About Our Curriculum

At Ramaz, our Early Childhood curriculum rests on a firm foundation of research and focuses on the emotional, social, cognitive, language, gross motor, and fine motor stages of child development.

Our educational program is child-centered and, therefore, is focused on the importance of play. Play provides children with the opportunity to actively explore, manipulate, and interact with their environment. Play encourages children to investigate, create, and discover. It motivates them to take risks and helps add to their understanding of the world. Through play and interacting with concrete materials, children achieve new levels of understanding of events, people, and the environment. Play enhances language development, social competence, imagination, and thinking skills. Play encompasses these specific components: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence. The skills mastered during play are the same skills needed for social interaction throughout life. Children need to listen, take turns, and work as team players in order to succeed in school and in life. These are the skills taught, modeled, and lived in our Early Childhood classrooms.

Young children learn through hands-on activities. By experimenting and being actively involved with their environment, children make sense of and develop a new understanding of the world around them. Children also learn best through the use of all of their senses. They need to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell in order to have the richest learning experiences. In the Ramaz ECC, children are given the freedom to explore, to learn, and to grow in a loving, nurturing, and exciting environment.

Our goal is to teach the whole child. Our excellent child/teacher ratio enables teachers to cater to children’s individual needs and therefore ensure the success of each child. Our teachers show warmth, interest, and acceptance toward all of the children. We strive to foster the development of independence, selfconfidence, inquisitiveness, and enthusiasm. We believe children’s learning is nurtured in a safe environment. We are aware that children grow and develop at different rates and we are committed to help each individual child thrive at Ramaz.

In Nursery, Pre-K, and Kindergarten, our children are immersed in a bilingual environment, in which one teacher in each classroom speaks to the children exclusively in Hebrew, while the other two teachers speak to them in English. Our goal is to immerse the children in Hebrew language and Israeli culture at a young age when acquisition of language is most natural for children.

At Ramaz, we are committed to instilling in our children middot, chesed, and a love of tefilla. Judaism is not something that we study; it is the way we live. By celebrating all elements of Torah life, children develop Ahavat Torah, Ahavat Mitzvot, and Derech Eretz at a very young age.

The curriculum of the Early Childhood program at Ramaz is based on an interdisciplinary approach to learning. Children can learn many subjects (for example, math, science, social studies, Judaism) from a central theme. There is a strong emphasis on Torah stories, Jewish and American holidays, community, family, and nature. As the year progresses, we include emergent themes that will arise, based on the discussions and expressed interests of the individual classes.