Zion Baptist Academy utilizes a faith-based early childhood curriculum that lays a foundation for biblically based living in today’s society. Our curriculum is spiritually dynamic and academically challenging. It is a research-based developmentally appropriate curriculum for infants and preschool children. Using this framework, our teachers are able to teach in the ways that best match the way in which we know young children develop and learn.

 

Our private care children learn best by doing, and our curriculum uses a developmentally “hands-on” approach built around monthly themes. During each week we address all areas of development: social, emotional, physical (large and small motor), cognitive and language development. Lesson plans are prepared weekly and posted in each classroom. There is a balance between teacher directed and child-initiated activities.

 

Our classrooms are set up in a learning center configuration, which allows each child to choose his/her activities in the different classroom areas. The activities in each learning center are planned by the teachers to facilitate discovery and learning. Our daily schedule includes large group, small group, and individual activities as well as learning center times. The children are guided and encouraged to learn new self-help skills, think for themselves, make choices, experiment, explore, make mistakes, and have a lot of fun in the process.

​

Our lottery funded Pre-K program uses the Georgia Early Learning and Development Standards (GELDS). The standards are flexible enough to support children’s individual rates of development, approaches to learning, and cultural context.  We use the Owl Comprehensive Program for reading, science, math and social studies.

​

We're currently using Learning Beyond for our Lower Academy, and Frog Street Curriculum for our Pre-K classes. We also participate in an enrichment called Language and Literary. Try My Way Phonics is a reading program that utilizes all learning modalities including visual, auditory, and kinesthetic that lead to mastery of phonetic concepts. These students are reading grade levels above where they currently are. These classrooms also use Scott Foresman’s Math and participate in Music and Physical Education.