LS Curriculum Detail

PK Full Days

Pre-K 4 year old - Full Time

  • Child-Centered Learning

    As with our preschool program, the pre-k program is guided by Quaker values and draws best practices in  early childhood education. Our program emphasizes community and responsibility, with respect for each individual, through practices that encourage student-initiated exploration.

  • Language Arts PK

    Through immersion in a literature- and language-rich environment, pre-kindergarten students begin their journey to literacy. Our focus is on developing reading and writing readiness through multi-sensory experiences and direct and explicit phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, with an emphasis on auditory and visual discrimination, listening skills, and spoken language development. Sample objectives for pre-kindergarten students in receptive language include learning to recognize rhyming patterns, following multi-step directions, and engaging in auditory discrimination with phoneme units. In expressive language, objectives include students expressing feelings in an appropriate manner, and recalling and restating facts and sequence from stories read aloud. Students also begin to create and share their own stories through storytelling and illustration. Toward goals specific to reading readiness, students learn to identify letter sounds and to discriminate letters and words; they are introduced to beginning consonant sounds, and learn to recognize upper and lower case letters. They experience the functionality of written words in a variety of contexts, and are asked to demonstrate left to right directionality. Fine motor activities are also emphasized as children learn to write their upper case letters, refine their pencil grip, and explore small manipulatives.
     

  • Mathematics PK

    Students in pre-kindergarten experience math through a variety of hands-on, everyday activities like taking attendance and learning to interpret the class calendar. They are exposed to math terminology and incorporate it into their own vocabulary. Students gain a foundation for number sense and mathematical operations by learning to count with one-to-one correspondence, reading numerals, and developing an understanding of the value of numbers (e.g. by matching a number to a set). Pre-kindergarten students work extensively with patterns, space, shape, and measurement as foundations of algebra and geometry. Our pre-kindergarten mathematicians also learn to classify objects, to recognize patterns in data, to make graphs, and to estimate and hypothesize.

  • Music and Movement

    The pre-kindergarten program offers a variety of experiences in singing, moving, listening, and playing, with activities that encourage both group cooperation and the expression of individuality and independence. Students explore the elements of sound, silence, space, and time. They echo tonal and rhythmic patterns, master the concept and production of a steady beat, and distinguish between sounds produced in different ways and by different sources. Dance activities emphasize following a rhythm, and interpreting tempo and dynamics through movement. Those and other activities help lay the foundation for more formal study of rhythm, melody, and musical notation and dynamics.

  • Physical Education PK

    Using a variety of materials and activities, pre-kindergarten students are engaged in movement activities that develop foundation skills. Understanding and negotiating the physical environment and integrating locomotion with levels and pathways are fundamental principles during the pre-kindergarten year. Students also learn how to handle equipment safely and properly.
     

  • PS Mathematics

    Preschool students explore mathematical concepts each day. They are exposed to numbers, counting, shapes, and colors through hands-on activities, everyday routines, and interactions with their outdoor environment. Counting, sorting, and patterning are incorporated into daily transitions, small group activities, and gross motor activities. Additional mathematical activities include comparing objects by size, shape, and color. Math through literature is also a key element in exposing children to new concepts and language to help to support mathematical understanding.

  • Science PK

    Pre-kindergarten science focuses on hands-on, discovery-based experiences related to classroom themes and children’s interests. These activities, as well as field trips that support the lessons, provide students with the opportunity to develop an appreciation for the life cycles of living things and to discuss their observations about the world in which they live. Students learn to recognize similarities and differences, often recording characteristics like size, color, shape, and weight. Through guided instruction, pre-kindergarten students make observations using the five senses. Using appropriate tools, students are encouraged to communicate, classify, predict, and infer about the world around them.
     
     

  • Social Science PK

    Pre-kindergarten students first approach social studies by building self-awareness. They learn and communicate about themselves, their feelings and ideas, their responsibility for their actions independently and interactively (e.g. sharing), their capacity for self-reliance, and their uniqueness in identity and in what they can contribute. Students broaden their study to family, including a sharing of traditions and celebrations, and then to a more global view through an introduction to celebrations from around the world, fostering an early appreciation for a variety of cultures.
     

  • Spanish PK

    In pre-kindergarten, students explore Spanish through songs, stories, and movement, and also by using the language in meaningful and familiar contexts. The Spanish teacher and homebase teachers work together to develop cross-curricular themes in which students’ learning in the homebase classroom is reinforced in the Spanish classroom and vice versa.
     

  • Visual Arts PK

    The pre-kindergarten visual arts program respects the ability of each child and honors the belief that young children can construct meaningful knowledge and understanding. The goal of the visual arts program in these early years is to promote individual imagination and creativity, communication with others, and the joy of creating group projects together.
101 School Road, Wilmington, DE 19803
302.576.2900   |   info@wilmingtonfriends.org
Preschool - 12th Grade
Statement of Nondiscrimination as to Student Enrollment
Wilmington Friends School admits students of any race, color, gender, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students of these schools. Wilmington Friends School does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender, national and ethnic origin in administration of their educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school administered programs.