ONE YEAR OLD PROGRAM
What will your child do throughout the day and year at Intown Jewish Preschool?
At this age, the children’s development is remarkable. For the first 12 months of a child’s life, they have been soaking up all the experiences that surround them. Now they are ready to take on a more visibly active role. They are moving around and can’t seem to stop. Their chubby hands want to open and close, dump and refill, climb up and climb down. Though they’ve been communicating from birth, they are now beginning to communicate verbally. They make leaps in language development; they may be putting 1-2 words together or full sentences.
Socially, they are beginning to explore who they are as people, and learn to relate to others. Therefore, each step of progress is celebrated: the first time your child resolves a problem on their own, gets their lunchbox from their own cubby, uses their words instead their hands to resolve a conflict.
We start off by forming a bond with the child, letting them know that they are safe. We do this by creating an environment that is secure and nurturing where the child feels totally accepted and safe.
So how do we teach this stage? What do we do?
We create a warm nurturing environment in which each child is valued and cherished as an individual and is guided according to positive methods of discipline / child guidance. One of the most important goals of quality care for children at this early age is to ensure that they feel loved, valued and capable. As they strive to reach out more and more to the world around them and to test their emerging sense of personal autonomy, they need loving, gentle direction and guidance to learn how to have their own needs met and how to interact appropriately with the world around them and the other people in their world. The staff provides lots of modeling (showing by example) and participatory involvement in their activities to teach them these skills.
We create a safe, physically active environment that allows and encourages continued development of their physical bodies, using both large and small muscles. Many opportunities are provided for movement of large muscles such as running, climbing, swinging, pedaling bikes, throwing and catching, etc.
Small muscle development occurs as the children play with a variety of manipulatives and toys with parts that fit together, when they use crayons and markers and paint with various tools and materials, and as they learn to tear and cut and glue, etc. They also practice many self-help skills as they grow through the year such as putting on their own jackets, washing their hands, learning to “go potty”, cleaning up after snack and putting away toys.
We create opportunities to learn and practice social skills, as well as the necessary guidance by loving teachers to learn to respect the rights of “friends” and to learn appropriate interactions. It is the nature of children at this age to be egocentric and self absorbed most of the time. But, as they play along side of other children they begin to interact in a group setting, they begin to enjoy more interactive play and learn to take turns (waiting is very hard when you’re one year old), to share, to imitate each other, and, eventually to cooperate with others ideas too.
We create a rich cognitively-stimulating environment, offering choices that encourage development of problem solving skills. As the child works/plays with the variety of resource materials and toys available, in addition to participating in teacher-led activities, he/she learns to discriminate and understand many basic concepts that are essential to readiness skills for the academics that will follow later. Language development progress greatly throughout this year as well, as teachers provide lots of opportunities for verbalization within all aspects of the child’s day.
We create opportunities to develop and express creativity. Also essential to later success is the strong ability to experiment, problem-solve, conceptualize both “tried and proven” but also “new and different” ways of viewing tasks (i.e. to be a creative thinker). Therefore lots of situations and activities including art activities are planned to be open ended, process-oriented rather than product oriented, and exploratory. They are offered frequently enough to allow children to experiment with different ideas and / or to fine tune skills.
Music and song are an integral part of the program. Children will learn new songs, sing old ones, sing familiar songs, make up songs, listen to songs and sing without tapes. Most of the time movement is a part of any music in the class. Rhythms and repetitions are subsequently introduced through music (which are helpful for math cognition). Once a week the children have formal music time with IJP mom and music class instructor, Amanda Rosenfield.
Praise and reinforcement is given liberally for the effort put forth and descriptive praise is used to enhance the child’s good feeling about the work they put into any attempt. E.g instead of saying “oh what a beautiful painting you made,” we might say, “I see that you put red here and you did blue dots there, and I like the way you did this part etc.“ This enhances the child’s feeling of competence and ingenuity, thus building his/her self esteem and ingenuity, thus building his/her self esteem and increasing his/her desire to continue attempting new endeavors.