Graydon Hall Nursery School’s high quality Preschool Programs emphasize the importance of cognitive, social, emotional and physical development.

Preschool children are provided with an environment designed to allow them to learn, explore, communicate and understand new concepts. The children learn to negotiate with their peers, begin to play cooperatively and expand their knowledge base through a program that offers play-based and guided learning. 

Play-based learning offers the children the opportunity to build on their individual problem solving, social, critical and creative thinking skills through imaginative dramatic, art, construction, manipulative and fine motor activities. 

Teacher guided programming happens within the play-based environment as our faculty build on each child’s learning by arranging the play environment with specific activities that promote language, math, fine motor, science and self-help skill development. Our teacher to child ratio is 1:8, which allows the children freedom to explore and expand their skill set while our dedicated faculty facilitate learning opportunities.

Weekly observations are completed to document each child’s developmental progress and allow our faculty to plan individual activities to encourage each child’s further growth to meet emerging milestones.

Each site has an outdoor play space which provides the opportunity for teachers and children to extend social and physical development. Learning opportunities such as socialization, science and nature, math and imaginative play are incorporated into outdoor programming.

Language Arts

• Exploring the imagination through a variety of:
  • Favourite stories
  • Finger plays
  • Puppets
  • Felt board stories
  • Theater arts
• Learning the alphabet
  • Experience relationships between letters and words
  • Jolly phonics will be introduced to assist in establishing recognition of sounds and actions associated with each letter
  • Progressively learn to organize and express ideas orally
  • Learn how to understand and organize written materials

Art and Social Skills

A variety of special group projects with their peers will help enhance social skills.

• Cooking and simple experiments
• Exploring their own style of artistic expression through a variety of different media:
  • Paint
  • Glue
  • Crayons
  • Coloured pencils
  • Experiment with mixing colours…just to see what happens

Enjoy seeing your child’s masterpieces created through free expression!

Fine Motor Skills

Your preschooler will develop their fine motor coordination through everyday, real life activities:

• Drawing, stencilling, and tracing
• Using scissors and tongs
• Forming directional lines in preparation for printing and colouring within boundaries

Physical Education

Mind and body balance through daily physical activities.

• Enhance coordination
• An opportunity to work as a team
• Stimulate creativity through dance and creative movement
• Develop sportsmanship and teamwork
• Learn to listen and follow directions regarding rules

The goal is to instill a strong foundation that will be carried with them for future years.

Self-Help Skills

Learn early self-help skills, such as:

• Zipping and buttoning
• Putting on their own shoes and clothing
• The beginnings of tying shoelaces
• Helping with real-life scenarios such as setting the table

Mathematics

Starting with basic math, your child will progressively:

• Learn number recognition and counting
• Explore new ways of learning math concepts, combined with visual aids such as:
  • Flashcards
  • Tracing
  • Games
  • Exploring size, height, and weight
• Learn how geometric shapes are used within our daily environment
• Count forward, backwards and in patterns
• Be introduced to the concept of currency
• Explore the concept of time

Every child learns at a different pace.

Children will learn from our experienced staff as well as by helping each other.

Science and Nature

Explore the world through discovery and understanding of the uniqueness of each new season.