Our Kindergarten Prep Program is designed for children between ages four and five.
This program is designed to be a preparation for children who are ready to go to kindergarten upon completion, or children can be on a two-year program. If your child misses the September 1st cut-off for kindergarten, they will be on our two-year track in this program.
During this phase of development, children are making the connections between their world and how they can affect it. They are blossoming into young inquisitive learners who delight in responsibilities and goals.
Emphasis in this class is on developing emotional, social, creative, physical and intellectual goals. Research shows the lasting benefits of intellectual goals are better predictors of later academic success. Intellectual goals include reasoning, analyzing, predicting, questioning, creativity, and a range of moral sensibilities. These are similar to academic goals which include more concrete skills such as knowing the days of the week, the calendar, writing words and memorizing facts.
Preparing students for kindergarten and a joy of learning requires a balance of skills, including: intellectual, academic, creative, social and emotional.
Through hands- on exploration and play, we engage our students in writing, reading, science, artistic expression, coding, math and engineering. Concepts are experienced, played with and integrated into the minds of young learners. We emphasis the importance of children understanding and recognizing the purpose in what they do, create, and learn. Students conduct experiments in our outdoor laboratory and express their newly found skills in their own creative way. Documentation of projects and learning is captured by the children using photos and video from classroom ipads, those images are sent to parents by their child using our unique software program and app.
Students have access to Ipads and a technology center for learning the beginning fundamentals of coding and for math and logic programs.
Students who graduate from our Kindergarten Prep class score in the ‘advanced’ and ‘very advanced’ scale of the Bracken Assessment. The Bracken Assessment is used to determine whether children are prepared to begin kindergarten. Our results indicate that 95 percent of Gratitude Garden students mastered 90 percent and above on the Bracken School Readiness (BSRA) concepts.
This is a full-day program, beginning at 8:30am and ending at 1:00pm.