LANGUAGE

• Alphabet letter recognition and sound association with the use of puppets, sandpaper letters, sand boxes, objects, books, letter boxes, puzzles, rubber stamps, and stories. 
• Pre-reading skills and activities such as: classification, visual and auditory discrimination, visual and auditory memory, and sequencing.
• Creative writing. Throughout the year we will write several class stories. We will write children’s dictated stories whenever they ask us. We hope that each child learns that what he thinks about he can say, what he says can be written by his teacher or himself, and what is written can be read by himself and others. Print is merely "talk written down."
• Little books. These are very short books with simple pictures and few words which children are quickly able to "read" to themselves and others.
• Journals.  Each child will have his/her own notebook in which he/she is to write weekly. At the end of the year these pages will be made into a book for each child to take home.

MATH

• The ability to identify basic properties of objects:  texture, temperature, color, sound, shape, parts of the objects, relationships of parts to the whole.
• The ability to identify spatial relationships:  this involves the way objects are related to each other in space, their position, direction, distance, etc.
• The ability to match:  to see that two objects are identical in every way.
• The ability to compare:  to see how things are alike and how they are different.
• One-to-one correspondence:  pairing objects so that there is one and only one of object # I for each object #2.
• Classification:  the ability to sort or group objects according to similarities and differences in quantity or quality.
• Quantification:  identification and comparison of quantity, questions how much and how many.
• Measurement:  the process of associating a number with the length of a line, or the area of a flat surface, or the weight of an object.
• Ordering or Seriation:  the ability to put things in order based on some quantitative increase or decrease.
• Patterning:  the ability to recognize a pattern or to put things in a pre-determined order.
• Set Construction:  the ability to recognize similarities and/or differences between groups of objects.
• Time:  the ability to recognize that events begin and end, some last a long time, others a short time. All events have a specific ordering.

**Preschool children must experience these math concepts concretely through the manipulation of objects or the movement of their own bodies. Terms such as "3, beginning, off, wide, yellow, soft" are abstractions of what the child must first experience with real things and events. These concepts cannot be taught verbally.

SOCIAL STUDIES AND SCIENCE  (2008-2009) 

NOTE - The Field Trips listed above are possibilities for where we might go in connection with our units of study. The question marks indicate we are looking for this type of person.  We typically plan 3 field trips each year.  Our first one is a walking trip somewhere in our neighborhood.  Our second trip requires bus transportation and is for 4’s only.  Our final trip each year is to the Anita Purves Nature Center. Parents bring their children to the Nature Center.

This curriculum outline is NOT a list of what your child will know at the end of the year. It is simply a list of what we are enabling him/her to experience.'

If a child leaves preschool:

• knowing God loves him/her
• with a positive self-concept - knowing he/she can learn
• feeling that school is a good place to be
• having friends

then preschool has been worthwhile for the child.