4 Year Old Program

Our 4 year old Program
We work with the children to reach these goals.

Motor Development: Gross Motor Skills

  • Running is more controlled; can start, stop, and turn
  • Turns somersaults; hops on one foot; gallops
  • Can easily catch, throw, and bounce a ball
  • Walks on tiptoe, broad jumps
  • Walks on a balance beam
  • Can balance on one foot
  • Climb and descend stairs with alternating feet

Motor Development: Fine Motor Skills

  • Develops and strengthen eye-hand coordination
  • Writes name using correct upper and lower case letters
  • Copies crosses and squares
  • Prints letters
  • Cuts on a line
  • Hand preference is established
  • Laces (but cannot tie) shoes
  • Gasps pencil with pincer grasp
  • Colors within lines
  • Cuts and pastes simple shapes

LITERACY

  • To be exposed to a variety of literature
  • To develop comprehension skills
  • T o recognize rhyming words
  • To recognize upper and lower case alphabet
  • To recognize beginning phonic sounds

MATH

  • To recognize shapes (star, rectangle, oval, diamond, square, circle, triangle)
  • To develop sorting, matching and graphing skills
  • To be able to identify existing patterns, copy patterns and create new patterns
  • To be able to count to 30
  • To recognize numbers 1-10
  • To begin simple addition with manipulatives

SCIENCE

  • To gain an understanding of cause and effect
  • To have numerous hands-on opportunities

ART

  • To recognize colors
  • To encourage creativity through a variety of open-ended art activities
  • To experience cause and effect through various art activities

MUSIC

  • To expose children to different styles of music
  • To foster listening skills and promote sound awareness
  • To encourage children to feel free and interact with music through singing and physical movement
  • To develop a feeling for rhythm

Language and Thinking Development

  • Understands words that relate one idea to another — if, why, when
  • Continues to learn through experience and the senses
  • Understands, mostly, the difference between fantasy and reality
  • Understands number and space concepts — more, less, bigger, in, under, behind
  • Begins to grasp that pictures and symbols can represent real objects
  • Starts to recognize patterns among objects — round things, soft things, animals
  • Grasps the concepts of past, present, and future but does not understand the duration of time
  • Speaks fluently; correctly uses plurals, pronouns, tenses
  • Understands and names opposites

Social and Emotional Development

  • Takes turns, shares, and cooperates
  • Expresses anger verbally rather than physically
  • Enjoys pretending and has a vivid imagination
  • Plays make-believe and dresses up
  • Silly, imaginative, and energetic, your child loves to try new words and new activities.
  • Four year-olds crave adult approval. We provide lots of positive encouragement.
  • We display calendars to help your child visualize the concept of time.
  • We offer opportunities for sorting, matching, counting, and comparing.
  • We encourage fine motor skills by letting your child cut pictures out of magazines, string beads, or play with take-apart, put-together toys.
  • We help your child recognize his/her emotions by using words to describe them: “I see you’re sad at me right now.”

Children want to learn many new and exciting things. When your child has reached the goals for the 3 and 4 year old program I focus on the rest of these goals:

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT (Oral to Written Language)

  1. To have developed the concept of a story (by creating stories, listening to, retelling in sequence and applying information from stories to daily living)
  2. To be able to follow one, two and three step directions
  3. To be able to listen and retell directions and/or basic concepts taught
  4. To speak in correct, meaningful sentences
  5. To be able to tell a story both orally and through drawing pictures

FINE MOTOR

  1. To be able to grasp correctly
  2. To be able to cut on lines with scissors
  3. To be able to tie, zipper, button, snap
  4. To recognize and write upper and lower case letters correctly on lined paper

READING

  1. To be able to identify letter names and corresponding sounds both in an out of alphabetical order
  2. To be able to identify initial and final consonants in words
  3. To recognize rhyming words
  4. To be able to recognize similarities and differences between objects or groups of objects
  5. To be able to recognize topics and details in stories
  6. To be able to identify sequential relationships
  7. To be able to follow across a page in a left/right progression

MATHEMATICS

  1. To be able to write the numbers 0-12
  2. To be able to count sets of objects through 10, using one to one correspondence
  3. To be able to order objects (first, second, Third, fourth and fifth)
  4. To be able to recognize and be able to use location concept words (over, under, above, next to, larger, smaller, between, zero, forward, every, separate, half, back, nearest, farthest)
  5. To be able to classify objects in sets
  6. To be able to solve problems using pictures and patterns