The Montessori preschool program focuses on five areas of child development: practical life, sensory awareness, language arts, math skills and cultural subjects. Through the course of the day, these areas are addressed. In practical life, children are taught to take care of themselves with basic, daily activities such as going to the bathroom or tying a shoelace.
Sensory awareness focuses on employing all five senses in learning, so the children are shown to stop and access textures, sights and sounds.
Language arts begins the basics for these children with verbalization and even learning to write the alphabet.
Teachers use simple math skills with hands-on models. Other subjects, such as other cultures, animals, music, telling time, some history, science and art are covered in the cultural subjects portion of the teaching.
In the High/Scope approach, the curriculum is divided into 10 categories: creative representation, language and literacy, social relations, movement, music, classification, seriation, numbers, space and time. Children learn to role-play and imitate in creative representation. In language and literacy, children are exposed to stories and are active in telling and scribbling them. Social relations help the children learn problem-solving and relationship-building skills. Movement is a physical regime of bending, dancing and running, developing coordination. Music training includes singing and playing instruments. In studying classifications, children learn to sort and match elements along with describing shapes. Seriation helps children learn to organize things by order. Children are taught counting skills in the numbers area. And in space, they learn concepts relating to filling and emptying space. The time area covers topics such as telling time, along with the starting, stopping and sequencing of things.
The Bank Street program is less structured than the Montessori or Waldorf programs. Its strategy focuses on child-centered education, believing that children are active learners, experimenters, artists and explorers. The goal is for children to develop physically, emotionally, cognitively and socially. In this program, preschool children play with toys that typically stimulate the imagination, such as blocks, clay, puzzles, art supplies, water, etc. Children are allowed to play alone or in groups, effectively taking control of their own development. Teaching tends to be free-form, without a strict classroom schedule.