Early Childhood

Three- and-four-year-olds are acquiring social and verbal skills at a rapid rate, and they are using these skills with their teachers, peers and caregivers to express their feelings and interests in new ways. Becoming a capable, communicative and autonomous person is a central goal of social-emotional growth at this age, along with a developing awareness of one’s own feelings and the ability to empathize with others and act with care and compassion.

Young children begin with learning to trust the new school environment and the adults and children that inhabit it. They start to find ways to express themselves as effectively and positively as possible. Teachers use the Second Step curriculum to help teach and model ways of identifying and regulating feelings, solving conflicts and internalizing social rules and values. The complex and delightful world of friendship and imaginative play is discovered and explored, and the norms of belonging to a group are built. 

Taking care of yourself, developing patience and persistence and beginning to engage in the compromises needed for authentic cooperation are daily successes and also long-term projects. 

In the language-rich environments of our youngest classrooms, children grow their capacity for verbal expression, listening and early literacy skills as they experience the books, songs, games, circle times and activities that incorporate these language skills into each day. They work with letters, print and symbolic representations in a natural and playful setting. Phonological awareness – the essential component of later reading ability – is developed and practiced through word play, rhyming, singing, reading the morning message, making lists, learning letters, sounds and syllables.

Play – whether in the dramatic area, outside spaces, sensory table or block area – allows for rich social interactions for literacy to emerge, and children begin to use written language in meaningful ways such as writing their name, labeling pictures, making signs and charts, writing simple books, stories and poems individually or as a class. Children dictate original stories to adults who write for them because the desire to communicate one’s good ideas should not have to wait for full writing fluency. Children may publish their own writing, which is catalogued into the library.

The Handwriting Without Tears curriculum is used to help build foundational writing skills like pencil grip and letter formation. 

At this level, our main focus is to lay the foundation of number sense: counting, one-to-one correspondence, subitizing small sets and developing an understanding that numerals represent quantity. Children gain the ability to sort and count quantities of objects, to group numbers and objects into sets and to understand and represent relationships in number, size, shape and quantity. Recognizing patterns and sorting by attributes are intrinsically satisfying ways for young children to see numbers as relationships among objects, not isolated facts.

The foundations of understanding addition, subtraction, equality, zero and bigger numbers are established as children work with concrete objects and problems in the real world. Teachers plan and facilitate rich experiences with many materials and games to facilitate the hands-on construction of mathematical knowledge – talking about and using numbers in play, blocks, puzzles, games, manipulatives, nature and real-world situations, songs and finger plays.

As children explore and play in the classroom and outdoor settings they gain experience with comparison, measurement, geometry, collecting and representing data. Math activities at circle time, picture books and a daily calendar routine allow teachers to model and develop mathematical curiosity, vocabulary and interest. 

Science with the youngest children is centered on observation, sensory exploration and asking questions aloud: What will happen if…? How do you know that…? Why is…?

Curiosity in children is understood to be innate, but the focusing of it helps build cause and effect reasoning and other critical thinking skills. Making predictions is encouraged before an experiment is undertaken. Physical experience and play with a rich assortment of materials (e.g., blocks, sand, water, marble runs, magnets, prisms, bones and natural artifacts) provide important opportunities to explore and test ideas and construct scientific knowledge.

Teachers scaffold this learning by extending an experiment, asking open-ended questions, guiding discovery, presenting contradictory experiences and encouraging children to share what they learn with their classmates. Exploration of animal and plant kingdoms is often based on the woods, the gardens and the meadow right outside our classrooms. Other popular topics at this age include trees, insects, spiders, dinosaurs, space, magnetism, force and motion, mixing colors and cooking or kitchen science. 

The youngest children begin to learn about social structures through what they know: their families and each other. How families and individuals are similar and different are subjects that are explored through play, discussion and stories. Students make “All About Me” books with the help of their family and these are an important resource for learning and sharing about these family identities.

The reading of picture books is a way to open a window to other characters, places and stories, and young children become curious about the world beyond their immediate family and classroom. Teachers model thinking and questioning, using phrases like “I notice, and I wonder” to promote children’s observations and questions. Some of these interests and questions become departure points for other discoveries about places, people, languages and cultures. Holidays, birthdays and celebrations also provide joyful opportunities to begin widening the perspective of students as they start to understand there are similarities and differences when it comes to festivities, food and community.

A sense of classroom identity and responsibility is fostered through rotating classroom jobs, daily cleaning and meetings and participation in some of the decisions that affect individuals and the group as a whole.