Curriculum

At Croydon Village School, our Program for Early Learners nurtures a sense of wonder and engagement in young students. Through activities, supportive environments, and positive interactions, we support each child’s physical, social/emotional, and academic growth while honoring their unique interests and encouraging risk-taking.

Preschool

Guided by the New Hampshire Early Learning Guidelines, our preschool curriculum focuses on hands-on exploration and child-directed activities. These are enhanced through communication with an adult or other children focusing on teachable moments. Children build foundational skills in a fun, engaging setting where adults bring humor and love to support their learning.

Children develop language and communication skills by using gestures, sounds, words, and sentences to share experiences. They play with spoken language through rhymes, letter sounds, and words. They enjoy books and stories while learning that print carries meaning. They respond to directions, engage in conversations, retell familiar tales, and create new ones. They also begin to recognize and form meaningful letters and words to express ideas.

Through focused inquiry and play, children explore mathematical concepts by comparing and contrasting objects, people, and ideas. They investigate cause and effect, collect and organize materials, and group or order items by features such as shape, size, texture, and color. They use numbers and counting to solve simple problems and express quantities. They also make predictions based on observations and experiences.

Kindergarten

Children build strong reading, comprehension, and writing skills through purposeful engagement with texts and stories. They will:

• Understand text organization by reading left to right and top to bottom, retell events in sequence, and compare characters.
• Distinguish fiction from nonfiction, identify scientific captions, and recognize poetry.
• Read high-frequency words from Fry lists (aiming for 20 by year’s end) and apply phonograms to decode new words.
• Recognize all upper- and lowercase letters in random order and match all 44 letter sounds.
• Engage purposefully with grade-level texts and demonstrate understanding of story structure.
• Achieve proficient DRA reading levels with at least 90% accuracy.
• Use drawings, dictation, and phonetic spelling to compose opinion pieces and convey information about topics.

Children develop number sense, problem-solving strategies, and spatial reasoning through hands-on exploration and real-world applications. They will:

• Count to 120, compare groups (greater than, less than, or equal to), add and subtract within 10, and progress to problem-solving utilizing addition and subtraction.
• Understand that numbers 11–19 are composed of a ten and some ones, using manipulatives, drawings, or sounds to represent solutions.
• Apply additive reasoning with multiple strategies, including manipulatives and models, to solve authentic problems.
• Use measurement tools to describe and compare objects by length or weight.
• Recognize attributes of 2D and 3D shapes, describe positions using terms like above, below, or beside, and compose simple shapes into larger ones.
• Gather, represent, and interpret data by classifying, counting, and sorting objects.