Pre-K
Pre-Kindergarten promotes a love of school while nurturing social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development. The teachers facilitate skills in self-regulation, self-initiation, and independence within a framework of a well-defined program. Children are encouraged to explore, to discover, and to think about the world around them. Learning experiences mainly focus on the process, while literacy and mathematical components of the program are integrated formally and informally throughout the morning. Functional and meaningful school experiences promote skills in creative thinking, problem solving and communication.
Play remains an important part of the learning process in Pre-Kindergarten and provides a gateway to imagination and creativity for all four and five year olds. Believing in its importance, we make time for play. During free play, students have the opportunity to practice and solidify social and academic skills. Each day, children have opportunities to engage in outdoor play and choice time, which includes a mixture of directed activities and opportunities for personal choice. Choices include a water and sand table, art, blocks, dramatic play, science exploration, books, and games. Play coupled with appropriate direct instruction in literacy, math, and social studies provides Pre-Kindergarten students with a rich early learning experience.
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Through daily opportunities to engage with print in routines and learning centers, Pre-Kindergarten students begin to understand that print conveys meaning. Carefully selected read-alouds draw students into the world of story and promote a love of literature that grows throughout their years at Tenacre. Author studies that focus on the work of selected authors, such as Eric Carle, help students recognize unique styles of writing and illustrating, while setting the stage for beginning conversations about literary elements such as character and setting. In addition to being immersed in a print-rich environment, students are introduced to letter/sound relationships through the Lively Letters program as they begin to examine words in morning messages, poems, and songs. Students also work in small groups putting sounds together to build words.
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Pre- Kindergarten students have many opportunities to develop their knowledge of print throughout the day. They sound out words to describe their illustrations, create books individually and as a group, and examine how authors put their stories together. Through these experiences students develop an understanding that print is a vehicle for expressing one’s thoughts and feelings. They are encouraged to tell their stories and see them recorded in print. Each student completes a class history page each month, documenting something that happened in school.
Using the Handwriting Without Tears program, Pre-Kindergarten students learn to recognize and form all upper case letters.
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Pre-kindergarten students begin their study of mathematics through daily experiences with numbers as they count how many students are present or predict what number will come next when looking at the calendar. Multiple math experiences are woven throughout the day, including work with numbers, patterns, blocks, shapes, and attributes. To deepen their understanding of math concepts, pre-kindergarten students receive direct instruction in the Singapore Math program two to three times a week. Mathematical concepts are introduced using hands-on materials so that students can build their understanding. Specific math vocabulary is also introduced and used throughout lessons. After being introduced to a new concept or skill, the students have multiple opportunities to practice through hands-on activities, games, and a Singapore Math workbook.
Concepts/Skills:
- Problem solving, reasoning, and communicating
- Ordering, classifying, patterning
- Writing and representing numbers to 10
- Recognizing and comparing quantities to 20
- Identifying flat and 3-dimensional shapes
- Length, size, weight, and capacity using non-standard measurements (i.e. using cubes and other objects)
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Pre-Kindergarten science: meets once a week in the first semester and twice a week in the second semester
Pre-Kindergarten science draws on the natural curiosity of children. Students learn how the five senses play an important role in science, helping them make observations about how items look, sound, feel, and smell. Part of every pre-kindergarten and kindergarten class is devoted to “explore time,” where students have the opportunity to investigate the different items in the science room.
Key Themes Covered
- The 5 senses of observation
- Light and shadows
- Tree habitats
- Introduction to plant and animal growth
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In pre-k Spanish, students make their first contact with the language. Learning a second language at this age is beneficial, as children have a window of opportunity to become familiar with Spanish before they realize they are learning a new language. Research shows that learning Spanish improves reading, vocabulary, English comprehension, and math abilities. Learning a second language stimulates the brain and may help a child’s development in social and academic areas. Culture is an integral part of the Tenacre curriculum, and students at this age are exposed to different traditions and cultural celebrations of Spanish-speaking countries.
Pre-kindergarteners will:
- Master simple greetings
- Learn to name and identify primary colors
- Identify the day of the week their foreign language class is in session
- Count 0-10 in Spanish
- Recognize the numbers in Spanish through groupings of objects
- Start naming objects in Spanish and engage in simple classroom commands
- Learn about families, animals, and clothing, all in a dynamic way through songs, games, and stories
- Learn about different traditions and cultural celebrations of Spanish-speaking countries
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- Exploring rhythm through a variety of activities including playing instruments and responsive movement to music
- Learning how our voices feel when we sing
- Practicing songs for class plays
- Folk dancing and creative movement
- Percussion and classroom instruments
- Carnival of the Animals
- Building performance skills in the December Nights, December Lights performance, the class play, and the "Tenacre Song"
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Art is an integral part of the Pre-K classroom curriculum, and engaging projects are offered daily in the homeroom class. Students have the opportunity to explore their creativity through a variety of media in both self-initiated and directed projects. As students work, the focus is on process more than product. Art projects can be related to author studies, thematic units or planned for the sheer joy of creativity.
Skills:
- to develop basic fine motor skills
- to explore how different materials produce different effects
- to introduce new media such as painting, drawing, clay, and collage
- to enjoy the process of creating and expressing themselves
- to tell a story through painting or drawing
- to work together to create the scenery for the class play
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Pre-Kindergarten students use technology as they interact with a SMART Board that is often used to introduce concepts or explore content in math, handwriting, and author studies. Throughout the year, students learn the basic skills needed to use this interactive white board.
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- Creative movement and exploration
- Basic movement skills: running, jumping, hopping, skipping, galloping
- Space awareness: where the body moves
- Relationships of body parts with objects, how the body moves with people and apparatus
- Dance
- Cooperative games and activities
- Hand-eye, foot-eye coordination
- Educational gymnastics
- Cardiovascular health unit
- Fitness
- Fair play and cooperation
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Pre-kindergarten: Library introduction, listening, and sharing
Literature appreciation
- Define author/illustrator
- Stories of family and communities
- Nursery rhymes
- Develop personal taste in book choice from pre-selected books
Information Literacy Skills
- Identify fiction and nonfiction
Lifelong learning
- Develop listening skills
- Demonstrate basic book care and personal responsibility for library behavior
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Building A Community of LearnersA great deal of time is dedicated to forming a cohesive, caring, and respectful class, one that will spend the better part of eight years together. Kindness is a central theme of our social/emotional curriculum and is emphasized and recognized throughout each day. In order for children to do their best learning, behavioral expectations and methods for social interaction must be clear and agreed upon. Therefore, we focus on the following skills for the entirety of the school year:
- Communicating effectively and appropriately with peers and teachers
- Being part of a group; learning to lead and follow
- Observing, respecting, and celebrating differences
- Effective problem solving and negotiation
The Culture of “Being a Student”The underlying behaviors and skills that are the basis for academic learning are explicitly taught in Pre-Kindergarten. Children are given direct instruction and the time to practice those underlying classroom skills that make learning possible:
- Sitting in a group
- Raising a hand and noticing appropriate times to speak
- Asking and answering questions
- Listening to and remembering directions and information
- Asking for help when it is needed
- Making independent choices
- Organizing time and materials
- Taking risks
- Teamwork
Thematic UnitsParticipation in thematic units provides students with the opportunity to explore topics of relevance in their lives and begin to stretch their knowledge beyond what is familiar. Hands-on activities across disciplines allow students to construct their knowledge in meaningful ways Units of Study:
- Seasons of the Tenacre apple orchard
- Pumpkins
- Holidays and Light
- “Me”
- Introduction to Martin Luther King and his work
- Seeds and Plants
- Personal Safety
Christina GraceDirector of Educational Support & Reading Coordinator781-591-7409
Lauren HowardInstructional Technology Specialist & Lower School Math/Reading Teacher
