All activities in the classroom incorporate expressive and receptive language. By the teacher verbalizing what the child is doing and by the child expressing what he/she has drawn, built or experienced, language skills grow. Verbal expression and sharing of ideas is always encouraged. As a child grows in the preschool, the focus of the language activities becomes more defined by pre-reading skills of vocabulary development, phonemic awareness, letter recognition, logo and word recognition. The Letter People Language and Literacy program will be introduced in the second half of the three year olds' school year. Books will be read daily. Older preschool children will be encouraged to make their own books by writing the text and illustrating them.

Mathematical awareness begins with our youngest students and develops throughout the preschool years. Skills like counting, classifying by size, color and attributes are introduced. Other areas of study are geometric shapes, seeing numbers in our daily activities, matching numbers to objects and number recognition. Understanding math concepts like more or less and equal are important math concepts that preschoolers will experiment with in the sand area, manipulative and other areas of the room. We introduce the Growing with Math program in our three-year old classroom.

Children will experience science through rich sensory opportunities that incorporate observation, hypothesizing, problem solving, analysis, discovery, and exploration. Some science-based units of study will include exploration of animals, insects, weather, outer space, the garden, the human body etc.

Through a multisensory approach, children study Jewish holidays and Shabbat. Puppets, song, dance, cooking and art will enrich their lives "Jewishly". Each child will have the experience of seeing and touching the Torah, having Shabbat with Rabbis, baking Challah, hamentashen and matzah. The spiritual life of the synagogue will serve as an integral part of the preschool. Cultivating each child's Jewish identity is a critical part of our program.

Art activities will enhance and encourage creativity, fine motor skills, color, and eye-hand coordination. Different media will be introduced and their use encouraged. Primary colors and secondary colors, cutting, pasting, chalk, basic collages, holiday pictures, mobiles, easel painting, finger painting, play dough, water-colors, colored chalk and tracing are just some of the activities and concepts, children will learn.

Pegs, puzzles, play dough, legos, beads, cutting, writing, drawing, and gluing all help to encourage fine motor development.

To develop balance and coordination, children will work daily on skills like throwing a ball, hopping, skipping, running, marching, and tumbling.

Children will create their own musical expression with bells, sticks and instruments. To develop the rhythm of language and music, songs in English and Hebrew will be studied.

Most critical to a child's emotional and intellectual development, is for a child to learn to act appropriately in a group situation, to interact with peers, to separate comfortably from parents or care giver and to become independent in eating, dressing and pottying. These skills are an essential focus of. Congregation Shearith Israel's preschool.