trial and error

Preschoolers will develop classification skills by:

• Exploring and describing similarities, differences, and the attributes of things
• Distinguishing and describing shapes
• Sorting and matching
• Using and describing something in several ways
• Holding more than one attribute in mind at a time
• Distinguishing between “some” and “all”
• Describing characteristics something does not possess or what class to which it does not belong

Preschoolers will enhance their understanding of the concept of space by:

• Filling and emptying
• Fitting things together and taking them apart
• Changing the shape and arrangement of objects (wrapping, twisting, stretching, stacking, enclosing)
• Observing people, places, and things from different spatial viewpoints
• Experiencing and describing positions, directions, and distances in the play space, building, and neighborhood
• Interpreting spatial relations in drawings, pictures, and photographs

Preschoolers will enhance their understanding of time by:

• Starting and stopping an action on signal
• Experiencing and describing rates of movement
• Experiencing and comparing time intervals
• Anticipating, remembering, and describing sequences of events

Preschoolers will enhance language and literacy skills by:

• Talking with others about personally meaningful experiences
• Describing objects, events, and relations
• Having fun with language:  listening to stories and poems, making up stories and rhymes
• Writing in various ways:  drawing, scribbling, letterlike forms, invented spelling, conventional forms
• Reading in various ways:  reading storybooks, signs and symbols, one’s own writing
• Dictating stories

Preschoolers will enhance their communication skills by:

• Negotiating with peers
• Maintaining a 20-30 minute conversation
• Telling “secrets” to friends

Preschoolers will expand their intellectual development by:

• Displaying a growing interest in letters and numbers
• Enjoying complex and smaller picture books
• Enjoying lotto games, matching and sorting
• Understanding simple science and math concepts
• Developing a conscience
• Beginning to use “Yesterday”, “Today”, and “Tomorrow” in conversation