Preschool

Full Day Preschool Program - Ages 3 to 5 years

Preschool Program

Our preschool program focuses on skill development, play, independence, and readiness for transition to kindergarten, including interaction with typically developing peers. Our multidisciplinary staff works closely with you to improve your child’s skills and developmental needs. Building your child’s social and communication skills will lead to improving their participation in play, group activities, learning from their environment, and independence. We emphasize naturalistic learning that allows the child’s interests to help us build their engagement for learning and social exchange.

Our preschool classrooms are 6:1:3 ratios. This means there are six students, one teacher, and three aides in each classroom. We are able to overenroll our classrooms with state approval and documented community need/school district request. Two of our classrooms can have up to 7 students and the other two classrooms can have up to 8 students. There are never more than that amount of students in a classroom in preschool. All speech therapy and occupational therapy services are provided in the classroom, and students get to participate in adaptive physical education classes several times per week with our physical education teacher.

We focus on developing your child’s:

Social Relationships
Emotional Awareness and Expression
Language
Communication
Pretend and Interactive Play
Family Relationships
Pre-academic and academic skills
Physical health and well being
Independence

We promote your child’s development by providing a warm, nurturing, and supportive setting that focuses on ways we can partner with you to build skills through play and social engagement. We use evidence-based teaching strategies so that your child receives state of the art instruction by all staff at ICD. Family involvement and support are prioritized at ICD because we know that when a family is thriving so is the child.

Our model is considered an immersive model, which means that children receive focused skill instruction on all areas of need specified in the IEP throughout the school day (5.5 hours each day, 5 days per week – 8:30 AM- 2 PM). This means our entire team is trained to teach the same goals, which allows a child to get 27.5 hours per week of focused therapeutic educational support. We also embed special classroom-wide group instructional sessions on communication, motor, adaptive, pre- academic, and social skills throughout the day. This model makes it unnecessary for students to also receive high frequencies of related services (speech, OT, PT). Our licensed related service providers are an integral part of the interdisciplinary team and consult with classroom teams as a starting point for services. This means that expert consultation is built into what we do and is accessible to all
students enrolled in our programs.

For more information about our service model, please click here: Understanding the Service Model of the Children's Unit for Treatment and Evaluation at the Institute for Child Development

We strive, together, to provide the best opportunities for your child to be healthy, happy, and ready to succeed at home, school, and within their community. If you have questions about our program or are interested in setting up a tour, please call us at 607-777-2829 and or email us at
icd@binghamton.edu.