A Holistic Aproach to Early Learning 

Throughout our program, your child will develop essential skills that help build a strong educational foundation. These skills are key to expanding background knowledge and fostering growth. The goal of early childhood education is to expose children to a variety of topics and activities that spark curiosity and exploration. The skills targeted in this program are open-ended and grow with your child over time. There is no specific moment of "mastery" where a child is moved on to another skill or held back to achieve mastery. Instead, these skills evolve alongside your child’s development. Most importantly, our approach is hands-on and play-based, which is developmentally appropriate for this age group. Play is vital in building foundational executive functioning skills that children need to thrive in school and beyond. 

In terms of reading readiness, we follow the Science of Reading and integrate phonological awareness into our play-based model through activities like rhyming, singing, and playing with sounds. Another key aspect of our program is our teacher-to-student ratio. We maintain small class sizes to ensure personalized, individualized instruction, fostering a close-knit, family-like environment that provides the many additional benefits of such a setting. Below, you'll find the foundational skills your child will be exposed to. Learning opportunities will be tailored to each child's unique needs.

Predicting: Children demonstrate an ability to answer questions about a story and what might happen. 

Recall & Retell: Children recall and retell information about a story or topic. 

Sorting: Children sort and classify data, information, and objects. 

Number Sense: Children demonstrate an understanding of numbers. 

Measuring: Children use measurement words to show size, height, weight, length and capacity. 

Shapes: Children identify basic 2-dimensional shapes. 

Alphabet Knowledge: Children show an awareness of letters and sounds. 

Why these specific skills? If this is your child's first year of school, please note that it's simply not realistic to expect them to master everything or know it all right away. Instead, we focus on exposing them to foundational skills through guided unit studies and, more importantly, through play. One of the great things about this program is how these simple skills naturally connect across different subjects. We use predicting in reading, math, and science. Recalling and retelling information helps develop skills in reading, writing, and communication. Sorting is used in nearly every subject as we sift through data. This small list of skills is mighty, intentional, and designed to set children up for success in their early educational journey.

*In addition to these skills, other subject areas will be woven in throughout the program. Each thematic unit will typically feature at least one activity from these other subject areas: 

• Art (both crafts and process/open-ended art) 

• Sensory (tactile learning with their hands) 

• Science or STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) 

• Fine motor skills (small movements like threading) 

• Gross motor skills (large movements like jumping)