Creative Curriculum Pre-Kindergarten Curriculum

Creative Curriculum Pre-K Curriculum is designed to meet the academic needs of your child, who will likely enter Kindergarten from our program.  Learning in pre-K involves a lot of talking, as children who have a large vocabulary are more successful at reading.  During conversations children learn to listen to and understand what others say and to express their ideas in words and sentences.  We take time to listen carefully to what children have to say.  The Pre-K curriculum, like the Preschool Curriculum, involves the same centers (see the preschool curriculum for a complete explanation of each center) with a more complex level of analysis and exploration.  Math manipulatives and math skills have greater emphasis in the Pre-K room, with specific goals for mastery of certain math skills.   Pre-reading skills go beyond simply identifying labels on objects and begin to include using sounds to create words and identify sight words.  The goal of the Pre-K program is to prepare your child for reading or possibly reading with your child if s/he is developmentally ready.  Parents will be asked to support the teachers by reading at home every day with their child; teachers will be reading with the children several times a day at Parkside.  The Writing Center takes on more importance in Pre-K, as students will be asked to tell stories using pictures and labeling pictures with beginning sounds or entire words.  Teachers will work with students to capture their words (the language experience approach) on paper as children illustrate their dictated stories.  Science and Social Studies have greater presence in Pre-K as well, where students are now recording their explorations and learning how to organize information that they discover.  Parkside is proud to be hosting a teacher from The Maine Discovery Museum, Ms. Trudi Plummer, every other Monday throughout the year as she leads students on intense scientific discoveries.  Lastly, technology comes more to the forefront in Pre-K as students begin to understand what computers can mean to their lives; we teach the basics of how to use computers and the understanding of how they can assist us in our explorations, recording of discoveries and organization of our world.  Students who graduate from our Pre-K program leave Parkside ready to thrive in Kindergarten and beyond. 

Physical Development

Your child will also have wonderful opportunities to develop physically. We have a large variety of indoor and outdoor equipment that enhances physical development throughout the day. You will see children participating in the following activities:

• Group activities: Obstacle courses, music and movement and various exercise activities
• Small motor activities: playdough, digging and constructing
• Planting and gardening
• Eye hand coordination activities: Throwing basketballs in hoops, catching balls, and kicking a ball
• Large motor: Bike riding, obstacle courses and dancing

Milestones that are focused on in the Pre-K Experience:

• Engaging in science activities and making predictions
• Conducting simple experiments
• Observing life cycles
• Introduction to geography/social studies
• Drawing, cutting and other fine motor activities
• Singing, dancing, mimicking and other expressive activities
• Patterning and basic one-to-one correspondence counting
• Problem solving
• Logical thinking and reasoning
• Comparisons and sorting by size, shape and color
• Basic measurements
• Estimating
• Cause and Effect understanding
• Pre-reading or reading skills including sound recognition, alphabet and sight word knowledge
• Recalling events from a story; speaking in front of the group to retell stories
• Recognizing and spelling own name
• Refining fine motor skills and creating art work that is recognizable as symbols