Academics
Can a preschool be academically rigorous and still be focused on play? Absolutely! At Perinton Nursery School, our teachers know that homework, lectures, and worksheets aren’t developmentally appropriate for preschoolers, but children are still eager and ready to learn all sorts of things – from animal families to astronomy; from musical instruments to symmetry. A week-by-week curriculum has been perfected by our lead teacher over her 15+ years at PNS.
The preschool "basics" are covered too. Daily activities include fun activities that teach and reinforce letter recognition, handwriting, colors, counting, patterning, early literacy skills, weather, graphing, calendar and more.
For example, every day the children gather to discuss the calendar and weather. Is it rainy? She colors in a box above a picture of rain on a graph. The class notices that now rainy and sunny have the same number of boxes colored on the graph. She now chooses clothes for Weather Bear to wear – a raincoat and umbrella is appropriate today! The class laughs as she purposely puts a rain boot on his hand instead of his foot. Oh, that silly bear!
Now the class looks at the calendar and counts together from 1 all the way up to today’s date. If it’s the 20th you’d better take a big breath first! Then the class recites the pattern of pictures on the calendar. Snowman, snowman, snowflake… snowman, snowman… what’s next?
Our teachers have explained to us that many calendar concepts are beyond the typical 3 and 4-year old, but they all learn that the calendar shows us fun things that are coming up, and each month starts over with 1. They learn to point to the days from left to right and top to bottom – an important skill for reading too! Most students will learn to count to 30 and some will even learn to recognize two-digit numbers like 28, or the word “March”.
Calendar and weather time is just one time when students are learning "academics". Generally, those concepts are woven into all the fun activities that the children do. Many times, the class broken into small groups of 6 or less students to play games involving matching, ordering, etc. Our low student-to-adult ratio allows smaller groups and more individualized teaching.