Gifted Kindergarten

The Phillips RBM Approach®

Overview

The Gifted Pre & Kindergarten is an intellectually and creatively rigorous program that is "100% Academic". Students can attend up to five half days a week; each day consisting of three hours of instruction. The program is held in both the Huntington and Roslyn locations.Through the utilization of the Phillips RBM Approach®, an accelerated gifted curriculum is presented covering all academic subjects. Through VEG's unique dialectical practices, our students learn to write and verbally articulate their complex thoughts before they have even mastered the written word.

Objectives

The objectives of the Gifted Pre K-Kindergarten at VEG are:
To utilize the Phillips RBM Approach®" to transform "academic complacency" into rigorous, engaging and creative academic participation.
To facilitate the constant, self-discovery and mastery of academic, cognitive and creative challenges beyond the walls of the typical classroom.
To demonstrate the importance of gifted kindergartner's quantifiable gains in scholastic performance at a young age, leading to future academic satisfaction and intrapersonal confidence as a gifted adult.
To teach gifted kindergartners academic content that appears to be beyond their reach, but is comprehensible with hard work and perseverance.
To redesign lessons, even at a moment's notice, to accommodate any child's spontaneous ideology or seemly-unrelated insight.
To reinforce the mastery of basic and advanced grammar, syntax and writing through public speaking and dialectical practices.
To promote the freedom of expression, the sharing of epiphanies and the welcoming of unlimited questions... related and unrelated to the topic at hand.
To introduce concepts and skills in the same curriculum areas that will be taught in the middle school and high school.
To enlighten gifted kindergarteners by teaching them how to think "laterally" constantly considering alternatives that challenge their perceptions and pre-conceptions.
To encourage cooperative learning amongst gifted peers emphasizing the importance of maintaining lifelong friendships with other "intellectually-vibrant" students.
To ensure that VEG is always a "soft place to fall" with the unconditional acceptance of the individual differences.
To preserve our gifted students' burning love for learning that we vow never to extinguish.

Curriculum

The following curriculum areas are taught verbally using continuous sight word (for nonreaders), visual clues, art, music, computers and creative movement: World Geography, Global History, Reading Comprehension, Etymology, Latin, Journalism, Grammar, Editing, American Sign Language, Mastering the Digital Microscope, Current Events, Historiology, Counting Currency, Decoding words, Microbiology, Living Science, Earth Science, Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Word Processing, Creative Problem-Solving, Computer Graphics, Creative Writing, Vocabulary Enrichment and Public Speaking.

The Pre-K/Kindergarten day Program teaches the following skills: SAT/ACT vocabulary; definitions, usage, 64 Latin word roots; definitions, word decoding and dialectical sentence construction, reading comprehension, editing, revision, punctuation, grammar, idea sequencing, parts of speech, Periodic Table of Elements: memorization and element study, geography: Equator, Prime Meridian, hemispheres, cardinal and intermediate directions, continents, oceans, borders and countries of North America, Central America, South America, Europe and capital cities, math: numeration, geometry, patterning, skip counting, comparisons, greater/less than, problem-solving, place value, addition and subtraction, partial mastery of multiplication, place value (ones, tens, hundreds), money and value, telling time, fractions (½ ¼ , ¾) and World History From Nomads Onward.