The Children’s Community School
Curriculum Guide: Ages Two to Four
The program at the Children’s Community School supports the development of all the necessary “academic” skills students need to be highly successful when they reach kindergarten. In addition, our teachers and our curriculum work to develop student’s confidence, curiosity, social abilities, communication, and abstract reasoning skills that will serve them as they continue to learn, explore and contribute in our world. We integrate receptive and expressive practices–yoga, mindfulness practices, art– to support the child in bringing their whole self to the educational experience.
How Children Learn:
Play provides the medium for understanding and consolidating knowledge for our children. Play is the means through which children think, feel, and create meaning.
- Children investigate and explore what they know and don’t know about their physical and social world.
- Within the relatively safe context of play, children try out roles, act out “what-ifs”, express ideas, try out solutions to problems, and simply imagine.
- Through the symbolic nature of play children lay the foundation for future, more sophisticated abstract and symbolic thinking.
- Students play with open-ended sensory materials- such as blocks, paint, clay wood, water, and sand.
- Practices such as yoga are integral to our play based curriculum, as they support the development of physical well-being, self-awareness and emotional stability. These practices enable the children to approach learning holistically, and to acquire powerful tools that support learning and development.
At The Children’s Community School we dedicate ourselves to the critical work of the preschool years when our children are actively learning to develop their Internal Selves, their Social Selves, and their Academic Selves. When planning classroom work, teachers consider the whole child and the inseparability of the social, emotional, kinestetic and intellectual components of learning and the self.
The Internal Self:
- establish independence and self help skills
- examine, evaluate and understand the effects of one’s own behavior
- regulate self control and impulse control
- take risks, try new things and be flexible
- persevere when the going gets tough
- ask for help when needed
- expressing feeling with words
- discovering what makes you feel better and what does not
- develop language, problem solving skills, and receptive practices to begin to manage frustration and conflict resolution
- respect others work, bodies and possessions
- develop skills and language to prepare for new experiences
- learn to express the internal self and experience with expressive movement, language, body oriented practices, and creative arts
- develop respect for their physical selves, their bodies, and their capacity to relate to others through gesture and movement
The Social Self:
- show their friends respect and care by being careful and caring
- be a good sport by taking turns and playing fair
- share toys, ideas and time
- listen and develop active listening skills
- be a peaceful problem solver by learning how to calm down, listen, talk and settle on solutions that take care of everyone
- join in and to make new friends
- expect and ask for respectful behavior from friends
- feel safe and strong with new friends
- respect differences, be inclusive and appreciate others as they are
- recognize and be thankful when given to by others
- develop a deep respect for their physical selves and their bodies in relation to others, as well as to build their capacity to relate to others through movement
- respect the physical differences and capacities of one another
The Academic Self:
Over the course of the year, children to learn through engagement in our social studies-based, core curriculum. Topics in this curriculum include learning about themselves, school, family, and community. Other academic areas such as literacy, mathematics and science are meaningfully integrated into students’ social studies and classroom work. The emphasize is on the the importance of active engagement in the world around us, and the skills and concepts found in reading or mathematics, for example, help us interact and make sense of our world. Within the interdisciplinary curriculum, students are given rich and varied opportunities to develop literacy and math readiness skills as well as systematic opportunities to practice them.
Social Studies Areas of Study:
- children’s growing world, from home to school, and becoming a member of the classroom community
- ourselves- exploring similarities and differences, growing and change, feelings, etc…
- families
- school community
- local community
Literacy Skills and Concepts:
- oral language development
- phonological/phonemic awareness
- alphabetic knowledge
- concepts about print
- comprehension
To develop these skills, students are given the opportunity to engage in a variety of rich oral language and early literacy experiences, including:
- storybook reading
- book discussions
- creating books
- listening comprehension
- word play
- meaningful writing
- dramatic play
- storytelling
- classroom responsibilities such as taking attendance
Math Skills and Concepts:
- develop an understanding of the meanings of whole numbers
- recognize the number of objects in small groups without counting
- begin counting and one to one correspondence
- sort, match, and compare shapes and objects
- recognize and create patterns
- use landmarks to find objects or locations
To develop these skills, students are given the opportunity to engage in a variety of rich early mathematical experiences, including:
- opportunities to enhance their natural interest in mathematics and to use it to make sense of their physical and social worlds
- manipulative work with building blocks, pattern blocks and puzzles
- games
- play with auditory, movement, and visual patterns
- classroom responsibilities such as setting up for snack (one napkin for one chair)
- play with attribute blocks and toys (for grouping and sorting)
- dramatic play
- storybook reading, songs and poems
Science Skills and Concepts:
- observe
- investigate student generated questions
- debate and discuss the investigations
- debate and discuss the evidence
- construct a beginning understanding of classification (similarities and differences)
- construct a beginning understanding of space (physical relationships, cause and effect, positions, directions and how things fit together)
- construct a beginning understanding of time (duration, predictability, and sequence)