Language Arts

Our primary goal in language and literacy development is to help children use language comfortably and effectively to communicate ideas, thoughts, and feelings. The entire classroom is a center for language arts. Through activities in art, music, cooking, and creative dramatics, coupled with games and manipulatives, the children expand their lexicon and language patterns. They learn to use language to talk about experiences and develop skills of comprehension and interpretation. Listening, speaking, writing, and reading are all parts of our language arts program. 

Strong oral language skills are the bedrock of literacy and academic success. Our teachers scaffold the children’s use of rich expressive language in all of our class activities. We model the intricacies of language, teaching new vocabulary and elaborating on the children’s ideas. Through questioning, we help the students stretch their thinking skills. Phonemic awareness activities promote hearing similarities and differences in the sounds of letters and words. The children are immersed in an environment with many types of meaningful print such as poems, labels, and signs. Daily painting, drawing, and writing activities allow children to represent their experiences through art and written work. We strive to foster a life-long love of literature. Teachers read to the children daily, and provide many opportunities to discuss the stories and create books. In Pre-Kindergarten, our students learn the names and sounds of letters through the Sounds in Motion® kinesthetic program. In Kindergarten, we introduce Fundations®, a structured literacy approach, which establishes a strong foundation for reading, handwriting and spelling.