Nursery and Pre-K Overview The nursery curriculum is designed to integrate many activities around a common theme. The classroom learning experiences give children an awareness of the connections among different disciplines. This integration enables children to learn to understand the world around them through engagement in art, music, reading, writing, speaking, listening and mathematics. The curricular areas for Nursery and Pre-K are the same, while the different stages of development of Nursery and Pre-K children allow for different degrees of understanding of the curricular material. Intellectual Development through Active Learning The philosophy underlying the Nursery and Pre-K programs is that intellectual development occurs when children are actively engaged with other children, teachers and materials in their environment. Given that young children learn best by doing and experiencing things for themselves, the teachers' role is to promote active learning in the classroom environment. Key experiences in active learning that are encouraged include the following: exploring with all the senses, discovering relations through direct experience, manipulating, transforming and combining materials, choosing materials, activities and purposes, acquiring skill with tools and equipment, using large and small muscles and taking care of one's own needs. Children are encouraged to play so as to encourage self-expression, interaction and cooperative efforts. Play also gives young children an opportunity to explore their feelings and act out many different roles. Social and Emotional Development The activities that take place in the nursery programs are designed to promote the children's social and emotional growth. These activities serve to teach children to work as part of a group, be self-reliant, relate to peers as well as adults, respect their own and others' property, develop leadership skills and self-control, defer immediate gratification, accept change, defeat or opposition, manage frustration and take responsibility for their actions. Judaic Studies Torah and mitzvot permeate the Nursery and Pre-K programs. Children learn some of the daily Shacharit tefillot and tefillot associated with Shabbat and chagim. Children learn some of the berakhot that are recited in connection with Shabbat and the chagim, as well as before and after eating. The teachers introduce Hebrew vocabulary words relating to daily routines, Shabbat, chagim, and parashat ha-shavu'a. An important element of the program is learning parashat ha-shavu'a. This aspect of the curriculum introduces children to stories from the Torah and serves to instill in them some of the ethical and moral values of Judaism. Many mitzvot and middot are introduced to the children in the discussions relating to the people and stories of the parashah. Nursery and Pre-K children learn the customs and songs related to the celebration of Shabbat and chagim. Language Development Nursery and Pre-K children are exposed to the four communication skills - speaking, listening, reading, writing - in all aspects of the curriculum. Children learn how to use language to express themselves and learn that letters represent sounds. During the Nursery and Pre-K years, the children are taught to recognize the use of symbols to represent feelings, ideas, and experiences. Classroom activities strive to stimulate a love of books and a curiosity about the language of books, their authors and illustrators. In the process, children develop a connection between the spoken and written word, acquire a sense of story and develop their communication and self-expression skills. Nursery and Pre-K children are taught to follow directions and rules and work on honing their listening skills. Key experiences in the children's language development include the following: talking with others about personally meaningful experiences, describing objects, describing events in relation, expressing feelings in words, having one's own spoken language written down by an adult and read back, and having fun with language, rhyming, making up stories, listening to poems and stories, singing songs. Nursery children participate in a variety of activities relating to language development, including the following: listening to stories that are read aloud to them, dictating stories and messages that the teachers transcribe, singing, playing rhyming games, labeling objects and areas in the classroom, and using language in dramatic and role play. Pre-K children participate in similar activities, but as their abilities increase they also engage in the following kinds of activities: writing or dictating complete stories and illustrating them, acting out stories that the teachers have read to them, creating individual and class-wide books around a theme that has been discussed in class, reading and discussing the daily chart, and writing signs and stories using inventive spelling. Logical Reasoning, Measurement and Spatial Relations An important element of the curriculum is the development of the children's ability to think logically. In order to develop these skills, nursery students are involved in the following kinds of activities: investigating and labeling the attributes of things, observing and recording how things are the same and different, sorting and matching, using and describing things in several ways, describing the characteristics that an object does not possess and the category to which it does not belong, comparing objects with respect to different properties (size, weight, texture, sound) and arranging objects in order along some dimension. Children learn beginning number concepts by comparing numbers and amounts, comparing the number of items in two sets and enumerating. Nursery and Pre-K students also learn important concepts in time by working on the following kinds of activities: planning projects and completing them, describing past events and anticipating future events, starting and stopping an action on signal, representing the order of events, describing different rates of movements, using conventional time units, comparing time periods, and observing that clocks and calendars are used to mark the passage of time. Another important element of the curriculum is learning the concepts of spatial relations. Nursery and Pre-K students learn to put things together and take them apart, rearrange sets of objects, hold, twist, stretch, tie, stack, describe the positions of objects in relation to each other, discern the direction of movement of objects and people, describe relative distances, and locate things in the classroom, school and neighborhood. Nursery and Pre-K Overview | Intellectual Development through Active Learning Social and Emotional Development | Judaic Studies Language Development | Logical Reasoning, Measurement and Spatial Relations | Science | Social Studies | Music | Art Physical Development next
Nursery and Pre-K Overview | Intellectual Development through Active Learning Social and Emotional Development | Judaic Studies Language Development | Logical Reasoning, Measurement and Spatial Relations | Science | Social Studies | Music | Art Physical Development next
The philosophy underlying the Nursery and Pre-K programs is that intellectual development occurs when children are actively engaged with other children, teachers and materials in their environment. Given that young children learn best by doing and experiencing things for themselves, the teachers' role is to promote active learning in the classroom environment. Key experiences in active learning that are encouraged include the following: exploring with all the senses, discovering relations through direct experience, manipulating, transforming and combining materials, choosing materials, activities and purposes, acquiring skill with tools and equipment, using large and small muscles and taking care of one's own needs. Children are encouraged to play so as to encourage self-expression, interaction and cooperative efforts. Play also gives young children an opportunity to explore their feelings and act out many different roles.
Torah and mitzvot permeate the Nursery and Pre-K programs. Children learn some of the daily Shacharit tefillot and tefillot associated with Shabbat and chagim. Children learn some of the berakhot that are recited in connection with Shabbat and the chagim, as well as before and after eating. The teachers introduce Hebrew vocabulary words relating to daily routines, Shabbat, chagim, and parashat ha-shavu'a. An important element of the program is learning parashat ha-shavu'a. This aspect of the curriculum introduces children to stories from the Torah and serves to instill in them some of the ethical and moral values of Judaism. Many mitzvot and middot are introduced to the children in the discussions relating to the people and stories of the parashah. Nursery and Pre-K children learn the customs and songs related to the celebration of Shabbat and chagim.
