large view Creating Green Shaving Cream! large view Starry, Starry Night large view The Christmas Star shines over Mary and Baby Jesus large view Building Monet's Waterloo Bridge large view Painting at the easel.

The pre-kindergarten program at St. Agnes has helped prepare young children for the challenges of kindergarten since 1989. The classroom experience offers developmentally appropriate activities that allow children to grow socially, physically and intellectually. This is accomplished through many satisfying sensory and sensory-motor experiences.

Our program includes:
creative and fine arts experiences
language and literacy activities
development of personal and social skills
mathematics and scientific thinking activities 
library time
music, songs and finger plays
field trips
activities in phonemic awareness
organized indoor and outdoor group play activities
outdoor free play opportunities

Learning about God’s world and how to get along in it is one of the most important parts of our program. Teaching children that God made them and all things in the world, that God loves them each as an individual and that we are all a part of God’s family is routinely focused on in our classroom.

The staff and children work together to create an atmosphere of loving concern that helps each child grow gradually in independence and cooperation. The experience helps increase the children’s sense of responsibility in a school setting.

"Play is a central component in children's mental growth. Play helps children make meaning in their world, it helps them learn about themselves, and equally crucially, it helps them to learn how to get along with others" (Einstein Never Used Flash Cards, p. 240)

Imaginative play is a precious commodity that is often devalued or encroached upon when adults get anxious about "academic achievement" in today's competitive society. In fact, this kind of play in childhood forms the foundation upon which learning is based. As children play out their ideas, they practice taking on the role of others and experience the world from another's point of view. This type of thinking and reasoning underlies reading comprehension, and indeed all abstract reasoning.

When children are engaged in imaginative play, they are totally engaged physically, mentally, and emotionally. They are using language, making and sustaining social connections, and trying out their own ideas and elaborating on them. When you ask your children what they did at school and they say "I played," you should be delighted.

Our program follows numerous guidelines of NAEYC, National Association of the Education of Young Children, and  our Rochester Diocese in regards to a developmentally appropriate approach to teaching the needs of the whole child.  The young child PLAYS TO LEARN.  To play, to create, to express--these are the primary tasks of every student in our Early Childhood Program.