​All Day Kindergarten Readiness Preschool Class

 

The All Day Kindergarten Readiness class is Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 8:00 a.m. - 2:15 p.m.  Students in this class will learn school readiness skills to prepare them for kindergarten.  While continuing to learn through play and exploration, we focus on the following academic areas:
 

Literacy

Through pictures, play, and the printed word, preschoolers begin the reading and writing process.  To build a solid foundation of literacy skills, we focus on:

• Oral language skills

• Vocabularies

• Conversations with other children and adults

• Proficiency in language

• Literacy skills related to writing and reading

• Letters of the alphabet

• Listening comprehension

• Print awareness

• Ways to use and appreciate books 

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Phonological Awareness

Through phonological awareness, children learn to associate sounds with letters and create links to word recognition and decoding skills necessary for reading.  Through blending activities, children learn to blend sounds to read words in everyday print.  In the kindergarten readiness class, we focus on:

• Rhyming— Children need to hear and make rhymes so they can make new words from words they already know. For example: If a child knows the word “fun,” then s/he can make the word “run.”

• Blending— Sound blending helps children connect sounds in words.

• Segmentation—Segmentation helps children learn to separate sentences into words and words into sounds. This will help a child to write the words s/he hears.

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STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math)

• Science activities include exploring water and sand, comparing and contrasting natural materials like rocks and soil, rolling balls across the room, and looking through a magnifying glass to count how many legs are on the bug that was caught during outdoor play.

• Technology activities include computers, but also identifying simple machines like gears and wheels and pulleys.

• Engineering in preschool happens in the block area where children are planning and designing structures every day with little teacher direction.

• Math activities include counting and matching shapes and making patterns. Measuring is easy too, especially with unit blocks where two of one size equal one of the next size up.