IS Approach and Curriculum

Curriculum

Children engage in enriching educational play-based experiences, explore learning materials and new concepts and ideas, while also building their motor and social skills as they prepare to enter into kindergarten. The APS  Pre-K curriculum is research-based, fosters the development of literacy and math skills, and builds social-emotional foundations for lifetime learning. Pre-Math and Literacy skills are integrated into the curriculum as students enter the 3-year-old classrooms, and become a greater focus at the 4-year-old level.

Conscious Discipline

Conscious Discipline is a research-based program that helps adults stay calm enough to see children’s “mistaken” behavior and upset emotions as an opportunity to teach instead of to punish. Conscious Discipline provides effective strategies for teaching identification of emotions, self-regulation, co-regulation, and friendship skills. All learning occurs in the higher centers of the brain. If our goal is for children to learn, we must help them manage their emotions first.

Pre-Literacy

Starting in the 3-year-old classrooms, students are exposed to literacy through structured storytime using texts from the OWL (Opening the World of Learning) literacy curriculum. Repeated reading gives our children the opportunity to learn concepts through repetition, and begin to ask questions, make inferences, and make predictions about those concepts or themes. Starting in the 2021-22 school year, 4-year-old classrooms are beginning to integrate the Heggerty curriculum as part of daily literacy activities to systematically teach phonemic awareness skills.

Pre-Math

Our 4-year-old classrooms learn math concepts (1:1 correspondence, pattern awareness, measurement) through the calendar-based routine of Every Day Counts