Pre-K Columbus, Ohio and Pre-K in Sunbury & Delaware, Ohio
Looking for the best Pre-K Columbus, Ohio has to offer? Little Buckeye’s Pre-K Program in Columbus, Sunbury and Delaware, Ohio provides children with the essential skills and tools necessary to prosper in kindergarten.
Pre-Kindergarten is a big year for our young learners at Little Buckeye! It is the year that we focus not only on developmental standards of learning but also on building a foundation of confidence for kindergarten. Our programming at Little Buckeye Learning Center ensures that our students will enter kindergarten with ease and excitement.
Our Pre-K is Committed to Preparing Your Child for Kindergarten
At Little Buckeye we understand the importance of being prepared for kindergarten. Therefore, we pride ourselves on meeting and exceeding the Ohio standards for kindergarten readiness. Our programming is designed to allow our students to excel in all of the educational components they will encounter in kindergarten. In addition, we prepare our students for this big step by introducing them to the often-overlooked skills needed to successfully navigate kindergarten, such as checking out a library book or carrying a lunch tray. Our special attention to these “extras” helps our students to feel prepared and comfortable as they enter the big, new world of kindergarten.
A Focus on Developmental Standards
In addition to preparation for kindergarten, we also focus on developmental standards of learning for our Pre-Kindergarten students. Pre-Kindergarten is a critical developmental stage for children, and our goal is to create a healthy enjoyment for learning that they will carry throughout their entire lifetime. Our program helps our children grow physically, mentally, and socially/emotionally. We carefully develop lesson plans that cover the five content areas in the Ohio Early Learning and Development Standards.
Pre-K Curriculum
At Little Buckeye, we are proud to provide a comprehensive Pre-Kindergarten curriculum based on the award-winning, research based Learning Beyond Paper. Our program also incorporates the whole child philosophy of learning and encompasses the following five main content areas of the Ohio Early Learning and Development Standards.
Social-Emotional Development
Pre-Kindergarteners are preparing to enter the exciting world of kindergarten! Our program helps our children grow socially and emotionally by:
- Ensuring that our children feel a bond with their teacher
- Providing opportunities for play with others in different environments and settings
- Guiding proper reactions to their own emotions
- Demonstrating responses to the emotions of others and developing empathy
- Encouraging role-play to help understand the wants and needs of others
Approaches Towards Learning
Our weekly lesson plans are customized to meet the needs of each individual child. We promote an open-ended learning system, and our plans are closely aligned with the Ohio Early Learning and Development Standards. We encourage learning by:
- Guiding children towards seeking new challenges and experiences
- Demonstrating initiative while offering many different routines and activities
- Encouraging children to ask questions and stimulate learning about their own areas of interest
- Allowing children to interact with peers in groups to enhance the learning processes
- Assisting with hands-on activities to help children learn through play
Cognition and General Knowledge
As children get closer to school age, it becomes more and more critical to have a solid base of education in all subjects, including math, science, and language skills. We prepare our children to be successful in kindergarten and beyond by:
- Communicating about past and future events using familiar routines and predictive language
- Demonstrating understanding of symbols and understanding that symbols carry deeper meaning
- Showing problem-solving abilities based upon prior experience
- Solving problems by executing basic plans and sequences of actions
- Counting to 20 by ones
- Identifying numerals from 1 to 9
- Demonstrating one-to-one correspondence with objects up to 10
- Developing an awareness of time
- Appreciating cultural stories and history
- Exploring events, objects, and materials
- Making inferences and generalizations based on evidence and past routines
Language and Literacy Development
Pre-Kindergarten age children begin to express more complex speech and longer sentence patterns. This sets the tone for more productive language interactions, and also helps in the development of reading. Our Pre-K teachers support these skills in every facet of our curriculum, including:
- Demonstrating an understanding of increasingly complex speech concepts
- Encouraging children to ask the meaning of words
- Following instructions of one or two steps
- Describing familiar people, places, and things
- Using drawings and symbols to represent details and descriptions
- Modeling the use of words to describe pictures and experiences
- Retelling familiar stories
- Identifying major characters in stories
- Understanding fantasy versus reality
- Demonstrating that written words and print carry meaning
- Rhyming and segmenting single-syllable words
- Using a grasp to hold a pencil or crayon
- Beginning to notice punctuation in a sentence
Physical Well-Being and Motor Development
In addition to developing problem-solving techniques and social-emotional growth, our curriculum also focuses on enhancing the development of physical abilities and motor skills. Our children will be encouraged to:
- Demonstrate coordination and balance through running, hopping, and skipping
- Develop coordination with objects such as bats and balls
- Demonstrate spatial awareness during movement
- Develop hand-eye coordination by catching and throwing
- Use objects to carry out activities
- Identify parts of the body
- Demonstrate an appreciating for activity and its benefits
- Personal care tasks such as brushing teeth and washing hands
- Identify basic safety rules and their benefits
