Kindergarten (5K)
Entrance into the Kindergarten is determined by a standardized assessment done by our faculty and admission staff. Our Kindergarten class is a full-day program (8:00 AM-3:00PM). All activities take place in the mornings. The program has enrichment activities in the afternoons, as well as augmented art classes.
Elements of Open Court, HighReach Learning, as well as best practices in current early childhood education gleaned from leading educators, are combined to form the guiding philosophy of our Kindergarten. With small class size, we ensure the individual development of each child. because each child is unique learner, our Kindergartners are exposed to a variety of learning methods.
Environmental print, Big Books, word journaling, and even hands-on cooking are used for pre-reading and reading skills. Our Kindergarten is unabashedly a demanding academic program for youngsters. While we believe that learning must be fun and interactive, most of our Kindergartners are reading independently by the end of the year. Handwriting Without Tears is employed to teach fine motor and writing skills. In math, reading and writing are integrated in most activities. Higher order thinking skills in math are added to science in activities requiring approximation, estimation, and observation. Again, as with a demanding curriculum, our students master the concepts of addition and subtraction during this year. Overarching all of our activities is the knowledge that all children learn in multiple ways. Our teaching and learning incorporate all of these learning styles as a way of re-enforcement. As more than a few of our parents have observed, our children do not have any idea of just how hard they are working and how much they are learning… It’s fun.
Spanish, music (Kindermusik), library skills, and physical education supplement the curriculum. In conjunction with the monthly learning themes of the Kindergarten, we plan regular field trips to re-enforce what is doing on inside the classroom. Recent examples of these trips include the following: student presentations of fruit and vegetable reports ending with a visit to Mike’s Farm; teacher-led readings of classic children’s literature before attending a live theatrical performance of those stories; introduction of musical pieces, culminating in a trip to Mr. Al’s concert.