Hanover Preschool’s comprehensive early childhood education program has been specifically designed to prepare children for success in school by enhancing preschool children’s intellectual, social, emotional, and physical development. Young children learn through purposeful and engaging interaction with materials and their environment. Hanover Preschool children use a variety of materials, equipment, and technology throughout each day to expand their knowledge and skills in both indoor and outdoor classrooms. Research-based best practices develop healthy problem-solving, social-emotional, and school readiness skills. Hanover Preschool promotes the growth and development of preschool children and strengthens family members for their roles as parents.
A Safe and Nuturing Environment at Hanover
Each Hanover Preschool classroom is staffed with a full-time teacher and instructional assistant, responsible for providing every child with a safe and nurturing atmosphere in which to develop at his/her own pace. Building positive, responsive relationships with each child is a cornerstone of our program.
Learning and Fun Go Hand in Hand
Hanover Preschool classrooms are lively, engaging places where children experience the joy of learning. We invite and encourage parent volunteers and welcome you to visit and become actively involved in your child’s classroom. We use the Frog Street Pre-K Curriculum in our classrooms, where we focus on the child's active participation in their learning. Each child “learns by doing.” Staff guide the children in their care to engage in activities around themes and developmental areas that build connections between intellectual, physical, and social-emotional skills. The curriculum supports a literacy-rich environment through reading to children several times each day, exposing them to quality children’s books, learning alphabet letters and becoming aware of letter sounds, drawing and writing, encouraging conversation, and building positive relationships and interactions. To extend learning beyond the classroom, we encourage family involvement by providing family connections resources both in print and online.
Social and Emotional Education
Each classroom also uses the Second Step Early Learning and Child Protection Units, which emphasize learning empathy, emotion management, problem-solving, friendship, and safety skills, and transitioning to kindergarten. Second Step helps children achieve positive social and emotional development as well as the skills they will need as they transition to kindergarten.
To meet specific goals and provide learning experiences that extend the classroom curriculum, we plan educational field trips for the children. Hanover County Public School buses are used for field trips. We encourage parents to participate in field trips as chaperones for the entire class.
Daily Classroom Routine
Classes follow a daily routine, which is designed to meet three major goals:
- To provide opportunities for children to make decisions in their learning
- To provide many types of interactions with people and the environment (opportunities to work in small and large groups, opportunities to work with different types of materials and different concepts)
- To provide time to learn many skills in a variety of safe and stimulating environments.