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Our Senior Classes are for children who are 4 years old as of September
1st
For the 2008-09 school year the Senior classes will be offered on the
following days. Please see the Registration Page
for information regarding available spaces or waiting lists. (click
here for 2007-08 information)
 | Monday thru Thursday mornings from 8:45-11:20 |
| Monday thru Thursday afternoons from 12:25-2:55 |
The Senior room builds upon the foundation established in
the Junior room and continues to provide meaningful experiences to help foster
the development of the whole child. The senior teachers create a warm,
nurturing, and inviting environment, while adding additional academic elements,
age appropriate materials, and hands on activities that foster development
across all domains. The classroom gives children the opportunity to initiate
their own learning, make choices, work independently, and learn to problem solve
in a social environment. The environment and activities in the classroom
promotes independency, creativity, and a love for learning that will give
children a feeling of success in school. A kindergarten teacher from the
Hinsdale School district #181 serves on our advisory board, and has worked with
our teachers to assure that children are participating in a curriculum that
helps prepare them for kindergarten.
Our child to adult ratio exceeds the mandated 1:10 ration required by DCFS,
with 3 teachers and 1 parent helper daily for a maximum of 20 children (1:6
teacher to child ratio). This allows the teachers to work closely with the
children and provide valuable individualized attention.
The following highlights the routine of the senior room:
Arrival: The teachers always
greet the parent and child at the door to welcome them into the class. It’s a
wonderful opportunity for children to share events from home with the teachers
and to be personally welcomed to the room. The children must wash their hands
upon entering the classroom as regulated by DCFS (the Department of Children and
Family Services)
Calendar Time: When the
children hear the “Hello” song played on the piano, it is their cue to meet on
the rug for a short morning group time. During this time, the teachers take
attendance and again greet each child individually by name. In addition, the
children help with the calendar time, putting up that day’s number on the
calendar, determining what the day’s weather, recognizing the patterns of the
calendar pieces, and determining which weather pattern (sunny, snowy, rainy,
windy, etc) has occurred the most and the least throughout the month. It’s a
wonderful opportunity to work on not only the days of the week and months of the
year, but also the math concepts of patterning, greater than, less than, and
rote counting. Once a week, one child is scheduled to bring an item from home to
share with the class for “Show and Tell”. Children are able to talk about their
item during group time, and answer questions from their friends.
Free Choice Time: The teachers work diligently to rotate the materials in the
classroom to reflect and reinforce the weekly theme, concepts, and interests and
development of the students. The room is divided into various areas for the
children to freely select where they would like to work and explore. The room
includes:
| Art Table:
children are free to participate in an art project that changes daily and
coincides with the weekly topic. Children can use their imagination and
creative minds when using a variety of art mediums, including fingerpainting,
color mixing and three dimensional construction. It is an opportunity for
children to also explore with mathematic and science concepts such as mixing
primary colors, symmetry, patterning, and shape recognition. Natural
elements, such as leaves, pine cones, corn cobs, beans, and vegetables are
also used for artistic collages. |
| Creative
Table: This area
provides an assortment of art and writing materials, including pencils,
tape, glue, stencils, crayons, markers, and scissors. The children are free
to let their imaginations guide them in using any of the supplies. In
addition, the children have their own journals to draw pictures and dictate
stories in that can be shared with the whole class. Some materials are
changed weekly, again based on the thematic unit. |
| Game/Small
Manipulative Table:
This area is used for playing games, working on puzzles, or investigating
other small manipulatives, including magnets, dominoes, and measurement
tools. As with the rest of the classroom, the children are free to use any
of the materials in a nearby shelf for this table. It is a wonderful
opportunity for children to work on social skills such as turn taking and
establishing rules for a game, mathematical concepts such as number
recognition, 1 to 1 correspondence, and matching/patterning, and scientific
concepts including understanding how magnets work. |
| Playdough
Table: A variety of
sensory materials are available for the children to create and work with,
including homemade playdough, silly putty, or flubber. This is a wonderful
opportunity for children to strengthen the muscles in their fingers and
hands that are essential for fine motor control and development (those used
in writing and cutting). It is also provides children with a variety of
science concepts, including how matter changes from dry solids to a new
liquid substance and illustrates the process of creating silly putty. It
also provides a rich language experience as the children use language to
identify how these various materials feels on their skins. Additional
materials are also added to this area to reinforce specific thematic units,
including scissors, variety of cooky cutters, or other household items. |
| Recess bin:
This sensory bin contains a variety of materials for children to
investigate, including water, corn, rice, and leaves. The bin offers
children the opportunity to experiment with math concepts such as volume and
laws of conservation, as well as sifting and hand/eye co-ordination as
children pour the materials into various containers. |
| Block Area:
Large wood blocks as well as small unit blocs are available for building,
constructing, and acting out dramatic play. Materials are incorporated into
this areas to help support various themes, including fire hats and gloves
during “Fire Safety and Prevention”. Unit blocks are an introduction to
numerous math concepts, including recognizing shapes, understanding the part
to whole relationship of fractions (2 squares to together equals one
rectangle), and spatial awareness. It is also a very social area, which
encourages children to work co-operatively, problem solve, and use their
imagination to create dramatic play. |
| Dramatic
Play Area: This area
routinely has child sized kitchen furniture to promote co-operative play,
sequencing, and creating a situation to be acted out. This area also
changes to become a restaurant, grocery store, post office, and hospital to
support other curriculum topics. As in the block area, it is a social area
that promotes co-operative learning, problem solving, and using language to
understand the world around them. |
Snack (Open
for the child at any time during free-choice time):
Snack is brought by the parent helper for the day (see our
Snack Guidelines page for DCFS guidelines)
and placed in baskets for the children to serve themselves at any point during
self-selected free choice time. Snack selections will be self-limiting by
number cards placed in each basket, indicating how many of each selection the
child may take (i.e.: a number 4 card can be placed in the basket with
crackers and 2 card with the basket containing cheese slices). These cards are a
wonderful tool for literacy, number recognition and understanding 1 to 1
correspondence. Snack time is created to
allow the child the power to decide when to have snack and the independence to
serve it themselves. After hand washing, the child removes his/her name from
the snack chart, promoting name recognition and is a meaningful literacy tool,
and then is able to serve themselves.
Clean-up,
“library time”, and opportunity for bathroom use before outdoor play:
Children help in the process of returning all the materials they used during
free choice time. All materials are kept in child sized shelving units that
promotes independence in selecting various materials and returning them upon
completion. Once the room is clean, the children meet on the rug for quiet
reading time with independent reading. Books are selected each week to support
the weekly theme or specific concepts that the children have been working on.
Rug Time:
The children and teachers gather for a variety of literacy activities, including
flannel board stories, fingerplays, reading stories. In addition, various music
and movement activities, including singing, instrument playing and dancing are
included. During this time, the students can also share reflections of the
day’s events, including predictions of various science experiments or discussion
of what was seen at a field trip.
Outdoor Play:
Weather permitting, the children spend approximately the last 15 minutes at one
of the local parks for large motor play. The children usually use Robbins
Park, but will also use the Irma Butler Toddler Park with developmentally
appropriate climbing equipments, slides, and swings.
- Small Groups: Small groups are an additional activity
that is done at the end of the morning/afternoon on Tuesday, Wednesday, and
Thursday. They are an opportunity for the teachers to work with the children in
small groups of six or seven. We have a large motor, cognitive skill, and
literature small group that the children participate in on a weekly basis.
The children stay together with the same group of children and rotate through
each group during the week. For the large motor group, children participate in activities such as walking on a balance beam, going through an
obstacle course, playing catch, or any number of musical activities that
promote large motor development. Cognitive skills focus on “kindergarten
readiness” activities such as name recognition, counting with one to one
correspondence, letter recognition, and cutting skills. The literature group
reads and discusses a variety of quality literature and flannel board
stories, acts out stories and works with poetry and rhyming words.
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- Field Trips: The senior room attends a variety of
field trips and is an extension of the themes the children have been
studying. Field trips vary year to year, but usually include visiting the fire
station, Graue Mill, Lakeview Nature Center, Robert Crown Center, a train trip
and Fullersburg Woods. Parents
volunteer to carpool and attend the trip to maintain a safe adult to child
ratio.
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Birthdays: The senior room celebrates birthday and half
birthdays for the children with summer birthdays in a number of ways. The
teachers put a “cake” for the date on the calendar. At group time the child
makes a birthday cake flannel board story, and the parent is encouraged to
bring a special snack. In addition, parents are encouraged to help their
child create a pictorial timeline of their child’s life, by creating a poster
with 1-2 pictures of the child from each year of their life. The pictures
illustrate how much the child has learned and grown in the past 5 (or 41/2)
years. The child gets to share this poster with his/her peers during the
celebration, giving them an opportunity to share unique experiences with
his/her classmates and to help his/her classmates learn more about the child.
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