Program Information
Our Program
The Doyle Early Childhood Center is an integrated preschool for children 3-5 years old. The Doyle School supports all abilities in both general education and special education settings. This integrated approach provides students with the opportunity to encourage each other in their growth in a safe, nurturing learning environment. Activities for all children are created to promote growth in self-esteem, independence, self-awareness, social skills, language development, physical development and academic skills. Children focus on advancing skills though developmental curriculum and activities that involve:
- Language acquisition
- Social skills
- Cognitive skills
- Gross motor skills
- Fine motor skills
- Daily living skills
These skills are aligned with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Pre-K frameworks.
Our Philosophy
Children learn best when they are in an environment where they feel safe, secure and respected. Our desire is for children to be engaged and learn through play with other children and adults. Our staff builds relationships with each child and family and encourages and supports the children in building relationships with each other. Our classroom environments have been created to encourage creativity, nurture imagination and foster exploration and learning.
Our Curriculum
Opening the World of Language (OWL) is a comprehensive curriculum that covers all domains of early learning. It is an early literacy curriculum and seamlessly weaves solid content that captures children’s natural curiosity about the world into an activity-centered day. The curriculum covers all domains of learning: language and literacy, social studies, science, mathematics, arts, physical development, and social and emotional development.
Doyle also uses the Fundations® Pre-K Activity Set. This supports students’ emerging understanding of the alphabetic principles of letter-sound associations and alphabetical order, and the written language skill of manuscript letter formation.
The Activity Set provides an introduction, or “pre-dose,” to the letter-sound and writing skills that will be taught to mastery in the Fundations Level K program. It is not intended to provide a full pre-k literacy curriculum.
The skills taught align with those that the Report of the National Early Literacy Panel (2008) identified as strong and consistent predictors for the later development of literacy skills:
- Knowledge of the names and sounds associated with printed letters
- Ability to manipulate the sounds of spoken language
- Ability to rapidly name letters, numbers, objects, or colors
- Ability to write isolated letters or one’s name
- Ability to remember spoken information for a short time
The Pre-K Activity Set strongly supports the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework (2015), which expects that a preschool child “recognizes and names at least half of the letters of the alphabet” and “produces the sounds of many recognized letters.”
Finally, the Doyle School integrates the Social Thinking methodologies and strategies throughout our program. Research has shown that, “with the Social Thinking methodology, you gain evidence-based strategies to help people aged 4 through adult to improve their social competencies, including: self-regulation, social-emotional learning, executive functioning, perspective taking, and social problem solving.”