Preschool Language Arts Curriculum
9781592692965
The Preschool Language Arts Curriculum Package includes:
- Teacher's Manual
- Language and Learning Workbook
- Pre-writing Book
- Story Book Set
- Resource Pack
The Preschool Language Arts Teacher’s Manual gives short, but detailed instructions for each learning task. A lesson may include several tasks chosen by the teacher from the manual. The Teacher’s Manual features color-coded corners and a coordinated color-coded table of contents to easily create a mix of different tasks during a lesson.
You may use the teacher’s manual sequentially like our grade level curriculum, or pick and choose a variety of activities from throughout the curriculum. The Lesson Planning forms allow you to customize your program.
The Preschool Language Arts curriculum focuses on four general areas of development leading to a successful transition to Kindergarten.
Foundational Concept Tasks develop basic “page awareness” and abstract thinking, a transition from concrete concepts used for informal learning to those used in formal instruction.
Phonemic Awareness Tasks are intended to increase the child’s awareness that spoken words are comprised of sounds and that these sounds are used to form a wide variety of words apart from meaning.
Alphabet Tasks introduce letter recognition of upper and lower case letters to lay a foundation for formal phonics training in Kindergarten. Writing of letters also helps develop fine motor skills. Although the focus is on letter recognition, some activities do include sound (phonics) recognition that is intended more to introduce the sounds, not necessarily master the sounds. Mastery of sounds will be the focus of the Kindergarten curriculum.
Literature Concepts introduce a wide variety of very important pre-reading tasks through teacher read stories. Students learn story structure, phonemic awareness in the context of stories, traditional rhymes, classic stories, and McRuffy originals. The Teacher’s Manual guides the parents and teachers to use the stories to develop comprehension skills, story structure awareness, poetry, and higher level thinking skills. You’ll learn patterns of teaching that can easily be applied to other books you read to your children.
The Preschool Language & Letters Workbook contains a variety of exercises to develop visual discrimination, print awareness, find opposites, classify objects, and introduce the alphabet. The workbook contains 106 activities pages that can be used a variety of ways as instructed in the Teacher’s Manual. The Flip & Draw design allows the book to be used again and again.
The Preschool Pre-Writing Book emphasizes basic strokes in handwriting such as straight lines, circles, and slants. It also includes a letter writing section for upper and lower case letters. The goals of preschool handwriting are to teach the fundamental strokes in letter formation and to involve children kinesthetically in letter recognition. The clear flip sheet allows the pages to be reused without reproduction.
The Preschool Reading Book Set includes 12 books. With teachers reading the books to students, various literature and phonemic awareness activities are made possible. Over 50 learning tasks are associated with the reading material, many completed over multiple days to give ample material to develop preschool language and literature skills. A special emphasis is placed on rhyming and other phonemic elements over the first five books.
The collection also includes two classic stories and a Mother Goose nursery rhyme collection. Three Ruff and Violet pictures books are included - the first McRuffy Press books ever created are back in print!
Book titles and descriptions:
- Ruff's Alphabet Book: Rhyming pairs of letter sayings and an alphabet poem
- Spaghetti Dreams and a Duck on the Rocks: A collection of nine original poems
- Crazy Cat: A picture book of consonance to raise phonemic awareness
- A, E, I, O, U: A picture book of assonance emphasizing vowel sound phonemic awareness
- McRuffy's Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes: A collection of classic nursery rhymes
- Ruff Plays the Piano: A full length picture book to help develop an understanding of story characteristics, the first of three Ruff picture books.
- Ruff's Surprise: Build's upon the previous book to draw on previous knowledge from a reading experience.
- Ruff and the Lion: The final Ruff picture book.
- Fuzzy Turtle: The first of four story books that have more text to tell the story building listening skills
- Bog the Dog: The second story book features an antagonist as the main character.
- Goldilocks and the Three Bears: A retelling of the classic story.
- The Three Little Pigs: The McRuffy Press version is edited to make the story more relevant for young children, but preserves most of the story elements.
The Preschool Language Arts Resource Pack includes a variety of materials. Seven different game boards are included to teach and review letter recognition, similarities and differences, opposites, rhymes, and even literature trivia. Copy masters include lesson planning sheets, coloring sheets, and various copy masters for some of the cardstock items. Cardstock items include sheets of puppet cut-outs for storytelling, sequence cards for story sequence review, and response cards. Included with the Resource Pack are over 380 pre-cut cards featuring 5 of each letter of the alphabet, plus alphabet picture cards, and cards for other activities and games.
