CURRICULUM

Our Director of Curriculum and Education, Sharon Rosenberg-Scholl, works with our staff to continually enrich our wonderful curriculum based on our child-centered approach. Sharon’s educational philosophy is to emphasize hands-on relevant experiences for children. If you have questions about our curriculum, please contact Sharon at 612-374-0380.

Our curriculum is multi-sensory and includes a variety of equipment, resources, and key experiences. Each month has a general theme and the environment is organized around that central idea. The children participate in activities, learn songs, hear poetry, music and stories, and create their own expressions in art and craft materials based on the theme or celebration. Our curriculum is designed to meet the individual needs of all the children enrolled.

Varied experiences are offered, involving space for indoor-outdoor play, expression through language, and flexible scheduling for quiet and active experiences suitable to the stages of growth and development of children. Recognition and encouragement for success and positive self-esteem for all children is our focus. Because children learn in the “here and now,” we are always flexible in how we implement our curriculum.

The six basic developmental areas of learning are considered in determining curriculum. These areas are cognitive, language, psycho-motor, social, emotional and creative. These developmental areas allow for experiences that take each child through a natural growth process. Observations are made and guidelines for learning experiences are created for each child.

Self-selection and choices are offered in a team-teaching, team-learning atmosphere. Such specific areas as science, health, safety, language, social living, mathematical concepts, perceptual and organizing skills, and religious customs and celebrations are covered through the use of mini-units within Learning Centers. The teachers are facilitators who guide the children through the varied learning experiences.

Materials in the preschool are colorful, attractive and safe. Varied choices are available to children for observation and problem-solving. Emphasis is placed upon development of self-awareness, respect for self and others, self-reliance and self control. The children work and play in small groups in all Learning Centers.

We provide a variety of activities and materials appropriate for your child’s age and development level – many from the URJ pre-school curriculum, “To See The World Through Jewish Eyes.”

We strive to enhance the individual child’s self-concept and feeling of worth, and to promote positive relationships with adults and with peers.

We foster a non-competitive atmosphere to enable each child to become self-directed. In all of our activities, the emphasis is on the development of the “whole child.”

KEY EXPERIENCES IN ACTIVE LEARNING
Exploring actively with all the senses.
Discovering relations through direct experience.
Manipulating, transforming, and combining materials.
Choosing materials, activities, purposes.
Acquiring skills with tools and equipment.
Using the large muscles.
Taking care of one’s own needs.

KEY EXPERIENCES IN USING LANGUAGE
Talking with others about personally meaningful experiences.
Describing objects, events, and relations.
Expressing feelings in words.
Having one’s own spoken language written down by an adult and read back.
Having fun with language; rhyming, making up stories, listening to poems and stories.

KEY EXPERIENCES IN REPRESENTING EXPERIENCES AND IDEAS
Recognizing objects by sound, touch, taste, and smell.
Imitating actions.
Relating pictures, photographs, and models to real places and things.
Role playing, pretending.
Making models out of clay, blocks, etc.
Drawing and painting.

KEY EXPERIENCES IN DEVELOPING LOGICAL REASONING
Classification
Investigating and labeling the attributes of things.
Noticing and describing how things are the same and how they are different.
Sorting and matching.
Using and describing something in several different ways.
Describing what characteristics something does not possess or what class it does not belong to.
Holding more than one attribute in mind at a time. (Ex: Can you find something that is red and made of wood?)
Distinguishing between “some” and “all.”

Seriation
Comparing; which one is bigger/smaller, heavier/lighter, rougher/smoother, louder/softer, taller/shorter, wider/narrower, sharper, darker, etc.

Arranging several things in order along some dimension and describing the relations (the longest one, the shortest one, etc.)

Number Concepts
Comparing number and amount; more/less, same amount, more/fewer, same number.

Comparing the number of items in two sets by matching them up in one-to-one correspondence. (Ex: Are there as many crackers as there are children?)

Enumerating (counting) objects, as well as counting by rote.

KEY EXPERIENCES IN UNDERSTANDING TIME AND SPACE
Spatial Relations

Fitting things together and taking them apart.

Rearranging a set of objects or one object in space (folding, twisting, stretching, stacking, tying) and observing the spatial transformations.

Observing things and places from different spatial viewpoints.

Experiencing and describing the positions of things in relation to each other (e.g., in the middle, on the side of, on, off, on top of, over, above).

Experiencing and describing the direction of movement of things and people (to, from, into, out of, toward, away from).

Experiencing and describing relative distances among things and locations (close, near, far, next to, apart, together).

Experiencing and representing one’s own body; how it is structured, what various body parts can do.

Learning to locate things in the classroom, school, and neighborhood.

Interpreting representations of spatial relations in drawings and pictures.

Distinguishing and describing shapes.

Time
Planning and completing what one has planned.
Describing and representing past events.
Anticipating future events verbally and by making appropriate preparations.
Starting and stopping an action on signal.
Noticing, describing, and representing the order of events.
Experiencing and describing different rates of movement.
Using conventional time units when talking about past and future events (morning, yesterday, hour, etc.).
Comparing time periods - short, long, new, old, young, a little while, a long time.
Observing that clocks and calendars are used to mark the passage of time.
Observing seasonal changes.
Be able to make transitions successfully.