Pre kindergarten programs: Pre-K Schools | Childtime

Опубликовано: January 6, 2022 в 10:12 am

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Pre-K Schools | Childtime


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A Nurturing Foundation for Kindergarten

At Childtime, Pre-K is a vital building block to kindergarten success. We guarantee that children achieve significant development advancements, learn to communicate effectively, and build collaborative skills, by working independently and in groups through a robust early childhood education approach. Our Pre-K program focuses on:

  • Problem-solving
  • Careful and responsive listening
  • Implementing language in learning
  • Collaborative social skills

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Pre-Kindergarten Classroom

Eight dynamic learning centers give these children the chance to make significant advances and experience a number of hands-on activities.

Art Center

Various art techniques and color concepts help bolster creativity, problem-solving, and self-expression.

Block Center

Children develop hand-eye coordination with various shapes and conceptual and physical exploration of counting, sorting, and patterning.

Dramatic Play Center

Early reading and writing abilities, as well as emotional expression, are built through cooperative pretend play and creating stories.

Math Center

Recognizing numbers builds to concepts like comparing, sorting, counting, and ordering.

Music & Movement Center

Children explore physical coordination, collaboration, and effective communication as they sing, dance, and move.

Science Center

Activities in this area focus on animals, weather, plants, and the seasons.

Reading Center

Children work on their print awareness, their ability to comprehend stories, and their listening skills.

Writing Center

Through the exploration of rhymes and sounds and letter recognition and formation, children start to build writing skills.

Curriculum & Developmental Scales

With our Empowered Child™ curriculum, we are inspired by the Reggio Emilia philosophy to use secure relationships with responsive adults as the basis for our educational approach, as teachers create customized exercises to meet the needs of each child across 10 significant developmental areas.

Approaches to Learning

Organizing, goal-setting, and interacting with peers and the environment.

Creative Arts

Express both feelings and ideas through song, dance, visual arts, and drama.

Language

Implementing both express and receptive vocabulary and conversation skills to communicate effectively.

Literacy

Showing phonological understanding, alphabet awareness, writing and reading skills.

Logic & Reasoning

Constructively showing sequencing, problem-solving, and symbolic and critical thinking skills.

Early Math

The comprehension of patterns, sorting, numbers, and ordering, alongside the implementation of numbers for addition, subtraction, measurement, and graphing.

Nature & Science

Observing, describing, predicting, and gathering data in the interest of understanding and exploring the physical and natural world.

Social Studies

Developing an understanding of themselves, their families, their communities, and the world around them.

Physical Development/Health

Developing fine and gross motor skills; comprehending health and nutrition.

Social-Emotional Development

Demonstrating respect and empathy for others through self-awareness.

Pre-Kindergarten ProgramExplore Our Other Programs:


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The Case For Universal Pre-K Just Got Stronger : Planet Money : NPR

Editor’s note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money‘s newsletter. You can sign up here.

Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post via Getty Images

According to the National Institute For Early Childhood Research, nearly half of all 3-year-olds and a third of all 4-year-olds in the United States were not enrolled in preschool in 2019. That’s in large part because many parents can’t afford it. Imagine a future where we changed that. A future where every American child had access to two years of preschool during a critical period of their mental development. How would their lives change? How would society change? If President Biden gets his way, and Congress agrees to spend $200 billion on his proposal for universal preschool, then we may begin to find out.

But it turns out, we kind of already know. In fact, a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research gives us a glimpse of what that world could look like. It adds to a burgeoning amount of high-quality research that shows just how valuable preschool is — and maybe not for the reasons you might think.

An accidental experiment

The story begins back in the mid-to-late 1990s. The Mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, wanted to improve the city’s schools. One of his big goals was to provide universal, full-day kindergarten for Boston’s kids. But the budget was tight, and following a task force’s recommendations, he and local lawmakers decided to move resources from preschool (for 4-year-olds) to kindergarten (for 5-year-olds) in order to achieve it.

The result was an even more limited number of slots for city-funded preschool, and the city officials had to figure out how to fairly divvy up those slots. They resorted to a lottery system, randomly selecting kids who would get in.

Fast forward two decades later, and the economists Christopher R. Walters, Guthrie Gray-Lobe and Parag A. Pathak saw this as a golden opportunity to see how preschool can affect people’s lives. The fact that Boston’s school administrators randomized who got admitted meant there were two virtually identical groups of kids with only one difference: one group got an extra year of education by going to preschool. That gave the researchers the opportunity to compare and contrast the two groups of kids and credibly see how kids’ lives changed as a result of getting into preschool.

About 4,000 4-year-olds took part in Boston’s preschool lottery between 1997 and 2003. Walters, Gray-Lobe, and Pathak acquired data on them from the Boston school system. And then they were able to get additional data from other sources that gave them insight into ways that the children’s lives might have benefited from an additional year of preschool education. These kids are now all twenty-somethings — a fact that should make you feel old.

Consistent with other studies that find preschool has a huge effect on kids, Walters, Gray-Lobe and Pathak find that the kids lucky enough to get accepted into preschools in Boston saw meaningful changes to their lives. These kids were less likely to get suspended from school, less likely to skip class, and less likely to get in trouble and be placed in a juvenile detention facility. They were more likely to take the SATs and prepare for college.

The most eye-popping effects the researchers find are on high school graduation and college enrollment rates. The kids who got accepted into preschool ended up having a high-school graduation rate of 70% — six percentage points higher than the kids who were denied preschool, who saw a graduation rate of only 64%. And 54% of the preschoolers ended up going to college after they graduated — eight percentage points higher than their counterparts who didn’t go to preschool. These effects were bigger for boys than for girls. And they’re all the more remarkable because the researchers only looked at the effects of a single year of preschool, as opposed to two years of preschool (as President Biden is now proposing for the nation’s youth). Moreover, in many cases, the classes were only half a day.

Intriguingly, while attending preschool at age 4 had clear effects on these kids’ entire lives, it did not improve their performance on standardized tests. These findings fit into a large body of research that suggests the true value of preschool is helping little ones to develop “non-cognitive skills,” like emotional and social intelligence, grit and respect for the rules.

“The combination of findings — that we don’t see an impact on test scores, but we do see an impact on these behavioral outcomes and the likelihood of attending college — is consistent with this idea that there’s some kind of behavioral or socio-emotional, non-cognitive impact from preschool,” says Christopher Walters, an economist at UC Berkeley who co-authored the study.

In other words, there’s growing evidence that preschool can permanently improve kids’ lives — but it’s not necessarily because it makes them smarter. It seems more related to making them more disciplined and motivated, which is just as important (or perhaps even more important) for their future livelihoods as how well they perform on reading or math tests.

The bigger picture

This latest study isn’t the first to show the outsized effects of providing a preschool education. The Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman has spent many years studying the results of small, randomized experiments with preschool in the 1960s and 1970s. The most famous such experiment was The Perry Preschool Project, which was conducted in Ypsilanti, Mich. The program provided two years of high-quality preschool for disadvantaged 3- and 4-year-olds.

Heckman and his colleagues found that the Perry Preschool had seismic effects on the kids who participated. They were much less likely to get arrested, go on welfare or be unemployed as adults. They earned significantly more. In a recent study, Heckman and his team found that even the kids of the kids who went to the Perry preschool had significantly better outcomes in life.

All in all, Heckman and his team estimate that every dollar the Perry Preschool project invested in kids had a return on investment of 7-10% per year, through increased economic gains for the kids and decreased public spending on them through other social programs when they got older. That’s a substantial return, equal to or greater than the average annual return from the stock market, and much greater than most other things our government spends money on.

Other preschool programs studied by Heckman and his colleagues have had even greater benefits. In the 1970s, a couple of programs in North Carolina experimented with high-quality childcare centers for kids. The centers offered kids aged zero to five education, medical checkups, and nutritious food. Heckman and his team found these centers delivered a 13 percent annual return on investment to the public for every dollar they invested. The program helped Heckman develop what’s known as “the Heckman Curve,” which asserts that the government gets more bang for the buck the earlier it provides resources to educate people. Educating toddlers, Heckman says, is much more powerful than educating high-schoolers, college students, or adults in, for example, job-training programs.

As astounding as Heckman’s findings about preschool have been, naysayers have long questioned whether such effects could be replicated with larger scale programs, like the one President Biden is now proposing. This new study out of Boston, which looks at a large-scale program conducted across the entire city, is another brick in the growing edifice of evidence that shows preschool is a worthy investment, not just for kids, but for society overall.

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Early Learning / Pre-K and Kindergarten

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  • Registering for Pre-K and Kindergarten in Fort Worth ISD begins April 1 and is entirely online. With a little preparation it will only take 10 to 15 minutes!

    This new step-by-step, how-to video in English, Spanish, Burmese, Swahili, Somali, and Arabic and tells parents what to have on hand for the registration process and offers other tips, including how to upload required documents, such as birth certificates and immunization records.

    Please watch the video first. If you still have questions, please use our Let’s Talk platform or text 817-500-0381!

  • Pre-K is vitally important to a child’s development and school readiness. Your child will have early language, literacy, and math experiences to better prepare them for academic rigor in later grades. Attending Pre-K also helps young student to gain a sense of self, exploration, discovery, and confidence. Fort Worth ISD’s program offers a safe environment, high-quality integrated curriculum, highly qualified teachers, and ongoing assessments with progress monitoring.

  • Your child must be 4-years-old on or before September 1, 2022 to enter Pre-K.

  • In the Fort Worth ISD, there is a place for every Pre-K student. If your child does not meet federal qualifying guidelines, he or she is designated as a Universal Pre-K (UPK) student. Individual campuses must serve the needs of qualifying Pre-K students first and then may fill available slots with UPK students.

  • The federal government prioritizes Pre-K students by the following criteria:
         – Unable to speak and comprehend English language
         – Economically or educationally disadvantaged
         – Homeless
         – The dependent of an active duty member of the armed forces of the United States
         – Child has ever been in the conservatorship of the Department of Family and Protective Services

  • Please check with the campus to verify availability or call the Early Learning Department at 817-814-2450. If you need help finding schools near your home, please use our online school locator.

  • Online registration begins April 1, 2022.

  • – Proof of age and identity of student such as a
           — birth certificate
           — statement of the child’s date of birth issued for school admission purposes by the division of the
               Texas Department of State Health Services responsible for vital statistics
           — driver’s license
           — passport
           — school ID card, records, or report card
           — military ID
           — hospital birth record
           — adoption records
           — church baptismal record
           — any other legal document that establishes identity
    – Immunization Record
    – Proof of Address such as a
           — Utility Bill
           — Lease Agreement

  • We will help you find a campus that still has available spots. Please call the Early Learning Department at 817-814-2450.

  • You do not have to live within the FWISD boundary to attend. However, school enrollment may be limited to space availability. 

  • Campuses will begin notifying families of student’s placement if they meet federal guideline no later than May 1, 2022.

  • Priority is given to students who qualify under the federal guidelines AND reside in the neighborhood of the campus (proof of residence required). Additional information about priority may be found in Board Policy.

  • Parents must wait until the campus of their choice has met the needs of the children in their neighborhood first. Then if space is available, the school may take other students. 

  • Contact information for all interested families is kept by campus personnel in case of future openings, but FWISD does not keep official waiting lists.

  • Most FWISD schools do with the exception of Western Hills Elementary, and our school of choice campuses, Alice Carlson Applied Learning Center, Daggett Montessori, and Como Montessori.

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    • Submit your questions through our Let’s Talk platform or text 817-500-0381!

    • Getting your child ready for school. One year at a time. Download the guide.

    Universal Pre-K Boston / Universal Pre-K Boston

    Search Input


    • Universal Pre-K Boston


    • Eligibility & Registration


    • About Boston UPK


    • UPK Community Providers


      • ABCD Head Start – Jamaica Plain


      • ABCD Head Start – Hyde Park


      • ABCD Head Start – Roslindale


      • ABCD Head Start – Walnut Grove


      • Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center


      • Boys & Girls Clubs of Dorchester – Harbor Point


      • Boys & Girls Clubs of Dorchester – McLaughlin


      • Children Services of Roxbury Early Care & Education Center


      • Crispus Attucks


      • East Boston Social Centers


      • Ellis Early Learning


      • Hattie B Cooper


      • Horizons for Homeless Children


      • Inquilinos Boricuas en Accion, Inc. (IBA)


      • John F. Kennedy Family Service Center, Inc.


      • Little Voices Early Education and Care, Inc.


      • Mission Grammar School


      • Nurtury, Inc. – Horadan Way


      • Nurtury, Inc. – Learning Lab


      • Paige Academy


      • Shaloh House Jewish Day School


      • South Boston Neighborhood House


      • Torah Academy


      • VietAID – Au Co Preschool


      • YMCA – East Boston


      • YMCA – Roxbury


      • YMCA – RTH


      • YMCA – Wang


      • YMCA – West Roxbury


    • Resources


    • Contact

    • Welcome! We’re excited you’re considering pre-k for your child. The City of Boston provides high-quality prekindergarten (preschool) for every 4-year-old living in the city at no cost to families. The program recently expanded to serve a limited number of 3-year-olds. Pre-k is a 6.5-hour school day for 180 days per year. 

      The Boston UPK preschool program is one of the strongest in the nation. Research shows children who attend are more prepared for kindergarten in the areas of early math, reading, and social-emotional development.

    • Applications are now being accepted for pre-k at community-based providers for the 2022-23 school year. Apply now here. Families who submit an application will be contacted about placement at a community provider based within 72 business hours (Monday-Friday). 

       

       

      You can download a 2022-23 UPK registration flyer here: 
      English | Español | العربية | Cabo-Verdiano | 中文 | Français | Kreyòl Ayisyen | Português | Soomaali | Tiếng Việt

      Note: If you are seeking to apply for pre-k in a Boston Public Schools setting (not at a community provider), please note that enrollment is through BPS Welcome Services. Information on the timeline and process for enrollment in BPS can be found at www.bostonpublicschools.org/register. 

    • Next steps after applying for pre-k at Boston Universal Pre-K community providers: 

      Upon applying for UPK and ranking up to three preferred community providers, the following process will take place:

      • The applicant should receive a confirmation email at the email address provided during the application account set-up that the application was received.

      • Placements for UPK seats at community providers for the 2022-2023 school year will begin in June 2022.

      • If applying after seat placement has begun in June 2022, the family will hear from their first choice provider within 72 business hours (Monday through Friday) – as long as that provider has not yet filled its available seats.

      • The family may have a call and/or site visit with the community provider.

      • If the family chooses to enroll their child there, they would work with the provider to complete paperwork and submit required documentation. The provider would then enroll the student.

      • If the family chooses not to enroll their student at the first provider or if the first provider has filled its seats, the family can be referred to one of their other preferred community providers by BPS.

      • The student is not enrolled until the family completes the enrollment process with the community provider. Boston Public Schools staff cannot complete the enrollment process; enrollment is between the family and the chosen community provider. Parents and caregivers can reach out at any time to BPS UPK staff if they have questions on the status of their application or if they would like to re-rank their provider choices by emailing [email protected] or calling 617-635-1507.