Kindergarten Readiness

At LeafSpring School, we know and appreciate how very important the Pre-Kindergarten year is for both you and your child. While a strong foundation has been built at LeafSpring throughout the preschool years, during the Pre-Kindergarten year the curriculum and the classroom “grow up with the child” and are specially designed to enhance your child’s school readiness.

• Having lockers instead of cubbies enhances self-management and independence.

• Elevated lofts provide an additional cool curriculum area, providing them a glimpse of what a larger learning environment will feel like.

• Bathroom stalls have doors to provide the appropriate privacy for this age, strengthening selfhelp skills.

• The curriculum is served in larger bites, building from day to day and week to week, helping children understand that learning does not occur as one event, but that learning is longitudinal, an essential perspective for life-long learners.

• The curriculum activities are more collaborative with numerous opportunities for teamwork and problem solving.

At LeafSpring School, we believe in the development of the whole child. Both academic and emotional readiness determine a child’s likelihood of doing well in school. All areas of growth and development: physical, fine motor, language/communication, emotional/social, and cognitive, are important and interdependent in determining readiness for kindergarten. Consider the child who knows every letter in the alphabet and all the colors and numbers but struggles to sit quietly and listen during instruction. It is likely that his ability to comprehend concepts or complete assignments may be limited by his inability to attend to the task at hand.

Preparing Your Child for K indergarten

To assist your child in the journey toward kindergarten success, our Pre-Kindergarten program will continue to focus on all areas of growth and development with special emphasis on readiness factors. For example:

• In addition to recognizing letters, the curriculum will focus on letter sounds and how they are used in words.

• Early handwriting techniques are practiced using multisensory, developmentally appropriate strategies to increase success with early writing skills.

• Pre-reading activities are integrated such as blending sounds, recognizing rhyming words, pretending to read books through illustrations and describing characters’ actions and feelings in a story.

• In addition to recognizing numbers, the curriculum will include pre-math activities that involve sequencing, measuring, graphing, valuating, patterning and estimating.

• Children will be introduced to age-appropriate technology that includes basic coding, engineering and problem solving.

• Science conceptual knowledge is refined through investigation of events observed in the environment and a multitude of outdoor learning opportunities.

• By using a wide variety of art mediums and being exposed to instruments and various types of music, children will continue to express and develop an appreciation for the arts.