Three-Year-Olds
Early Childhood Education Curriculum
The three-year-old curriculum at Treetop Friends focuses on new, important developmental milestones for young children who are continuing to move up through a daycare and preschool facility. Our early childhood education lessons and childcare activities are specifically designed to prepare students inside and outside the classroom.
There are several milestones we’re hoping to see those in our three-year-old program achieve during their time at Treetop Friends. These milestones include social-emotional milestones, physical milestones, language milestones, mathematics milestones, science milestones, social studies milestones, and literacy milestones.
Call us today to learn more about each of these milestones below.
Social-Emotional Milestones
Social-emotional milestones for three-year-olds at Treetop Friends focus on regulating emotions and behaviors, as well as establishing and sustaining positive relationships and participating cooperatively and constructively in group situations.
We specifically help our three-year-olds achieve the following:
- Manage feelings
- Identify emotions
- Understand simple calming techniques
- Follow most expectations
- Take care of own basic needs
- Have fewer tantrums
- Verbalize frustration
- Identify personal characteristics and likes/dislikes
- Focus on a single task at a time, even if the task isn’t finished
- Feel comfortable in a classroom environment
- Seek help from an adult when there is a conflict with another child
Treetop Friends’ curriculum will help these youngsters establish and sustain positive relationships. Milestones we will be looking to see include the forming of relationships with adults and peers, the ability to identify emotional cues in others, signs of worry when adults and peers are upset, and the ability to play with peers.
Participating cooperatively and constructively in group situations are important milestones we’re hoping our three-year-olds can achieve through our social-emotional curriculum. Evidence of this curriculum working includes being able to sit for an activity for 10-15 minutes, learning how to solve social issues, learning to respect boundaries, an ability to pay attention and respond appropriately to others, actively seeking out how to be a helper, and understanding how to take turns.
Physical Milestones
As part of our three-year-old curriculum
We’re hoping to see our youngsters achieve physical milestones, such as:
- Demonstrating healthy choices
- Fine motor skills
- Gross motor skills
If we’re seeing our three-year-olds demonstrating healthy choices, then we’re seeing an understanding of how to wash their hands for an appropriate length of time, an ability to identify what nutritional foods are, an ability to make safe choices with their bodies, an understanding of the importance of being physically active, and an awareness of understanding healthy physical boundaries with others.
Gross motor skills physical milestones we’re looking for from our three-year-olds include coordination of large movements and a demonstration of strength and balance.
The physical milestones we’re hoping to see from three-year-olds in relation to fine motor skills are control of small movements with actions such as lacing, an ability to cut using scissors, coordination of hand and eye movement (such as brushing hair), and an ability to hold a pencil between the thumb and forefingers.
Literacy Milestones
As our kids move from the two-year-old class to the three-year-old class, we will begin to expect to see more milestones from them in terms of reading.
The literacy milestones we will help our three-year-olds achieve at Treetop Friends include letter and word recognition, as well as a demonstration of writing skills.
The letter and word recognition milestones our youngsters will achieve in the three-year-old class include:
- Knowledge of most letter names and sounds
- Understanding that letters and illustrations have meaning
- Ability to tell a familiar story from a book based on pictures
- Recognition of two-word rhyming
- Ability to distinguish between two words beginning with the same sound
- Enjoying being read to and noticing when a favorite part of a story has been left out
- Noticing print and connecting meaning to it
- Ability to interact with a story when it is being read to him/her
- Asking questions about a book
- Ability to describe what is read or seen in a book
The writing skills a three-year-old should be able to demonstrate after being in our curriculum include:
- Tracing letters and numbers on own
- Realization that words are what is read and not the picture
- Using letters and letter-like forms to replace scribbles
- Telling stories associated with marks on paper
- Noticing when an adult doesn’t say something correctly
- Showing written products to others
Language Milestones
For three-year-olds at Treetop Friends, language milestones we are hoping to see enhanced through our curriculum include language development, communication skills, activity engagement, connecting the activity with knowledge, classification skills, and engagement in sociodramatic play.
Language development skills to be learned by three-year-olds at Treetop Friends include listening to and understanding the meaning of language, as well as the ability to follow three-step directions and ask questions.
Communication skills we’re looking to see three-year-olds develop at Treetop Friends include speaking clearly, saying sentences to express thoughts, using social rules during conversations, continuing to build vocabulary and use words correctly, and using simple sentences with one idea.
We’re hoping these three-year-olds will show they have become engaged in activities by participating, sharing ideas, working independently for a short amount of time on small tasks, and engaging in songs and finger plays.
Our three-year-olds will also show the ability to connect each activity with knowledge by placing some learning concepts into action and understanding some learning concepts by demonstrating them physically and verbally.
Classification skills milestones that our curriculum will help three-year-olds reach include the ability to sort items together and develop vocabulary of most object names and common phrases.
Finally, we’ll begin to see our three-year-olds engage in sociodramatic play by taking the learning objective and applying it to imaginary play, demonstrating development in language and social abilities with familiar adults and peers; beginning to develop storylines; identifying by name a few familiar objects, people, and events; and using simple sentences to communicate needs.
Mathematics Milestones
The mathematics curriculum at Treetop Friends focuses on spatial relationships, shapes, and using number concepts and operations, money, measurement, and time.
We will help three-year-olds reach milestones in spatial relationships by understanding above, under, right, and left. They will also learn the ability to flip and rotate objects, complete age-appropriate puzzles, and recognize how much can be placed within an object. To help our students learn shapes, we’ll have them identify and draw basic shapes, as well as curves and lines. They will also begin to develop an understanding of how to manipulate shapes using their fine motor skills.
The number concepts we’re hoping they will achieve include the ability to count to 20, identify numerals 1-20, connect numerals 1-20 with quantities, understand that by adding an object to a set the number of objects increases, using “first” properly in a sentence, identifying one to three objects without having to count them, recognizing that when an object is removed from a set, the number of objects decreases, and recognizing two groups of objects placed side by side as being equal or non-equal.
Three-year-olds at Treetop Friends will also begin to use standard and non-standard forms of measurement, understand that numbers and objects can be bigger and smaller than each other, and understand that lengths of objects can vary and be compared.
The three-year-old curriculum at Treetop Friends will also teach our students a basic understanding of how to use money, a general understanding about the passage of time, and an ability to recognize simple patterns (such as AB and ABC).
Social Studies Milestones
Social studies are a close look at the world around us, how we interact with our community, and how we learn about how our world works.
For our three-year-olds, we are looking at a few milestones in terms of social studies. These include community, family, history, geography, and culture.
The community milestones we’re hoping our three-year-olds can achieve include an understanding of the roles of community helpers, the meaning of most safety signs, and a respect for the differences in people.
We’ll also teach our three-year-olds about family and hope they have an understanding of family member roles, as well as recognizing and respecting the differences in families, their homes, and the surrounding areas.
With help from Treetop Friends, three-year-olds will develop a basic knowledge of historical facts and knowledge of important holidays. They will also start to identify continents.
Finally, we’ll help teach our three-year-olds about culture and begin to see basic cultural facts. They’ll have a basic understanding of different cultural holidays, languages, food, and more. They’ll also begin to respect cultural differences.
Science Milestones
Treetop Friends will also focus on developing an understanding of science and scientific skills as a part of our curriculum.
We do have specific scientific milestones in mind for our three-year-olds as part of their curriculum and daycare activities. The science milestones we focus on are:
- Use of Tools to Observe and Explore
- Earth’s Environment
- Characteristics of Living Organisms
- Physical Properties of Objects and Materials
- How to Use Scientific Inquiry Skills
- Space
We will hope to see our three-year-olds begin to use their bodies to explore the world around them. Our three-year-olds will demonstrate knowledge of scientific tools and their proper use and an ability to sort items that are the same and different.
Our three-year-olds will begin to understand the earth’s environment by understanding different types of weather and learning different parts of an ecosystem.
Three-year-olds will continue to learn about the characteristics of living organisms. We will hope to see them understand some basic needs of living things and most basic healthy habits. They will also identify some internal organs.
The scientific milestones three-year-olds will begin to reach also include the physical properties of objects and materials. They will be able to understand that objects and materials move differently. Three-year-olds will also gain knowledge of secondary colors and develop a basic understanding of matter and weight.
We will continue to see our three-year-olds reach milestones in the use of scientific inquiry skills as they will be able to ask a question and predict an outcome, as well as observe and evaluate during an activity.
Finally, three-year-olds will expand their understanding of space. This will include a knowledge of the elements of Earth, a basic understanding of the moon’s movement, knowledge of the existence of other planets, and some knowledge of space objects.