The Orchard Academy at Mountain Top School is proud to use Teaching Strategies for Early Childhood's The Creative Curriculum for Preschool and Kindergarten as a base for academic success.  The Creative Curriculum is an award-winning curriculum that works hand-in-hand with our Arts program to build a truly holistic approach to child-centric education.  Using exploration and discovery as a way of learning, The Creative Curriculum enables children to develop confidence, creativity, and lifelong critical thinking skills.

The Creative Curriculum for Preschool:

• Is based on 38 objectives for development and learning, which are fully aligned with the Head Start Child Development and Early Learning Framework as well as early learning standards for New Jersey.  Click here or below to read more about the alignment of our curriculum with NJ standards.
• Presents knowledge-building volumes and daily practice resources in tandem, allowing to explore the “what,” “why” and “how” of early childhood education.
• Offers daily opportunities to individualize instruction, allowing our educators to meet the needs of every type of learner.
• Addresses all the important areas of learning, from social-emotional and math to technology and the arts, and incorporates them throughout every part of every day.
• Offers daily, built-in opportunities for observation, helping our educators clearly see the strong relationship between curriculum and assessment. Read more about our assessments, called LADRs, below or by clicking here.

One of the areas that sets The Creative Curriculum and TOA@MTS apart from other schools is the focus on longer-term investigations versus shorter-term themes.  Instead of a traditional preschool week-long focuses, our Investigation Areas (or Studies) span four to six weeks and allow for children to truly explore a topic inside and out.  Studies are tangible, avoiding the abstract, and present students with a hands-on approach to learning while engaging all five senses.

Literacy and Mathematics take center-stage as lynchpins for preparing our students for future academic success.  Educators in all classes embrace early literacy learning, being sure to integrate literacy skills intentionally and incorporate language and literacy learning into everyday classroom experiences.  Similarly, our educators constantly explore math components and employ practical strategies for promoting mathematics learning throughout the day.

With over 50 years of child care experience, we know that no two students learn in the same ways or process information using the same set of strategies.  The Orchard Academy takes great pride in our ability to differentiate learning for each individual student, developing educational goals, objectives and outcomes to suit that specific learner’s needs.  Our curriculum presents educators and parents with 38 objectives for development and learning, each of which are used in formal and informal assessments that allow teachers to adapt lessons to where students are, not where they “should” be.

Our curriculum is not only research-based, it’s research-proven—validated and shown to be effective by extensive research conducted by independent researchers. From multi-year efficacy studies to peer-reviewed journal articles and research foundation papers, this vast body of research helps prove that you can trust our curriculum to help you deliver positive outcomes for your child.  To read more about the research, including studies and published papers, click here.

“If you can both listen to children and accept their answers not as things to just be judged right or wrong but as pieces of information which may reveal what the child is thinking, you will have taken a giant step toward becoming a master teacher, rather than merely a disseminator of information.” - EASLEY AND ZWOYER

TOA@MTS’s goal is not to simply create a “report card” that goes out a few times each year with random information. In fact, the idea of a document with grades for preschool aged children runs counter to so many of the best practices in early childhood education. Instead, we wanted to create something that is emblematic of who we are and what we do, providing families with something tangible that speaks to and provides feedback on the real goals we use day in and day out.

The Creative Curriculum, our educational foundation, is based on a number of research-based objectives for development and learning, each of which ties into every piece of what we do in our classrooms, Arts areas, hallways, lunch room, playgrounds and throughout our days. As we’ve said time and time again, for us, every minute of the day is a teachable moment and our children deserve something that is representative of that engagement.

Our Learning, Advancement & Development Report or LADR (pronounced LADDER, like the thing you climb) is simply a snapshot that we take twice a year to see all the different areas of a child’s growth. It’s based on the same exact document that our teachers use weekly to lesson plan and assesses the age-appropriate developmental benchmark of our learners.

Descriptions under each category are robust, showing you not only the overarching category but also the specific developmental standard for that age, like the sample below:

Remember, LADRs are NOT report cards or progress reports. Instead, the LADR serves as a measurement of how your child is progressing, learning certain skills or reaching developmental benchmarks. We encourage our parents to read and review them to see what amazing progress your children are making.

We look forward to our LADRs serving as another example of our commitment to education and the seriousness to which we approach our children’s early childhood experience!