Swan Academy aims to ensure smooth transition from childcare setting to school environment for all children. We aim to not only preparing children with their transitions to formal schooling but also preparing children for their future life. And we begin the process not only with the older groups but across all groups starting from our babies group. We also aim to provide families with guidance to ensure the transition to school a positive experience for all children.
A range of strategies that we incorporate into our curriculum as part of our school readiness program:
- Provide responsive and flexible curriculum that encourages thinking, investigating, exploring and problem solving in a social environment.
- Provide curriculum that focuses on developing skills and dispositions such as perseverance, independence, conflict resolution, empathy, turn taking, curiosity, problem solving, creativity and self-expression.
- Provide opportunities for children to participate in play as well as group experiences.
- Provide opportunities for children to express their needs, emotions and ideas.
- Give children a positive understanding and experience of school as a safe and enjoyable place.
- Arrange a visit to the local School.
- Read stories or watch short films about School.
- Include school props, such as uniforms, bags, lunch boxes and chalk boards in the
- dramatic play areas.
- Learning how to hold pencils correctly.
- Learning how to hold and handle scissors correctly.
- Learning how to use glue unassisted.
- Support Children to develop their self-help skills, e.g. children put shoes by themselves. Incorporate school based activities as part of the early childhood program. For example: practice using lunch boxes and drink bottle.
- Provide lots of reading and writing materials as part of the daily play based program, e.g. letter tracing worksheets, number tracing worksheets and shape tracing worksheets.
- Learning how to spell and write their own names.
- Basic mathematics, e.g. counting, mathematical language and symbols.
- Recognizing and correctly pronouncing letters of the alphabet, days of the week, months of the year, numbers and shapes.
- Learning the date each day, e.g. Today is Thursday, the 12th of May in the year 2016.