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Redeemer Home > Children & Youth > Parish Day School > Course Offerings: Pre-First
 The pre-first class meets Monday through Friday from 9:00 am to 2:45 pm. 1 class of no more than 10 students/class led by one teacher.
Curriculum
Overall Goal:
To provide a nurturing and supportive environment where each child's individual growth and development can flourish.
Language Arts:
The Fall semester of Pre-first centers around helping each child feel comfortable in an all day academic environment. Attention is given to learning to follow directions, listening skills developed and enhanced, auditory and visual discrimination, letter recognition, letter sound and overall mastery of reading readiness skills.
The second semester continues with listening and following directions skills. Vowel sounds are introduced as well as consonant blends and diagraphs. Attention is paid to putting letter sounds together to form words. Sight words are introduced and built on to approximately 50 to 75 words. Strategies are developed for reading and decoding new words with an emphasis on independent learning.
Writing:
We begin by learning to hold the pencil correctly, learning the concepts of left to right, up and down, and spacing between words. Learn correct manuscript printing, practice lower case letters and the difference between letters and words. Develop and strengthen simple writing skills by weekly creative writing exercises and daily journal entries.
Math:
- mastery of shape recognition
- recognition and ability to write the numbers 1 to 10 and later 11 to 19
- number concepts
- pattern and grouping concepts
- determination of things that are alike and different
- beginning addition - concept of putting two groups together
- concept of taking away a part of a whole
- exposure to tan grams and spatial relationships
- time - o'clock, thirty, seconds, minutes, hours
- money - penny, nickel, dime, quarter, dollar
- groups of 10 up to 100 - counting by 10 and 5
- fractions - concept of part of the whole
- pencil and paper computation
- use of manipulatives to learn and understand concepts
Social Studies:
Pre-first takes a trip "Around the World" and explores the cultures of:
- Ancient Egypt
- Kenya
- England
- Italy
- Ancient Greece
- Mexico
- Rain Forest
- Japan
Science:
To explore and discover the world around us, we will do experiments and projects in conjunction with the following units:
- arachnids (webs, habitat, skeleton)
- simple machines (such as the lever)
- time (including sundials, constellation (star) clock, water clock)
- buoyancy
- speed and distance
Lunch Bunch:
An afternoon program is provided from 11:45 am to 2:45 pm for children whose parents feel they would benefit from a longer day or after school care is needed. Children ages 3 to 6 who are potty-trained and enrolled in the morning programs (with the exception of the two year old classes) are eligible.
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