Christ the King Nursery School
50 Erskine Road
Ringwood, NJ 07456
School Phone: 973-962-6767
School Fax: 973-962-6581
e-mail: christtheking3@juno.com
The school is celebrating 33 years of excellence in preschool education, serving children ages 3-5 years old. Our school calendar runs consistent with the Ringwood Public Schools, following all of the same major holidays and vacations.
School Philosophy and Statement of Purpose
One of the most precious gifts God has given you is your child. He has also charged you to bring up the child in the "nurture and admonition of the Lord." The Christian home is, and always will be, the ideal setting for the child to grow in the knowledge and security of God’s love and concern for us. However, each home is part of the larger family of the community and God’s world.
The education of the child is a mutual concern between home and school. We believe that each child who enters our doors is a special person in his or her own right and we want to play a part in helping him or her feel that way. The school and the home can become strong partners working together to provide a loving, Christian atmosphere with the opportunity for the natural growth and development of each child.
It is our purpose and joy to work together with parents in guiding their children into Christian lives that are useful, successful and purposeful, while maintaining the highest standard of preschool education, integrated and related to the teachings of God’s word.
Christ the King does not discriminate in providing services to children and their families on the basis of race, religion, cultural heritage, politics, belief, national origin, disability, or marital status.
Preschool Curriculum
It is our aim to provide each child with a multitude of experiences and materials so as to extend his thinking on his own level. If we remember that a "Child’s intelligence develop because it functions" (Farth, 1970, p. 74), we will be better able to approach each child on his own level of intelligence and enhance the concepts he already has so as to build a stronger foundation for later development.
"Our aim should be not to move the child from one stage to the next in concepts studied by Piaget, but, rather, to enable him to develop his total cognitive framework so that he will be able to apply it to any task including classification, seriation, conservation, arithmetic, and reading." (Kamii in Spodek, 1973, p. 210)
Our curriculum attempts to develop each child’s cognitive framework so that he will be better able to understand the more abstract and complex concepts of his later life and schooling.
Early intellectual development cannot be brought home. Rather, it is internalized through a wide variety of multi-sensory experiences. Sorting and categorizing objects gives a child practice in noticing likenesses and differences before they are able to make distinctions between letters and word forms. When children build with blocks, they estimate how much space they will need, as well as classify by size and shape. These are concrete experiences that require problem-solving and thinking techniques. Stimulating a child to think will help him to better understand the world around him. On the other hand, doing abstract things from memory and by rote may produce a robot-like child. If a child knows the why of things he is learning he will be better able to apply them to other areas as he grows older.
If we thing of curriculum as something we do to children, we think of products we teach them to make and lessons we have them remember. But if we think of curriculum as something that happens to children, that children mesh with, then we think more of our role in preparing an environment and offering experiences through which children undergo the processes of learning, perhaps even without producing a product.
Learning itself must be understood to be more than the rote learning of details and the mechanics of skills. In early childhood, learning must be the fulfillment of young children’s stretching outward toward a great variety of experiences within which facts and skills are a part, but hardly the major part.
Sample Schedule
This is an approximate schedule. It allows for a good deal of flexibility. Some things are done daily, others periodically. Various themes are carried out during the course of the year. The children move with their class and teachers from room to room. The starting rooms are changed approximately every six weeks.
Starting Room: Sharing time – 15 minutes
Opening worship: Prayer, Bible stories, Songs
Flag
Calendar
Finger Plays
Language Development
Yellow Room: Free Plan – 30 minutes
Block building, cars, trucks, trains, doll house, animals, balls, housekeeping corner, puppet theater, climber and slide, riding toys, rocking boat, balance beam.
The children move freely from one activity to another. Teachers supervise and encourage them to share, take turns, initiate new games, communicate and solve problems.
Indoor/Outdoor Play – Games, beanbags/physical fitness activities, rhythm activities, marching, sticks, instruments, parachute, streamers, tumbling mat.
Blue Room: Art and Science – 40 minutes
Arts and crafts, sand/water table, floor puzzles, book corner, listening center, science experiments, cooking, large manipulatives, audio-visual activities.
This time is semi-structured. Children are often assigned specific tasks or organized into revolving groups.
Bathroom and Snack: -- 15 minutes
Snacks are most often healthful and low in sugar. Parents are encouraged to contribute special foods.
Green Room: Learning Centers – 40 minutes
Puzzles, games, listening activities, storytime, small manipulatives.
Reading readiness activities: Classifying, matching, sequencing, perception, letters and sounds.
Number activities: Counting, sorting, matching, measuring, ordering.
This room is more structured. Children have the opportunity to work one-on-one with the teacher. Sometimes they are free to choose their activity, other times they work in small or large groups on specific tasks.
Starting Room: Remaining 10 minutes
The children return to their starting room to gather their belongings and be dismissed.
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