Study Methods & Skills

Franklin Lakes Jewish Preschool strives to create an environment for the self-initiated and self-directed learning that leads to intellectual, emotional, social, and moral development. Through engaging teacher-student dialogue and multisensory materials and activities, teachers engage students' curiosity and encourage them to make discoveries about their environment. Children can often be seen working collaboratively or small groups as they exchange thoughts and ideas with their peers and teachers.

 Because students' interests and curiosities determine many of the curricularthemes and these themes are often revisited and expanded upon in successive years, children are actively engaged in creating, revising, and deepening their understandings. Though literacy activities and print-rich classrooms, students develop a passion for lit

erature and begin to understand the many values and uses of printed text. Pre-math explorations and manipulatives allow children to develop understandings of numerals, shapes, patterns, measurement, and logical thinking. Science and discovery- based activities, woven througho

ut the curriculum, fulfill children's innate need to explore, discover, and draw their own conclusions based on observations. By developing and practicing these skills, children at FLJP build the conceptual foundations for their academic endeavors, and beyond.

Arts Curriculum

At the cornerstone of our school is our arts program. Children are naturally creative and derive much pleasure from involvement in the arts. They learn a host of skills and acquire tremendous self-esteem when given varied opportunities to create. Our children use a wide array of art media including acrylic, finger, and water paints, pastels, crayons, and markers. They create their works on diverse surfaces including wood, plastic, textured papers, foam, and canvas. Generating art in a host of settings, including our beautiful art studio, their classrooms, our indoor garden, and our outdoor yard, continually invigorates our children's creative juices. 

We celebrate our children's creativity by prominently and artfully displaying their work in our gallery and throughout our school. Because we believe the artistic process to be even more valuable than the final product, we accompany each work with a transcription of the child's thoughts about the piece. In addition to our visual arts program, our children enjoy daily music and movement. In music and movement class the children enjoy singing songs accompanied by a range of musical instruments. Additionally, their teachers expose them to music of many genres including traditional, folk, and classical music. By learning about rhythm, tempo, and beat, the children become discerning listeners and develop independent musical preferences. 

Judaic Curriculum

Our children learn the customs, traditions, and moral values of Judaism. These lessons are woven naturally through all of our disciplines so that they become both a meaningful and treasured part of each child's personal milieu.

Our children eagerly anticipate holidays such as Rosh Hashanah, Chanukah, Purim, and Passover and understand how to meaningfully and joyfully participate in each holiday. We regularly celebrate holidays with parents and members of the larger Franklin Lakes community. We carefully select teachers who model and nurture Jewish values such as charity, friendship, tolerance, discipline, and respect for the environment and the rights of others. Our staff strives to instill our children with a love for the land of Israel and the Torah and pride in their Jewish identities.

Parent Partnership

We wholeheartedly embrace and encourage parental involvement in our school and understand how it enriches our program and the lives of our children.A strong home-school connection demonstrates to children that we are all working toward the same goals and makes the lessons we impart at school even more significant and enduring.

We invite parents and grandparents to become our partners in their children's education by always welcoming them into our school, including them in holiday celebrations, and encouraging them to visit classrooms to share their areas of special interest and expertise. We cherish the warm relationship we enjoy with our parents that is regularly nurtured through such programs as our parent social, family holiday and Shabbat events, Me and My Favorite Guy Day, and Moms and Muffins, to name a few. We educate parents about our unique educational philosophy and keep them abreast of activities in their children's classrooms through weekly classroom stories and our blog. Parents learn precisely how we weave the educational disciplines together through written descriptions of activities and photographs of their children engaged in learning throughout the day. Through emails, families also attain important information such as the dates of school celebrations and holiday events and news of happy occasions such as weddings, births, and student birthdays. Our weekly stories and emails are our opportunity to provide parents a window into how their children spend their day at school.