Preschool is a vital bridge between playschool and formal education that equips young children with the skills, knowledge and abilities they need to thrive in a school setting. At Parkland Children’s Academy, our preschool teachers make use of several techniques and teaching skills to engage the minds and imaginations of the young people in their classes. They skillfully meet preschool learning outcomes by delivering the prescribed preschool curriculum in ways that appeal to this age group.
Preschool Curriculum Goals And Objectives
Preschool educators face the challenge of laying a solid foundation of a love for learning that will sustain a child through a decade or more of schooling. If you took a virtual tour through our facilities, it may look like pure fun and games, but each lesson, game, and playtime activity is carefully designed to:
- Equip children with academic skills and abilities as a foundation for future schooling.
- Provide a safe, judgment-free environment that makes learning a joyful experience.
- Develop their sense of self and enable autonomy in a school environment.
- Facilitate social and emotional development, to give them tools for successful interpersonal relationships.
- Awaken an awareness of the world around them by engaging their curiosity.
Making Lessons Come Alive
Preschool lessons are about far more than delivering a set of facts to be remembered. They’re about creating an environment, provoking curiosity, and guiding each child to discover and internalize the building blocks they’ll need for the coming years. These are some of the approaches our teachers take to make every lesson come to life:
Playing To Learn
Preschoolers love having fun. Syllabus content presented through playful activities captures their attention and engages their minds. Play-based lessons are hands-on, allowing children to immerse themselves in the experience.
Play to learn lessons often incorporate many learning areas through a single activity. For example, building a car from craft materials touches on:
- Math: Children learn how many bottle tops they need for wheels.
- Fine motor skills: Tearing aluminum foil for the bumper, painting, or gluing trims.
- Creativity and color recognition: Instruct preschoolers to paint the wheels black and the car red.
- Awareness of the world around them, memory, and recall: Ask them to count how many red cars they see on the drive home and tell the class the following day.
- Engaging the imagination: Preschoolers get to play with their cars during free time.
Accommodating Different Learning Styles
The beauty of our approach to teaching the preschool curriculum is that all types of learning styles are catered to naturally. Successful early childhood education that supports diverse learning needs lays a solid foundation that helps children retain a positive attitude toward lifelong learning.
These are the three types of learners and the strategies we use to engage with them in lessons:
Visual Learners Absorb Information Through Seeing
These are preschoolers who learn through observation. They thrive on picture books, demonstrations, flashcards, and colorful pictures.
Auditory Learners Understand And Remember Through Hearing
Preschoolers who learn through sound love story time when they get to listen to stories. Singing songs or playing sound games works well for them. Circle times that involve discussions suit them as well.
Kinesthetic Learners Absorb Information Best By Doing
These tactile children are the most hands-on and need to interact with the subject matter for comprehension and retention. They’re at their happiest when playing at a sand or water sensory table, shaping clay, or playing games that involve movement.
Focusing On Weekly Themes
Focusing on a theme is a highly successful strategy for preschoolers as it attaches abstract concepts to real life, making them memorable and fun. Let’s face it, it’s far more exciting to count how many wheels Dad’s car has than reciting the numbers one through four!
Themes naturally provide a fresh set of words to learn, allowing their vocabularies to expand effortlessly. Words like tractor, crop, silo, or coop may not be part of day-to-day conversations, but when they’re learning about the farm, those concepts come alive in young minds.
Learning On The Move
Preschool educators understand this age group’s intrinsic need to move and accommodate that in how they plan their content delivery. Whether it’s through dancing, singing, moving between stations, or taking a lesson outdoors, they keep young minds fresh and focused. This approach makes the most of children’s high energy levels by avoiding a classroom instruction model that insists on hours of sitting still and listening.
Studies have shown that moving sharpens attention, increases memory, and enhances decision-making. Physical activity gets the heart pumping, increases blood flow, and maximizes the delivery of fresh oxygen to the brain cells, keeping children fresh and alert.
Engaging The Senses
A simple, yet profoundly effective means of bringing a preschool curriculum to life for a child is to connect the information to the five senses: seeing, feeling, touching, tasting, and hearing. Each sensory input provides a unique teaching perspective for preschool teachers as they convey complex topic ideas in simple ways.
Senses take abstract information and convert it into a lived experience, creating a strong anchor point in the memory. This helps the mind to absorb, store, and retrieve information quickly.
Looking For A School That Brings The Preschool Curriculum To Life In Broward County (FL)?
Joining the Parkland Children’s Academy family means putting your child into the hands of the highest quality educators who take a fun, friendly approach to learning. We’ve created an environment that allows each child to thrive and discover the joy of learning. If you’d like to schedule a tour to see our facilities and meet the staff, contact us. We’d love to show you around!