Kindergarten Curriculum

The development of language and literacy skills is critical to children’s development and success. Kindergarten students are provided multiple opportunities throughout the day to practice language and literacy skills through listening, talking and interacting with each through dramatic play. Teachers help guide their literacy development through games, songs and read alouds. The ELA curriculum is delivered through the following:

LITERACY
Kindergarten children are immersed in communication, reading, and writing throughout the school day. Children participate in literacy activities in whole group and small group as well as individual work. Each classroom accesses literacy through the Tools of the Mind curriculum. A Tools classroom concentrates on children’s development in two areas: underlying cognitive skills and specific literacy skills. The kindergarten literacy program meets the system wide mandate of providing a minimum of one 90-minute literacy block each day. For the first two months of school, centers revolve around dramatic play of folk and fairy tales and later The Magic Tree House series. Later, the centers transition to be literacy based. These centers are interdisciplinary and the activities often have a literature connection or theme.

In January, students begin reading instruction during Buddy Reading2. In pairs, teachers help children to apply the knowledge they have gained from writing and literacy games (initial sounds, word families etc.) to start decoding text. These leveled books come from a number of sources and include fiction and nonfiction. As students’ reading strengthens, teachers start to meet with them individually. Students who need additional support in reading are provided further instruction through the Reading Intervention Program.

WRITING
n a Tools classroom, there is a strong relationship between writing and oral speech. Children practice their writing at two different times of day, Write Along (whole group writing) and Scaffolded Writing (individual writing). In scaffolded writing, children recall different facts from read alouds and illustrate what they write. Initially in the Tools classroom, children do not use lined paper; they draw a picture, orally say their message and draw a line to represent each word. Children are at different stages of writing development: some have learned voice to line match while others have learned word patterns. As the children develop phonemic awareness, they start to add more sounds to represent words. Later in the year, the children transition away from using “lines” to represent words and use traditional lined paper.

PHONEMIC AWARENESS
Kindergarten children learn how to break words into sounds, isolate sounds and identify them in the order in which they appear in words. In a Tools classroom, children first identify sounds and work on phonemic awareness during writing; they first represent sounds in the words of their own written message. Phonemic awareness is further developed through small group literacy games which help children segment out consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words and learn alphabetic principles.

Children start developing a sense of identity and a sense of their social and individual selves in their early educational years. The social studies curriculum, learning in history and social science, is built on children's experiences in their families, school, community, state, and country. In a Tools classroom, children are exposed many different cultures and countries through the Magic Tree House series. These topics are integrated throughout the kindergarten curriculum.

National Holidays
• Columbus Day
• Thanksgiving
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
• Presidents Day
• Independence Day

National Symbols
• Pledge of Allegiance
• American Flag
• Current President
• Patriotic Songs

Community
• Maps and basic geography
• Community Helpers
• Personal and social time

Teaching and learning in the arts serves several functions, including learning and mastering different art forms for their own sake, and using the arts across the curriculum to integrate and express information. Kindergarten students are provided opportunities to express themselves through drawings and other visual art activities, in acting out stories, singing songs, and through dramatic play activities. In addition to the integration of these activities throughout the kindergarten curriculum, kindergarten students are provided specialized content instruction in art and music during the week.

There are two Progress Reports (report cards) in Kindergarten- one in the fall and one at the end of the year. Kindergarteners are given grades of “C” Consistent, “D” Developing, or “N” Not yet acquired. Topics include Social Emotional Development, Literacy Skills, Math Skills, Science and Social Studies, and a participation grade in special subjects- Art, Music, and Physical Education.