• Provide a safe, healthy and secure environment away from home.
• Provide a welcoming atmosphere of joy and warmth for the child.
• Nurture and become a significant, consistent adult in the child’s life.
• Create an environment that encourages discovery and exploration.
• Provide experiences that will increase child’s positive self-image, sense of competence and pride in accomplishments.
• Provide experiences to develop qualities of responsibility, initiative, and independence and help children learn to face and overcome problems.

 Cognitive Growth

• Provide activities to develop pre-reading skills
     a. alphabet recognition
     b. visual discrimination
     c. matching shapes, letters, words
     d. recognizing words and listing words on experience charts
     e. writing class stories
• Provide activities to develop pre-writing skills

           a. tactile writing experiences with a variety of writing materials
           b. tracing activities
           c. assembling individual books of beginning story-writing

• Provide activities to develop beginning math skills

           a. matching, sorting, counting concrete objects
           b. grouping objects into sets
           c. number recognition and sequencing of numbers

           d. graphing and number comparisons

           a. simple experiments
           b. cooking activities
           c. collecting and grouping objects from nature
           d. observation and memory skills

• Provide experiences in social studies

           a. simple map skill activities
           b. historical events in the calendar year

• Facilitate creative and make-believe play

           -with objects
           -about situations
           -assuming pretend roles
           -interacting with other children
           -with puppets and acting out stories

• Provide opportunities to practice and develop reasoning and problem-solving skills
• Provide opportunities to express self through art, music, drama, and creative movement.
• Provide opportunities to begin learning Spanish.

  Social Growth

• Encourage social interaction among all class members.
• Encourage sharing and turn taking.
• Encourage fairness in large and small group game play.
• Encourage verbal expression of emotions and feelings.
• Encourage talking through problems and rationalization.
• Encourage independence, self-control, and self-help skills.
• Encourage resolution of conflicts constructively.
• Encourage conforming to rules and following directions.
• Encourage working cooperatively with others.
• Encourage a sense of initiative.
• Encourage responsibility to maintain classroom environment.
• Encourage respect for authority, property, and the rights of others.

  Physical Growth

• Provide opportunity for large muscle development.
• Provide opportunity for small muscle development.
• Demonstrate and encourage good habits of health and safety.

Spiritual Growth 

• Encourage and model showing love for each other.
• Demonstrate and encourage consciousness of God.
• Guide in development of ecological values and concern for God’s world.
• Help children recognize differences and likenesses in people and to show acceptance.
• Provide learning experiences about Christmas and Easter.
• Introduce rituals of thankfulness and concern.