Our job is to meet each individual child where they are at and move them forward. Your child does not need to know or be able to do anything particular in order to attend 4K.
SOCIAL EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
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The Oshkosh Area School District Ready 4 Learning Program supports proactive management techniques that focus on creating successful learning environment, school community, and opportunities to learn what to do (replacement behaviors) for every child. Your 4K classroom teacher will implement Conscious Discipline and the Pyramid Model techniques within their 4K classrooms.
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PYRAMID MODEL: The pyramid model is a framework, rather than a curriculum, for planning how we support children in developing social and emotional competence. All children have needs that are addressed within the framework. The Pyramid Model was designed by the Center on the Social Emotional Foundations of early learning based on what the research tells us about best practices in supporting social and emotional development.
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CONSCIOUS DISCIPLINE: is a comprehensive social and emotional intelligence classroom management practice that empowers both teachers and students. The goal of the practice is to provide systematic changes in schools by fostering the emotional intelligence of teachers first and children second. Conscious Discipline leads teachers through a process that promotes permanent behavior changes in both teachers and children. The change is from a traditional compliance model of discipline to a relationship-based community model.
EARLY LITERACY SKILLS
Through the time spent in our program we support children with seeing themselves as readers and writers. We find functional uses for reading and writing in our daily lives and maximize our literacy rich learning environments for all children.
Children’s skills are met and gently nudged forward from making marks and strokes all the way up to writing letters and their name when/if they are ready for it throughout the year. Children learn that sometimes readers read pictures and sometimes readers read words! Our goal is to instill for all children in our program that “people make and read books and they each can too.”
Fountas and Pinnell’s Literacy Beginnings and the work of Matt Glover and Katie Woodray’s work about book making lead the way in our literacy instruction.
EARLY MATH SKILLS
Children’s skills in mathematics are supported to move beyond rote counting. We support children in thinking critically about mathematical skills. We focus our attention on 0-5 and 0-10 learning them forwards, backwards, how to represent them with numerals and objects, how to build them and break them apart, and so on. We also talk about measuring, shapes, directional words, and so much more!
While we patiently await Bridges’ preschool curriculum we are using and enhancing our current Everyday Math curriculum.
OVERARCHING TEACHING AND LEARNING
All of our teaching and learning is done within the overall structure of best practices provided by Creative Curriculum. Our assessment tool is called Teaching Strategies Gold, which focuses on several learning domains including:
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Social and Emotional
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Language
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Cognitive
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Physical
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Literacy
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Mathematics
If you have any questions about what your child is learning please feel free to contact your child’s teacher or the Office of Early Learning at any time!
