Preschool Program Goals in Areas of Development:
- Social
To help children feel comfortable in school, trust their new environment, make friends, and feel they are a part of the group. Through trusting relationships with adults, planned and spontaneous lessons, preschoolers grow their social skills. Turn-taking, using words to interact appropriately, waiting with patience, and practicing self-help skills give children opportunities to grow socially in a safe and creative environment.
- Emotional
To help children experience pride and self-confidence, develop independence and self-control, and have a positive attitude toward life. Using language to identify emotions is important at this age. Children practice sharing their thoughts and emotions appropriately with support from teachers. Children gain confidence through shared experiences, conversation, and learning activities.
- Cognitive
To help children become confident learners by letting them try out their own ideas and experience success, and by helping them acquire learning skills such as the ability to solve problems, ask questions, and use words to describe their ideas, observations, and feelings. The outdoor classroom offers the preschoolers access to a greenhouse, a community garden, and many more intentional centers. Literacy centers increase access to a variety of books and tools to practice letter recognition, reading, and writing. These areas increase vocabulary and comprehension. Art areas, messy play spaces, and natural manipulative play centers encourage use of senses, creativity, and critical thinking skills.
- Physical
To help children increase their large and small muscle skills as well as feel confident about their bodies. Natural manipulative play centers boost fine motor strength as children build, move, snap, close, and open. Finger and hand strength prepare children for writing. Music and movement centers help preschoolers develop motor skills and improve their balance and coordination. Outdoor classroom lessons focus upon building strength in children’s large muscles. Daily opportunities include tricycle-riding, running, jumping, skipping, climbing, hopping, and lifting.
Cornerstone also offers an extensive set of curricular enhancements to in-class programming. See details here.
We invite prospective parents to learn more about early childhood development and milestones with the CDC resource here.
