Curriculum

The Creative Curriculum

At Sunnyside, we implement The Creative Curriculum and we intigrate the zoo phonics curriculum in all of our classrooms, Infants through Preschool. The Creative Curriculum is a teaching philosophy based on five fundamental principles that assist Teachers in planning developmentally appropriate lessons and presenting activities in a cohesive manner which supports emotionally sound relationships with each child.

The Principals:

Positive interactions and relationships with adults provide a critical foundation for successful learning.
Social–emotional competence is a significant factor in school success.
Constructive, purposeful play supports essential learning.
The physical environment affects the type and quality of learning interactions.
Teacher–family partnerships promote development and learning.

Zoo-Phonics

The Zoo-phonics Multisensory Language Arts Program is a kinesthetic, multi-modal approach to learning all aspects of language arts, including vocabulary development and articulation, based on phonics and phonemic awareness.

Zoo-phonics is a method developed to make children strong readers and spellers using a “phono” (hearing), “oral” (speaking), “visual” (seeing), “kinesthetic” (moving), and tactile (touching)—whole brain approach.

Zoo-phonics also provides a springboard for all other academia such as math, art, music,
cooking/nutrition, social studies, science, grooming, physical education and sensory/drama. Zoo-phonics is used throughout the United States and internationally as a highly effective and proven methodology!

The Animal Alphabet helps children remember the shapes and sounds of the letters.
Letter sounds are taught before letter names.
Lowercase letters are taught before capital letters.
The Body Movement for each Animal Letter helps “cement” the phonemic information into
memory.
The alphabet is taught sequentially, and as a whole entity, “a – z.” The alphabet is not fragmented.
Short vowels are taught before long vowels.
Phonemic patterns (at, bat, fat, sat, etc.) are taught first, rather than random word lists (of, it, then, was, etc.)

We use Zoo-phonics with a strong literature-based curriculum that also integrates science, math and social studies.

Each classroom at Sunnyside follows an age-appropriate daily plan that incorporates a variety of components, including large groups, small groups or individual activities. We design the day to be a balance between structured activities and free choice.