The Mt. Olive Difference
Christian Education
Mt. Olive Lutheran Preschool believes the most important thing we do every day is to teach little children about the love of Jesus. Children know about love because they experience and know the feeling of love they get from their parents, grandparents, and siblings. When you tell young children that Jesus loves them, they have an understanding of what that means. Our aim each day is to let the light and love of Jesus show in our words and actions. We model love and concern, forgiveness, and joy. Our Bible curriculum teaches basic Bible stories like Noah’s ark, David and Goliath, and Jesus’ miracles. At Christmas and Easter, we focus our lessons on those special stories. At Mt. Olive Lutheran Preschool, children begin to build a foundation for a lifetime of faith and joyful living.
Family Environment
We strive to make all children and their families feel at home at Mt. Olive Lutheran Preschool. Many of our students spend a large part of their young lives with us at the Preschool. We get to know children and their families and come to love the children like our own. We share in families’ celebrations of little victories like successful potty training and offer caring support in times of challenge.
Low Teacher-Student Ratios
Mt. Olive Lutheran Preschool’s teacher-student ratios are much lower than the state’s minimum standards allow. We believe strongly that manageable student ratios enable teachers to maintain a safe and productive classroom learning environment.
Limited Screen Time
With readily-available home computers, DVD players in cars, smartphones, and digital tablets, children are exposed to video, games and other electronic content early and often. At Mt. Olive Lutheran Preschool, we believe that children in preschool classes should spend their time exploring, pretending and interacting with teachers and fellow students and focus on the fundamentals. Young preschool minds are just beginning to think abstractly, so many preschoolers don’t understand that screen images and actions are not real. At Mt. Olive Lutheran Preschool, videos are shown only occasionally when a video complements a lesson or when weather prevents outside play.
Strong Pre-K program prepares children well for Kindergarten
Learning and Practicing How to Be a Student
The primary objective in our Pre-K class is to teach children how to be students. That is, we help children learn how to function properly in a classroom setting preparing them for Kindergarten. Children learn that there are times for doing table work, times for listening to the teacher, times to clean up and line up, and times when they can choose their own activities.
Learning Letters
For academic readiness, we use the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum to teach children the proper formation of capital letters as well as the DIG program through Frog Street. This curriculum has been approved by the Texas Education Agency for use in public school Pre-K programs.
Getting Ready to Read
Research tells us the best way for young children to get ready to read is to be read to and to answer questions about what is being read. Students at Mt. Olive Lutheran Preschool are read to daily.
Building Math Skills
Through individual and group work children have daily opportunities to build math skills by counting, sorting, patterning, and building.