Children are introduced to the world of letters, literature, and writing—and they soon discover a love for the written word.
Starting Your Story
In classrooms rich in language experiences, we foster the rapid growth of each child’s receptive and expressive skills. Capitalizing on their innate eagerness to communicate, we build vocabularies, solidify blending and decoding skills, and provide countless engaging interactions to hear, process, and use language to understand and describe their world.
Constant exposure to phonetic patterns, sound blending, and sight words, and engaging practice with decoding strategies and new vocabulary builds a child’s confidence and skill until decoding becomes second nature. Lively discussions of engaging stories foster the ability to comprehend spoken and written language.
Reading
In pre-kindergarten, language is developed through listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Teachers carefully guide students through this process as they learn the fundamentals of print and language.
In pre-kindergarten, students may:
- Experience a variety of literature
- Improve their listening skills
- Understand the rhythm of language
- Identify letters, words, and symbols
- Expand their vocabulary through stories
- Acquire phonetic awareness
- Discriminate first-letter sounds
- Recognize their own name and meaningful words in print
In kindergarten, the pages in books come to life as students become actively involved in the stories they hear, read aloud, and the stories they read by themselves. They continue to develop their language through listening, reading, speaking, and writing.
In kindergarten, students may:
- Develop letter recognition and the sound-symbol relationship
- Begin to put sounds together to form words and put words together to form sentences
Creative Writing and Grammar
Our pre-kindergarteners learn to tell stories with words and actions. They begin to experiment with letter-like symbols, progressing to inventive spelling.
In pre-kindergarten, students may:
- Participate in journaling
- Manipulate all forms of writing implements
- Write from word cards and letters dictated by others
- Begin to write with a purpose
Kindergarten students develop skills in journal-writing and expressing their own ideas, beginning with pictures and writing phrases.
In kindergarten, students may:
- Participate in creating classroom and individual stories
- Tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end
- Communicate their ideas in complete sentences