curriculum
Nursery and Infant Classrooms (6 weeks to 12 months of age)
Infants, up to one year, are provided activities that are appropriate for their development. The curriculum for this age is children’s literature based. Activities are developed in coordination with a preselected book appropriate for infants. Each day a pre-planned activity is introduced to your child.
Read It Once Again
All classrooms beyond our infants will engage in the Read It Once Again curriculum. Read It Once Again is a comprehensive early childhood educational program that uses familiar children’s literature to provide a solid foundation of the basic skills necessary for children to be successful in kindergarten. It includes activities that provide explicit instruction on the most basic foundational skills in the common domains of speech/language, cognitive, gross motor, fine motor, daily living, and socialization skills.
Toddler Classrooms (12 months to 2 years of age)
Our Toddler Classrooms focus on this first level of learning through morning, language, and music groups, sensory and art activities, and free play.
Preschool (2 years of age to kindergarten)
Our curriculum also concentrates on a higher level of foundational skills through activities for phonemic awareness, math, science, creative writing, and social studies. Our preschool classrooms include this second level of learning through center times.
Our curriculum includes detailed lesson plans, which can be found on our child’s classroom’s parent board. Lesson plans are designed on a three-phase system:
1. Prepare activities to introduce a skill or concept.
2. Skills and concepts are introduced as a group.
3. Individual activities are available during center time to practice skills and concepts on their own or with classmates.
To learn more about our curriculum, please feel free to communicate with any of our directors at all of our locations or visit the Read It Once Again website here!
Our Junior and Senior classrooms also participate in a Heggerty group time where children participate in fun, oral and auditory language play activities to practice phonological awareness, or the understanding that spoken language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated. The ultimate goal is to come to phonemic awareness, which is the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds called phonemes. According to research, becoming phonologically aware prepares children for later reading instruction and is critical for learning to read any alphabetic writing system.
Please visit https://heggerty.org/ to learn more!
GRADUATE PROGRAM (kindergarten up to 10 years of age)
We offer an incredible before and after school program for school age children, or “Graduates,” at our Ankeny and Bondurant locations for respective school districts. Please see a member of management for participating schools.
We provide exciting learning opportunities in a fun and safe environment designed specifically for them. Different areas include a writing center, arts and crafts center, game area, and cooking lab, to name a few. In the summer, Graduates patriciate in various activities based on weekly themes and attend approximately three field trips per week.
