PREPARING YOUR CHILD ON THEIR PATH TO
​SCHOOL ​READINESS AND LIFELONG LEARNING

Derived from the Michigan Standards of Quality and our team’s knowledge of early childhood development, IXL’s Smart Start Curriculum was created to support a child’s individual needs, reinforce skills needed for school readiness, and expose them to developmentally appropriate content. This curriculum incorporates IXL Phonics, Handwriting Without Tears and Touch Math into our lessons.
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An important addition to this program is our Social Emotional Curriculum, an empowering program that supports a child’s social emotional health and improves their capacity for self control, self confidence, trust, communication, and empathy.

MICHIGAN STANDARDS OF QUALITY

The Early Childhood Standards of Quality are meant to provide guidance to all early care and education programs. Clear research-based expectations for the content are desired results of early learning experiences help focus curriculum and instruction. The Standards offer children with opportunities to reach essential developmental and educational goals.

EARLY LEARNING EXPECTATIONS FOR
​3 AND 4 YEAR OLD CHILDREN:

APPROACHES TO LEARNING

SOCIAL, EMOTIONAL & PHYSICAL HEALTH & DEVLOPMENT

EARLY LEARNING IN SCIENCE

EARLY LEARNING IN
​SOCIAL STUDIES

CREATIVE ARTS

LANGUAGE & EARLY LITERACY

EARLY LEARNING IN
​MATHEMATICS

TECHNOLOGY LITERACY-
​EARLY LEARNING & TECHNOLOGY

SOCIAL EMOTIONAL CURRICULUM

While safety, love, and compassion all play an important role in our classrooms, it’s also crucial that our children feel heard and understood during their time at IXL. To accomplish this, we created our Social Emotional Curriculum. This empowering program supports a child’s social emotional health and improves their capacity for self control, self confidence, trust, communication, and empathy. Emotions run wild during childhood, so every classroom provides our kiddos with a safe space for when they’re feeling upset, need a moment to themselves, or have a problem to solve.

IXL PHONICS

IXL Phonics is a language based phonemic awareness program created by our IXL team, that uses multi-sensory lessons to teach developmentally appropriate skills. Hand movements & Sound Toys are used as a mnemonic tools to help children associate the sound with the letter. Letter Cards help children associate the letter, sound and hand movement all together. IXL Phonics teaches children to become familiar with “Speech Helpers” to assist them in forming their letters correctly.

LETTER RECOGNITION  •  SOUND RECOGNITION
SOUND-SYMBOL ASSOCIATION  •  RHYMING
SOUND BLENDING  •  SOUND SEGMENTING
SIMPLE READING DECODING
​EARLY SPELLING SKILLS

HANDWRITING WITHOUT TEARS®

Handwriting Without Tears provides developmentally appropriate, multi-sensory strategies for early writing. The program follows research of how children learn best and includes materials that address all styles of learning.  These skills will assist children in coloring, drawing, singing, counting and writing their letters and numbers.

The “Get Set for School” Program builds these skills:

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1| Playing & singing

2| Fine & gross motor

3| Cognitive/Language

4| Social/Emotional

5| Visual perception

6| Sensory

EARLY MATH SKILLS

Children learn early math skills at IXL to gain a basic
understanding of counting, number sense, shapes, colors and
other simple math concepts. Math presents itself in our daily
lives and introducing it at a young age helps children make
sense of the world around them. Teachers plan hands-on
lessons to make learning early math skills fun, tangible and
encouraging. 
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Concepts taught include:

NUMBER RECOGNITION  •  COUNTING
TOUCHING/COUNTING PATTERNS GREATER/LESS THAN
PLACE VALUE  •  ADDITION & SUBTRACTION