The Early Childhood Department offers the Creative Curriculum to children ages three through five. The nature of the Creative Curriculum places the child at the center, which allows TRAIL to consistently position the student's strengths and interests at the forefront of the learning experience. No two students are alike, and the School enthusiastically supports and fosters each child’s unique passion. One may be a future mathematician, another a budding artist, and still another a world-class athlete in the making. Throughout the year, the PK3 and PK4 classes explore and discover.
Young children are like little scientists who are continuously exploring the unknown. One major way for them to explore, understand, and relate to the world around them is through play. Play becomes an intricate part of a young child’s development, and the pathway to reach cognitive, social/emotional, physical, and language milestones.
Play is children’s work. Through this work, children learn about who they are and about the world around them. By allowing ample playtime, children use language to engage with friends, inquire about new topics, and explore new materials. These play times throughout the day provide meaningful experiences for building skill sets, thus creating foundations for success in later school experiences. The following are the skills that children develop when engaging with the materials in the learning centers.
The language and literacy standards in the PK3 program reflect an amalgamation of the standards set by the Common Core Creative Curriculum for Preschool. Students demonstrate knowledge of phonics and phonemic awareness through daily classroom routines and activities, including games, manipulatives, puzzles, and fine and gross motor experiences. Environmental print is used to introduce the concept that print conveys meaning via daily calendar and schedule review, read-aloud stories, and dictation of children’s thoughts and ideas. Emerging writing skills are developed through the use of the Handwriting Without Tears Program, which incorporates hands-on activities, including Roll-a-Dough Letters, Stamp and See Screens, and building letters with wooden pieces. Children develop their communication skills through conversations with peers and teachers, and sharing opportunities.
Mathematics in the PK3 program is a year of introduction and practice. We begin the year focusing on mathematical fundamentals such as number recognition and counting. Development of these skills are supported through formal lessons as well as everyday routines such as group time, work time, and free play with classroom manipulatives. Once students have a working knowledge of basic numeracy, we move on to quantifying and connecting numerals with their quantities. Students learn one-to-one correspondence before engaging in more analytical math skills. Through topics covered in our focus lessons, as well as daily procedures in classrooms, students are exposed to identifying and creating patterns. In similar ways, students are also exposed to the concept of sequencing to round out their mathematical skill set. By the end of the year, students have an awareness of the basic foundations of math skills that will be expanded upon during their time in preschool.
Students in the PK3 classroom experience music in a variety of languages and styles. They develop a repertoire of songs from memory, and begin to explore steady beat through singing, speaking, playing classroom instruments, and movement. The songs they sing include holidays, seasons, and often focus on alphabet recognition and counting. Students are also very involved in improvisation. They are encouraged to find different ways to play their instruments in class, and begin to become aware of the different timbres on non-pitched percussion (like ringing, jingling, rattling, scraping, and clicking). In the PK3 music classroom, students also develop the ability to creatively organize musical ideas and sounds.
In the PK3 program, children begin to participate in structured physical education classes. In these classes, young students are introduced to the strands of personal, social, and physical education through adventure challenges, athletics, body control and spatial awareness, movement to music, games, gymnastics, and health-related activities. PK3 students are introduced to the proper terminology to various skills found in P.E. class and participate in and follow directions for simple games requiring little to no equipment to aid their development in different areas such as spatial awareness, gross motor and fine motor skills, coordination, balance, and components of fitness. The environment places a high priority on safety, physical activity, and tasks with a high rate of success to boost students’ confidence and develop a positive attitude towards physical education.
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