Junior and Senior Program Overview

At the Weiss School, our early childhood program includes Junior and Senior Preschool to accommodate students in the 3 year-old and 4 year-old age ranges, respectively.

Each of our early learners is given the skills and support to blossom in a safe, nurturing learning environment while providing our children with the opportunities to develop in all areas, including cognitive, emotional, physical, and social.

Children at this level learn through play and social interaction. While some educators debate the value of play, we maintain that children learn valuable concepts and skills through imaginative as well as structured independent and cooperative play time.

For instance, consider the following skills that derive from learning through play:

• Children increase understanding about themselves, others, and their environment.
• Children increase their language and communication skills.
• Children develop their creativity and imagination.
• Children increase and improve physical coordination and manual dexterity.
• Children learn to interact with others through taking turns, cooperating, negotiating, and playing by the rules.
• Children develop emotional well-being during positive play experiences as they bond with peers and adults who interact with them.

Our Early Childhood teachers provide our earliest learners with a solid foundation in essential early literacy skills, such as pre-reading and pre-writing, along with practice in age appropriate concepts and processes.

The Weiss School philosophy begins with our youngest learners in our Early Childhood Center, incorporating and exceeding Palm Beach County Early Childhood and Palm Beach Gardens preschool program standards.

We integrate our curriculum across multiple fields, facilitating understanding and skill development for our early learners. As needed, our early childhood program implements advanced curriculum to facilitate and encourage gifted practices.

In addition, technology in our early childhood classrooms provides these early learners with the foundation to become technologically literate students, paving an early pathway toward acquiring 21st century skills.

The curriculum integrates five key areas of essential development for our youngest learners:

• Cognitive Investigations
• Emotional Needs
• Imaginative Creativity
• Physical Play
• Social Interactions

Our well-rounded program also embraces a thematic approach that enables children to explore and understand their environment as they develop communication and creativity skills. The program incorporates multiple learning activities within the following areas:

• Art
• Creative Movement/Dance
• Music
• Science
• Spanish
• Sports
• Storytelling

Self-Knowledge and Social Skills helps learners:

• Develop positive sense of self.
• Develop self-confidence in coping skills.
• Develop self-knowledge/self-awareness.
• Take risks and persevere to complete new challenges or tasks.

Language and Literacy helps learners:

• Develop oral language, listening, speaking, and vocabulary skills.
• Explore the basic concepts of print and increase understanding of sounds, letters, and letter-sound relationship.
• Increase vocabulary that reflects their growing knowledge of the world.
• Discover their environment and develop the conceptual, experimental, and language foundations necessary for learning and writing.

Math helps learners:

• Identify numbers and their meaning.
• Depict similarities and differences when sorting, and identify appropriate categories.
• Formulate collections of given quantities.
• Represent amounts in several different ways.
• Use relative language when contrasting two objects, pictures, shapes, and collections.

Science helps learners:

• Use all five senses to formulate careful observations of objects, organisms, and events.
• Raise questions regarding objects and events in their environment.
• Engage in primary investigations by making predictions, gathering and interpreting data, recognizing simple patterns, and drawing conclusions.
• Work collaboratively with others, share and discuss ideas, and listen to new viewpoints.

Social Studies helps learners:

• Develop responsibility for their individual selves.
• Positively consider other people's ideas, thoughts, and feelings.
• Develop respect for people from different cultures or different genders, ethnicities, or abilities.
• Show an understanding about aspects of diversity through discussions and representations.
• Understand the meaning behind various holiday celebrations.