In the course of their third year children’s language grows at an enormous rate and they become far more independent. Our curriculum is designed to encourage these emergent language and social skills. For example, story time is used to teach new words, concepts, and print awareness, and the kids are schooled in waiting their turn, learning how to cope with minor conflicts, and working in groups – such as making floor puzzles together.
Academically, the focus is on developing their pre-reading and pre-writing skills to pave the way for their pre-k year. We continue to develop the relationship between letters and letter sounds (phonics) started in the 2s class, and learn about rhyming and initial word sounds (phonemic awareness). The kids will learn that stories come from the written text of books, which consists of words read from left to right and top to bottom, and that words are made up of letters (print awareness). The fine motor skills needed for writing are worked on directly through line, shape and letter tracing, as well as indirectly through cutting, painting, drawing and gluing. By the end of the year the kids will recognize most of the upper and lower case letters, know most letter sounds, how to spell their first and last names, and to write their first name.
Numeracy and patterning are also worked on; by the end of the year the goal is to count up to twenty, show an understanding of adding and subtracting objects, predicting what follows in simple patterns, and sorting objects by multiple categories (e.g. give me all the red teddy bears). They will also be able to recognize written numbers up to 10 and understand the correspondence between numbers and objects.
