In this Half Day class, students attend school for a 3-hour day on either two, three or five days per week, and they are required to be potty trained. These three- and young four-year-olds are having a huge developmental year! For some, this will be the second year of preschool, and the program here will begin to focus on building a strong foundation for academic success. With three teachers and twenty students in the classroom, they enjoy a low ratio under 7:1 to provide the supervision and assistance that help these preschoolers thrive. At this stage, social and emotional skills are emerging as the children become less egocentric and more aware of the world around them; they will begin to problem-solve, seek friendships and group play with their peers, and cultivate empathy toward others. Language skills are blossoming: vocabulary increases dramatically, expressive ability reaches new heights, and students can more easily follow a series of directions as auditory processing skills surface. The groundwork for literacy is laid as they learn to recognize and write letters of the alphabet and spend time becoming familiar with books and stories. Cognitively, children at this age are becoming capable of logic and reasoning, so teachers will introduce concepts of patterning, sorting, sequencing, identifying similarities and differences, in addition to counting and writing numbers. Motor skills are also being strengthened while they practice writing with different mediums, cutting with scissors, and manipulate puzzles, pegs, play dough and tweezers. They will learn about the Letter of the Week, including the proper formation for writing each letter and soon transition to writing their names. The friendships they make here are often ones that will follow them far beyond the preschool years!