Through our unique continuum of education model, we support scholars through key moments of transition – from their first days in our infant and toddler rooms to 8th grade graduation – ensuring that they are prepared to take each and every step on their educational journeys.
A pivotal milestone for young scholars is the culmination of their Preschool experience, marking the transition from Christopher House’ Infant & Preschool into Elementary School. This momentous time is an opportunity to celebrate our scholars’ growth over the past few years and to recognize the fundamental skills learned – cognitive, motor, literacy, math, social – that will serve as a foundation for their academic careers.
To ensure our scholars have a positive and healthy transition from Preschool to Kindergarten, Christopher House offers a Summer Bridge Program for graduating Preschool scholars. Through this five- week summer program, Preschool scholars preparing to matriculate to Kindergarten have daily opportunities to receive additional individualized and focused instruction to strengthen specific skills while being introduced to teachers, classroom environments, and resources that students will be interacting with in the coming school year.
This summer marked the 4th year that Christopher House implemented a summer bridge program to support the transition of all of our preschool children who recently transitioned to kindergarten. The summer bridge program is supported by certified teaching staff from both early childhood and elementary school. Collaborative lesson planning and reflection is conducted weekly with input from teaching staff that supports intentional areas of focus across developmental domains and is informed by spring Teaching Strategies GOLD checkpoint data, as well as a pre-assessment based on the Christopher House Kindergarten Readiness matrix. This year we were excited to have our two summer bridge teachers at Stewart representing both early childhood and the elementary team. A huge thanks to Julian Lomax, one of our Lead Preschool teachers and Kimberly Lopez, a primary teacher in CHES for developing and implementing the summer bridge instruction at Stewart.
For the past three years, Kimberly Lopez, Christopher House English Language Learner (ELL) Teacher and Summer Bridge Teacher, has spent her summers helping our young scholars prepare for Kindergarten.
“Christopher House’s Summer Bridge Program provides small group instruction to meet students’ individual needs to best prepare them for Kindergarten.”
By easing the transition with early and intentional exposure, scholars experience reduced stress and can more easily interact with their new learning environments in positive ways, leading to higher educational outcomes. After completing last year’s Summer Bridge program, the 57 scholars met or exceeded widely held expectations for Kindergarten, resulting in continued summer growth in Social Emotional, Literacy, and most notably in the math domain which increased by almost 13%.
“Throughout the summer, scholars became more fluent in their numbers, letter identification and print awareness. They also improved rhyming skills and by the end of the program, could recognize rhyming words based on sound, images, and letter recognition,” Kimberly Lopez shared. “If you were to see all of my students now in Kindergarten, they look like pros walking down the hallway and listening to their teachers! I am so proud of each and every one of them, and I’m excited for their next educational adventure.”
Julian Lomax, a Lead Preschool Teacher at our Stewart Campus, collaborated with Kimberly during this summer’s Bridge Program. Julian has been a preschool teacher for seven years and was excited to engage across our family of schools to deepen his impact.
“Summer bridge was a great opportunity because it expanded on what the preschool teachers have been supporting children in learning over the past two years. In early childhood we believe in a whole child approach, meeting each child where they are at and creating intentional opportunities that build on children’s interests to support them to achieve. This approach is supported through the intentional collection and use of data to see what each child needs –through ongoing collaboration with preschool teachers, families and family advocates we were able to tailor lesson plans and individualize to meet each child’s needs in specific developmental domains. We utilized different modalities and hands on materials such as play-dough and wicky sticks to explore measurement which allowed children to more deeply engage with the concepts. We also implemented Heggerty phonemic awareness and tracked children’s weekly progress during bridge to support our data collection for summer checkpoint. It allowed all teachers to see the children’s growth and identify additional areas where support was needed.”
