Curriculum
Creative Curriculum- Vienna Pre-k uses Creative Curriculum as suggested by the Illinois State Board of Education. It uses exploration and discovery through activities, classroom management, time management, even room arrangement to encourage confidence, creativity, and critical thinking skills. You can learn more at www.teachingstrategies.com
Handwriting Without Tears- Handwriting Without Tears (HWT) is a curriculum that uses activities, play, and songs to teach language, social skills, fine and gross motor control, color and shape recognition, letter and number recognition, and counting. HWT focuses on four shapes in order to write every letter- big line, little line, big curve, little curve. Typically children learn to make straight lines up and down before they can make a slanted line or a curve. For this reason, we introduce letters such as the L, E, F, etc (with only straight lines up and down and back and forth) before we learn to write the A, V, X, etc (with slanted lines) or B, D, G, etc (with curves). You can learn more at www.HWT.com.
Assessments
Child Portfolios- Child portfolios are collections of checklists, photographs, typed conversations between children, and samples of the child’s work organized in a 3 ring binder. They are organized according to each learning domain- Social-Emotional, Physical, Language, Mathematics, Science and Technology, Social Studies, and the Arts. Each item in the portfolio is aligned and labeled with the Illinois Early Learning Standards so that families can see exactly what we are learning and how. They serve as a visual record and proof of each child’s strengths, needs, interests, and progress throughout the year. They are available in the classroom for children to view at any time so they may see their own work, progress, and proof of learning. They love to look in their book and say things such as, “That’s my picture. I was making a triangle.” This is the beginning of self reflection on their own educational experience.
Teaching Strategies® Child Assessment Portfolio Records- These records are designed by Teaching Strategies, the same company that created the Creative Curriculum. Pre-k staff uses Teaching Strategies Portfolios to record individual student’s progress at different checkpoints throughout the year. Simply put, these Teaching Strategies Portfolios allow staff to record each child’s progress while the Child Portfolios mentioned above provide proof of the progress. For example, when a student learns to write the first letter of his or her name on a piece of paper, the skill (partial name writing) will be recorded in the Teaching Strategies Portfolio and the proof will be the child’s paper in the Language/ Literacy section of the Child Portfolio.
