Griffin Academy Curriculum

Emotional Growth:

• Provide a physical environment that is healthy, safe, and nurturing.
• Provide a loving, welcoming, and joyous atmosphere for the children.
• Provide an environment of routine and consistency.
• Provide experiences that will develop qualities of responsibility and independence.
• Create opportunities for the child to practice sitting still, working independently, concentrating, following directions, and working on a task until its completion.
• Provide opportunities to develop the child’s imagination through pretend-play, creative story-telling, and art.

Social Growth

• Encourage forming friendships with classmates.
• Encourage sharing and taking turns.
• Encourage and model responsibility of caring for one’s own things as well as caring for and maintaining the classroom (simple chores assigned to each child).
• Encourage child to work cooperatively with others and to begin to understand and respect differences among individuals.
• Create an environment where conflicts are solved constructively.
• Create opportunities to practice/promote thoughtfulness and giving.

Cognitive Growth:

• Provide learning activities in language arts:
  • oral language development;
  • expressive language;
  • increasing vocabulary;
  • pre-writing activities using crayons, pencils, markers, fingerpaints, and paints;
  • visual discrimination through matching, sequencing activities, and finding hidden objects;
  • activities for letter and sound recognition;
  • auditory discrimination through identifying familiar sounds, rhyming.

• Provide concrete activities in pre-math and reasoning:
  • classifying, matching, sorting;
  • patterns and sequencing;
  • counting;
  • beginning number recognition;
  • memory skills.

• Provide learning activities in science:
  • caring for the environment and for all living things;
  • collecting and gathering materials from nature;
  • simple experiments (such as growing seeds);
  • activities to improve observation skills.

• Provide a wide range of art, drama, and music activities.
• Provide opportunities and encourage self expression through music, movement, art, and drama.
• Provide exposure to the French language through songs and simple conversation.

Physical Growth:

• Provide opportunities for large muscle development and control.
• Provide opportunities for small muscle development and control.
• Provide opportunities to develop balance and coordination, hand-eye coordination, and spatial skills.
• Encourage good habits of health, hygiene, diet, and safety.

Emotional Growth:

• Provide a physical environment that is healthy, safe, and nurturing.
• Provide a loving, welcoming, and joyous atmosphere for the children.
• Provide an environment of routine and consistency.
• Create an opportunity that encourages discovery and exploration.
• Create experiences that will increase a sense of competence and pride in accomplishments.
• Create opportunities that will further develop qualities of responsibility and independence.
• Provide experiences that will develop the child’s initiative and help him/her to learn to face and resolve conflict or overcome problems.
• Provide opportunities to develop the child’s imagination through pretend-play, creative story-telling, and art.

Social Growth:

• Encourage social interaction among all classmates.
• Encourage forming friendships with more than one classmate.
• Encourage sharing and taking turns.
• Encourage expressing oneself through verbal expression of feelings and thoughts.
• Encourage self-reliance and self-control.
• Encourage and model responsibility of caring for one’s own things as well as caring for and maintaining the classroom (simple chores assigned to each child).
• Encourage child to work cooperatively with others and to begin to understand and respect differences among individuals.
• Encourage compliance with rules and following directions.
• Create an environment where conflicts are solved constructively (via talking through problems and reasoning).
• Promote and create opportunities to practice thoughtfulness and giving.

Cognitive Growth:

• Provide language-development activities in listening and expressive language.
• Provide activities to develop pre-reading and reading skills through a phonics-based program:
  • Alphabet recognition/sound correlation;
  • Matching of letters, words, and shapes;
  • Visual discrimination and memory;
  • Word recognition;
  • Auditory discrimination and memory.

• Provide activities to develop pre-writing and fine-motor skills:
  • tracing activities;
  • clay, painting and puzzles;
  • creative story writing.

• Provide activities to develop beginning math skills:
  • sorting, matching, and counting objects;
  • grouping into sets;
  • recognition and sequencing of numbers;
  • recognition of shapes;
  • beginning addition and subtraction skills using math manipulatives.

• Provide learning activities in science:
  • caring for the environment and for all living things;
  • gathering and examining materials from nature;
  • simple experiments;
  • activities to improve observation and memory skills.

• Provide learning activities in social studies:
  • holidays and historical events during the calendar year;
  • community helpers;
  • simple map skills activities.

• Provide a wide range of art, drama, and music activities.
• Provide opportunities and encourage self expression through music, movement, art, and drama:
  • role-playing and make-believe play;
  • show-and-tell;
  • acting out stories with puppets and/or props.

• Provide an environment to begin learning French.

Physical Growth:

• Provide opportunities for large muscle development and control.
• Provide opportunities for small muscle development and control.
• Provide opportunities to further develop balance and coordination, hand-eye coordination, and spatial skills.
• Encourage good habits of health, hygiene, diet, and safety.