The curriculum for the three-year-old students at Beacon Academy includes introduction to letters — visual identification, letter sounds and handwriting. New letters are introduced each week and are integrated into the Art and Reading lessons. Students will learn to first visually identify their name, write their first, and finally write their last name.

 

During Circle Time, using the calendar, the students learn counting, the days of the week and the months of the year. Also at this time, new shapes and colors are introduced. Learning about the weather and the seasons is made fun by dressing a weather bear each day. After Circle Time, the students recite The Pledge of Allegiance.

 

In Math, students will learn writing numbers and most importantly learn a one-to one correspondence.

 

Three-year-old students are expected to make great strides socially. The concepts of learning to share and waiting your turn are incorporated into most lessons and games in our three-year-old classrooms. These students will also learn to sit through a story, be introduced to guided reading — a concept that allows students to predict what will happen next in a story and fine tune their comprehension skills.

 

These students will also learn to use the bathroom independently and take care of their personal hygiene.

Our goal is to create a literacy based environment with a wide range of enriching activities that allow your child to grow academically, socially, and emotionally.

 

We begin our day with morning circle time, which reinforces counting, using the monthly calendar. Students also learn the days of the week, months of the year and weather information. Child Craft Early Education Math is used during Circle Time and throughout the day. It is a hand on the way to connect math standards and help promote a higher level of thinking skills. These units offer instruction in numbers, number operations, patterns, geometry, classification and many other math topics. Scholastic Number Tales is another component of our math curriculum. It is a collection of simple books that focus on a different number or math skill, teaching numbers, skip counting, simple addition, and simple subtraction.

 

Our phonics/language arts program uses Scholastic Alpha Tales to help the students develop the important skills needed to learn to read. Scholastic Alpha tales is a series of stories that introduces children to an animal “mascot” each week. The animal “mascot” for the week begins with a letter of the alphabet. With these stories, children learn letter sequence, associate a letter with a sound, build phonemic awareness skills, and build vocabulary, word knowledge, and oral language skills. Other Alpha Tales support materials are used in conjunction with the stories. Journal writing is a large component of this program, but more importantly the students begin to associate letters and letter sounds and how letters join together to make words.

 

New sight words are introduced and practiced during the day. Research shows that 220 words included in the Dolch Basic Site Word Vocabulary still comprise more than 50 percent of the words primary age children most frequently encounter in the print materials they use. In Pre-K, the students are introduced to sight words. They work on a list of 3 to four sight words each week. By the end of the school year, the students will have a total of 80 words. The benefits of having a bank of sight words committed to memory are significant for children who are learning to read.