Harold Lewis Center
Curriculum
The Harold Lewis Center uses a curriculum that is aligned with Ohio’s Learning and Development Standards developed by the Ohio Department of Education.
What are Pre-K Academic Content Standards?
Ohio's Early Learning and Development Standards describe key concepts and skills that young children develop during the birth-to-five-year period. Their purpose is to support the development and well-being of young children and to foster their learning. The standards promote the understanding of early learning and development, provide a comprehensive and coherent set of expectations for children’s development and learning, and guide the design and implementation of curriculum, assessment and instructional practices with young children.
What are the domains of the new standards?
List of 5 items.
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Social and Emotional Development
These standards include a focus on children’s developing abilities to regulate attention, emotions, and behavior, and to establish positive relationships with familiar adults and with peers. -
Physical Well-Being and Motor Development
These skills include the ability to use large and small muscles to produce movements, to touch, grasp and manipulate objects, and to engage in physical activity. These 3 standards also describe the development of health practices that become part of children’s daily routines and healthy habits such as nutrition and self-help. -
Approaches Toward Learning
These skills include children’s initiative and curiosity, and their motivation to participate in new and varied experiences and challenges. These behaviors are fundamental to children’s ability to take advantage of learning opportunities, and to set, plan, and achieve goals for themselves. This domain also includes children’s level of attention, engagement, and persistence as they do a variety of tasks. -
Language and Literacy
The standards for language and literacy reflect knowledge and skills fundamental to children’s learning of language, reading and writing. Early literacy skills include children’s developing concepts of print, comprehension of age-appropriate text, phonological awareness, and letter recognition. -
Cognition and General Knowledge
This domain includes those cognitive processes that enable all other learning to take place, as well as children’s knowledge of the social and physical world. It includes math, science and social studies.- Mathematics - This includes skills like the children’s developing understanding of number and quantity, number relationships, and basic algebraic concepts. It also addresses children’s developing knowledge of key attributes of objects, including size and shape, and the way objects fit, are positioned, and move in space.
- Social Studies - This includes basic skills and competencies that set the foundation for learning about concepts of social science. Through everyday interactions with others, they learn how to function socially in a group, and how social rules help people in promoting safety and fairness.
- Science - This focuses on children’s curiosity to explore and learn about their environment. It includes behaviors of exploration and discovery, and fundamental conceptual development such as problem solving and cause and effect. These early behaviors develop into increasingly systematic inquiry skills, and the ability to observe, investigate and communicate about the natural environment, living things, and objects and materials.
What does this mean for my child? What does this mean for the Harold Lewis Center?
As a parent of a preschooler, it may seem a little overwhelming that the state of Ohio has developed academic standards for your little one. The best way to look at them is as a guide to help teachers plan for each day. Teachers and others can use the standards as starting points for observing and understanding young children’s learning and development. With each learning encounter teachers observe, they can refer to the standards and ask what knowledge and skills are the children gaining in the areas of language and literacy, cognition and general knowledge, social and emotional development, physical well-being and motor development, and approaches toward learning. Teachers can use their observations of integrated learning to plan new learning encounters for young children and support the building of knowledge in all essential domains of school readiness.
