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Kindergarten

General Information

Many educational psychologists warn that conventional schooling can stifle children’s natural intelligence — imposing discipline, classes, and procedures so rigidly that administrative control overtakes learning.

With that risk firmly in mind, we have designed our kindergarten curriculum around play and active learning. Academic and cognitive skills are woven into daily activity so that learning happens naturally — the way a child explores the world.

Class Environment

The child moves between a small number of dedicated learning halls. Each hall is equipped with educational workshops, teamwork stations, and the tools a teacher and child need to explore the foundations of academic subjects — from Qur’an to Arabic to mathematics.

The halls are equipped with individual work, work in pairs, and work in mini-groups. They contain everything that helps the child and the teacher to acquire knowledge and skills in multiple areas in a differentiated environment. Each corner serves as a learning resource that specializes in developing specific knowledge and set of skills which are as follows:

Cognitive Corner

Where the child learns problem-solving and planning, and works through mental processes such as matching, sequencing, and classification at progressively harder levels.

Art Corner

Where the child learns about line, colour, imagination, and creativity — and discovers how different materials interact with one another.

Social Coexistence Corner

The corner where the child learns social roles, laws in which people live, sentences and socially accepted words that can be used with those around us. It also allows the child to imagine himself in all roles in society.

Discovery Corner

A corner that meets the child’s desire to know the tools, materials, and natural phenomena around him.

Lego Corner

Playing with Lego cubes supports the child’s development across the board. It supports logical thinking through sizes, shapes, and numbers, and contributes to the development of both fine and gross motor skills, language, and social skills.

Library Corner

The Library Corner sparks the desire to read and develops the pre-reading skills children need to become confident readers. They learn that words and images are both means of communication, valuable sources of information — and they practise the art of listening, whether to a teacher or to recorded audio.

There are academic teaching elements, such as mathematics, Arabic language, and English. These elements give the child the opportunity to acquire the basic academic materials, according to the individual learning time of each child, and prepare him for the transition to the first stage of primary education.

All of the previous corners are constantly changing hierarchical elements, meaning that teachers change their content in proportion to the skills acquired during the year, and sequentially which that these activities and curriculum start at a lower level and scale their way up to harder levels, in proportion to the abilities and characteristics of the age of the children.

Acquired Skills

Arabic Language

The interactive reading and writing program, which serves the age group of four to six years, is designed on the basis of the developmental characteristics of the mental, muscular, psychological and social stages and is divided into four consecutive levels . (4 years, 5 years, etc.) in accordance with the school policy in the way of reading and writing in Arabic, and its share of the weekly schedule of the child , And whether it is offered as a primary or second language for the child. The most suitable format for the program is to distribute the first and second stages of the school year, for the second grade kindergarten (4 – 5 years) and the distribution of the skills of the third, and fourth stage of the third grade kindergarten (5 – 6 years). The school can also introduce the four stages of the introductory class in one academic year if it is offered 3 hours per week. It is therefore clear that the school is able to adapt the program according to its educational policy.

A timetable has been set for the expected number of lessons for each stage, through which the school can distribute these lessons to its Arabic language schedule, allowing for the expected time to study the required stages of the program.

The program begins by learning the shapes and sounds of the letters of the alphabet , learning the names of the things around the child, and ending with the child learning to read a simple word of three to four letters, writing them, formulating a correct oral sentence, and expressing what is going on in the world around him orally. The child is also able to read a simple sentence, composed of three simple words and written correctly.

The program includes several branches of the Arabic language: reading, writing (copying and dictation), oral expression and listening. To master the program’s skills, learning activities were divided into lesson time, learning cognitive games in reading and writing, Participation in the collective project, and domestic duty.

English

The child, at this stage, learns reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills.

Reading skill:

The child recognizes the sounds of letters, the formation of syllables, or words by combining sounds. He trains to distinguish passages of words, words that are not the same, and practice reading aloud.

Writing skill:

Children are trained to write letters, and how each of them is written in the beginning, middle, and end of words, and learn the parts of the sentence, spelling, and also practice writing their names.

Speaking, and listening skills:

Children begin to train to tell stories, memorize and recite songs, listen to words, and listen to and participate in dialogues with their peers.

The efforts are focused on each child in his or her pronunciation of the vocals and letters in a clear and understandable way, and also learns the good manners of speaking and listening.

Mathematics

The mathematics curriculum has been carefully selected to suit this age group and is implemented according to approved educational principles in a suitable classroom environment.

The child’s inherent abilities are enhanced, so that he recognizes numbers and learns counting, and primary calculation, and identify the measurements, shapes, and the distinction between them.

The child learns geometry, mathematics in its simple forms, in physical form, and real-life processes.

There are also some exercises that challenge the gifted with special abilities for further understanding and practice in the field of mathematics.

Science

In order to address the children at the youngest age in a comprehensible manner, we have to adopt teaching methods that are to be absorbed by their young minds.

The New Generation Science Standard adopts, along with the ordinary consumable books, interactivity that engages the child and captures his/her attention and curiosity.

Dividing those standards into four major units; A: Science, Engineering & Technology, B: Life Science, C: Earth Science, D: Physical Science, makes it easy for the child to acquire the needed knowledge to ascend to the next level. In other words, the three learning pathways that are involved are: Reading, Digital, and Inquiry.

Assessment and Reports

Types of assessment

  1. Periodic
  2. Quarterly

Performance indicators

  1. Fully Completed.
  2. Mostly Completed.
  3. Partially Completed.
  4. Not Completed.

Academic reports

The child is handed a portfolio of his achievements throughout the year, which is a useful collection of all the children’s work. It presents all his work, his progress, his personal characteristics (traits), his social relations, his attendance and his commitment and behaving in a great manner. The Portfolio is a true and useful documentation of the child’s work.
It also provides an assessment in which the child, the teacher, and the mother are involved once a year.