Junior Preschool

In our Junior Preschool our educators focus heavily on observing and analyzing children’s interactions with the environment, materials, and each other. Our teachers use these observations to recognize your child’s interests and create projections based on your child’s curiosity and their teachers’ intentions.

Educators observe your child develop their expressive language skills and witness an increase in their ability to remember events. Empathy, pretend play, and social roles are explored as teachers support your children as they navigate their first relationships and begin to create their own identity.

While their fine motor skills evolve the children dig and pour in the sensory table, paint, scribble, and express graphically on an easel, paper, or other materials. The world is full of things for children to discover as they move and dance to music, discover insects, leaves and flowers, and begin sorting and collecting things they find in the playground.

As your child grows in a safe and comfortable environment they are more open to take risks and be more autonomous. Independence becomes an evident milestone for two-year-olds. As they discover all the things they can do they want to do more things for themselves such as eating, washing hands, dressing themselves, and learning to use the toilet. Through various sensorial, fine motor, and gross motor experiences teachers encourage children to become self-sufficient. While your child becomes more vocal and begins to put sentences together, our teachers create opportunities for conversations to help expand your child’s comprehension and literacy skills.

The environment is arranged so that children are exposed to their written name, establish a daily flow, create peer relationships, understand emotions and start to express their thoughts and ideas in simple sentences. By encouraging communication between the children they begin to understand the dynamics of a classroom community.

Our educators share stories that help build new vocabulary and also instill the interest to read. The teachers connect stories with objects and events in children’s lives so that they may begin to understand that print and pictures have a meaning.

A variety of opportunities are offered for children to experiment with art and drawing as they are able to make lines, zigzags, make a series of scribbles and begin to give meaning to the symbols they create. Educators create a rich environment to offer various possibilities to recognize common symbols, some letters, sometimes the first letter of their names, and drawing lines that begin looking like letters and shapes.

Educators begin to ask open-ended questions and plan brainstorming discussions to encourage children to verbalize their ideas and promote conversations amongst them. During these discussions the teachers take notes or make recordings to document children’s thinking. As children create theories and ask questions projects begin to emerge. Through projects children develop cognitive skills such as problem solving, collaboration, understanding cause and effect, sharing and how to be a member of a group.