Welcome to Pre-Kindergarten at Visitation Academy

It is my privilege and sincere pleasure to have the opportunity to watch your daughter grow and change from day to day in our pre-kindergarten class. I am looking forward to witnessing all the exciting experiences and achievements your daughter will make over the next few months.
Our pre-k program is dedicated to educating the whole child. This approach to learning is designed to enhance the social/emotional, intellectual, aesthetic and physical development of your daughter while nurturing autonomy, self-esteem and success. This will ensure that each child become a self-motivated, life-long learner. Literacy is valued and serves as a springboard from which cognitive, language and expressive skills develop. We are committed to helping each child gain literacy skills by weaving literacy throughout our classroom environment and providing appropriately planned play experiences. Play is necessary for young children to grow physically and mentally. Play-based experiences promote and target important areas of literacy development. This blended approach to literacy and play combines educational goals and early learning standards while allowing children to pretend, make choices and express their creativity.


The physical space of our classroom environment is organized into Literacy Centers. These centers include- Library, Alphabet, Writing, Dramatic Play, Art, Math/Science, Blocks and Puzzles. Each literacy center provides children with activities that nurture oral language development, social interaction and artistic expression. A rotation system is set up to allow each child to move through a number of centers in a systematic way. Children will generally go to two or three centers per day, staying at each for a fixed period of time (15 minutes per center) and moving as a group.
In our pre-k program, we recognize the importance of transition and continuity. The transition into our kindergarten program is a seamless process. The children have a sense of wonder and excitement as they continue on their educational journey. The possibilities seem endless for making new discoveries, inventing, creating and learning. Our Pre-k environment invites children to be who they are. This is the world of early childhood education. We create this world inside of our pre-kindergarten classroom at Visitation Academy.
I look forward to a successful year with you and your daughter.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Nancy Maneri