The philosophy of Bright Beginnings encourages children to learn by playing. Our hands-on age-appropriate curriculum offers math, science, art, and literature activities that provide great experiences for our anxious learners as they prepare for the adventures of kindergarten.

Centers of free play are offered daily and give your child the opportunity to explore a variety of different activities. Examples of centers include free art, water table, dolls, puzzles, dress-up, blocks and literature. Although these centers are offered to all of the children, Pre-K students take their exploration one or two steps further.

Math - Our Math curriculum is based on Math Their Way. This program involves a hands-on interactive approach to learning math concepts such as one-to-one correspondence, matching, patterning, rote counting and sorting. We Use Math Their Way by counting the days we have been in school during calendar time, graphing how many children have pets, counting and sorting our "Junk boxes" and making patterns with unifix cubes. What fun we have!

Science - Our goal for science is to expose the children to the natural world around them. We take nature walks and record what we see and hear. We grow plants from seeds and watch their progress. We also experiment and hypothesize about what will happen. We provide a sampling of what the world has to offer.

Art - Art time provides each child with more opportunities to express him or herself. The children experiment with paints, crayons, markers, recyclable items, clay and many other mediums to learn artistic ways to express themselves.

Literature - We provide quality literature daily to our students as well as activities that take books many steps further. The students may act out a story, make up a new ending, make puppets, or find a few favorite stories they cherish.

Some unique aspects to our Pre-K curriculum are journal writing, word banks and the children's favorite, Traveling Teddy. "T.T." is a little bear who spends one weekend at home with each child. The child then writes about their adventures with a little help from home. We feel these activities provide excellent introductions to letter recognition and pre-writing skills.

Our students are well prepared for all of the challenges kindergarten has to offer. We continually work on listening skills, following directions, and social interactions. We practice taking turns, sharing, and being responsible for our actions and behavior. Teachers model how to problem-solve and negotiate. Most importantly, we educators support and nurture each child as an individual, unique and special.

Traveling Teddy

Each classroom will have a class mascot, usually a teddy bear,  that will be named by the children. the purpose of Teddy is to help children bridge home with school by visiting the home of each child for a "weekend adventure." Typically Teddy goes home with a student on a Friday afternoon and returns on Monday morning. Teddy has a journal or scrapbook with him which the child and his family write in all about Teddy's weekend at their house to share with classmates.

Ready Readers

We use the commercial educational product "Ready Readers" as part of our literature program for our Pre-Kindergarteners. It's just one element in our curriculum designed to interest children in pre reading and pre writing. In addition to exposing children to letters and sounds, word families and sight word recognition, Ready Readers provides each child his own small book which is used throughout the week and sent home on Fridays. The curriculum builds throughout the year beginning with very simple one syllable words and developing into short sentences. As time progresses, you'll be amazed at the reading your child begins to do. What at first appears to be rote memorization, quickly turns into actual sounding our of letters, articulating sounds and connecting the idea that those funny looking symbols on the page actually represent words, which or course have meaning. Combined with all of this of course is the immersion into of many, many books of high quality children's literature, the library and book mobile visits, as well as the visits from our Master of Education Reading specialist. while we don't believe in pushing children academically, and we certainly are opposed to very structured sitting at desks with dittos and pencil/paper activities, we do want to meet children at their academic level and know that the children at Bright Beginnings have very rich home environments filled with many language opportunities.