Great Beginnings
Great Beginnings is a ministry of First United Methodist Church and is licensed by the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services. Currently, we are licensed for 93 students. We provide year round child care and and preschool for children aged 6 weeks to 5 years old and after-school care and summer full time care for children 5-11 years old. Class size is small to insure optimum learning. Great Beginnings is a Christian center-based program that allows learning to take place through play. Children learn best through exploration and a hands-on curriculum, therefore we strive to teach in a manner that allows each child to discover his/her individual strengths through activities that include the arts, crafts, manipulates, math and science, a writing center, sand and water play, music and daily story-times. For children ages 3 to 5, we complement this center-base program with the A Beka Program. At Great Beginnings you will observe children engage in a stimulating environment that involves more than color-sheets, work-sheets, and rote memorization of numbers and letters. Children will be active participants and carefully planned, developmentally appropriate activities during both center and small group times. The classroom in a center-based program is set-up so children are able to explore curriculum that may be both interesting and challenging to them. Bellow is a list of centers that may be found in a center-based program as well as an explanation on what skill the child is developing in that particular center.
Reading, Readiness, and Literacy: Skills include visual discrimination. Listening to stories and poems, dictating original stories, seeing classroom charts and other words help children connect verbal and written words.
Fine Motor: Activities include puzzles, peg boards, stringing beads and cutting with scissors. These activities allow these smaller muscles in the fingers to develop, which will prepare a child for writing.
Gross Motor: Activities such as running, hopping, pedaling, skipping, crawling and hopscotch help develop the large muscles.
Creative Arts: Activities include a variety of art mediums including paint, chalk and watercolor. These are opened ended projects; not a teacher-directed activity. This will allow a child to experiment and explore without having to make a "project".
Dramatic Play: Spontaneous acting out of nursery rhymes, songs, emotions, finger play etc. The home center may change from a home to a vets clinic with just a few changes and props. this center is excellent for developing verbal expressions, to learn to play socially with there peers as well as encouraging a little one's imagination.
Science and Math: Explored daily through the discussion of bugs, the weather, how colors mix, counting objects, measuring sand, and other activities that will allow for exploration and classification. We discuss the numbers and their operations, geometry, measurements, classification, and data collection. Our block center is a great area to discuss balance, weight, and fractions.
Music: Activities include finger-plays, sing-a-longs, rhythm instruments, and listening to Cd's and dancing. Through music and dance, children learn rhythm, rhyming, body-awareness, and body control and movement. Music is also an excellent area to develop skills in speech production and discrimination.
