Words & Stories (3 - 5 years)

Learning Guidelines

Massachusetts Guidelines for Preschool Learning Experiences

The Words and Stories workshop has been designed to meet the Massachusetts Early Learning Guidelines for Preschool Learning Experiences. The purpose of these guidelines, developed by the Massachusetts Association for the Education of Young Children for the Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) in 2003, is to provide a comprehensive view of the development of preschool aged children while documenting the experiences that support this development and school readiness. The guidelines are for families as well as early education and care professionals.

For more information about the guidelines, including definitions of terms, visit

http://www.mass.gov/edu/birth-grade-12/early-education-and-care/curriculum-and-learning/.

This workshop aligns with the following guidelines:

Learning in English Language Arts

Children will be able to:

• Participate actively in discussions, listen to the ideas of others, and ask and answer relevant questions.
• Communicate personal experiences or interests.
• Listen to and use formal and informal language.
• Link letters with sounds in play activities.
• Listen to, recognize, and use a broad vocabulary of sensory words.
• Use their own words or illustrations to describe their experiences, tell imaginative stories, or communicate information about a topic of interest.
• Listen to a wide variety of age appropriate literature read aloud.
• Develop familiarity with the forms of alphabet letters, awareness of print, and letter forms.
• Listen to, identify, and manipulate language sounds to develop auditory discrimination and phonemic awareness.
• Link letters with sounds in play activities.
• Use their own words or illustrations to describe their experiences, tell imaginative stories, or communicate information about a topic of interest.
• Use emergent writing skills to make letters in many settings and for many purposes.

Learning in Mathematics

Children will be able to:

• Explore and describe a wide variety of concrete objects by their attributes.
• Listen to and say the names of numbers in meaningful contexts.
• Use positional language and ordinal numbers (first, second, third) in everyday activities.
• Listen to and use comparative words to describe the relationships of objects to one another.

Learning in Science and Technology/Engineering

Children will be able to:

• Ask and seek out answers to questions about objects and events with the assistance of interested adults.
• Compare and contrast natural materials such as water, rocks, soil, and living organisms using descriptive language.
• Use their senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste to explore their environment using sensory vocabulary.

Learning in History and Social Science

Children will be able to:

• Identify and describe cause and effect as they relate to personal experiences and age-appropriate stories.

Learning in Health Education

Children will be able to:

• Listen to and use appropriate language describing the names and functions of parts of the human body.
• Recognize and describe or represent emotions such as happiness, surprise, anger, fear, sadness.

Learning in the Arts

Children will be able to:

• Explore activities and vocabulary related to movement, balance, strength, and flexibility.
• Listen to, imitate, and improvise sounds, patterns, or songs.

Listen to storytellers and watch puppet shows.