Our Kindergarten Curriculum – 5 Years Old

Five year olds are about to take on the world. We give them the tools to do it.

At Staten Island Early Childhood Center, the skills and concepts learned in our classroom are reinforced and extended throughout the year. Our educators always deliver the most comprehensive learning and supportive care possible. Your child will learn throughout the day, including playtime, because the opportunity to learn is always present.

Five-year-olds are eager to discover and learn new information. They love to plan and enjoy playing with their peers. Staten Island Early Childhood Center curriculum for your five-year-old child provides learning and social activities to meet your child’s needs.

At Staten Island Early Childhood Center, children learn from the time they enter our school until the time they leave. Throughout the day, your child will interact with peers and teachers in small and large groups, learn and discover in our developmentally appropriate learning centers, explore outside on our age appropriate playground, and participate in our family style dining.

Areas of Development

Our Kindergarten Curriculum focuses on your five-year-old child’s primary areas of development.

Language Arts and Literacy: Children are introduced to a variety of fiction and nonfiction children’s literature. Through these books, children begin to recognize common sight words, such as will, we and see. They continue to identify upper and lower case letters, as well as letter sounds. Children will begin to decode words in print, start combining letters to make words, and eventually combine words to write sentences and stories. Children will explore content-rich literature, and expand their vocabulary tremendously throughout the year.

Mathematics: When you visit our five-year-old room, you will see students actively engaged in mathematical thinking. They’ll be interacting in small and large groups using manipulatives to solve problems, making graphs out of data they collected, or comparing and classifying shapes and objects. They practice numbers in daily routines by counting the children who are present, or the number of days that have passed in the month. They begin adding, subtracting, and estimating numbers by giving proper change to their customers in a restaurant in the Dramatic Play center, or by figuring out how many more blocks are needed to complete a structure in the Blocks and Transportation center.

Science: The natural curiosity of five year olds is the basic ingredient in Our Kindergarten Curriculum science program. Children explore, observe and question. They learn to appreciate nature and science through hands-on activities. They discover plants and their needs, and learn about taking care of themselves, animals and the earth.

Social Studies: Our social studies units involve children as individuals and explore their roles in the classroom, academy and the larger community. Throughout the year, children learn about citizenship, rules, working together and basic government. Children have an opportunity to explore their local community, geography, American history and symbols.

Character Education: At our school, we believe it is important to introduce children to a wide variety of character traits. Each month we focus on a positive value; such as, honesty, generosity or patience, to help children better understand the society we live in and to help them develop into caring and responsible young adults.

Our Five-Year-Old curriculum focuses on experiences designed to promote thinking, reasoning, teamwork, creative, and investigative skills that the children can use throughout their day. Science activities are focused on encouraging the children to experience their natural environment through hands-on experiments, group projects, and open-ended exploration. Technology in also incorporated in our Five-Year-Old classrooms through the use of computers, tablets, and Smart Boards. The children will participate in Engineering activities that focus on helping children to identify a problem to creating and developing a solution. Mathematics skills are integrated with other science and technology activities, to increase the children’s knowledge about numbers and number sense, organizing data, geometry, operations and algebraic thinking, and patterns and number relationships.