Kindergarten

Catholic identity must and does permeate the curriculum guidelines, the instruction, and assessments. Curriculum guidelines provide a template for teachers to provide instruction, and assessments demonstrate that learners have achieved unsurpassed academic success. A process of continuous improvement ensures that curriculum guidelines are regularly examined and updated or revised where needed.

 

The kindergarten religion curriculum focuses on Jesus and how we can be an image of him in our daily lives. Some units in our Image of God series include learning about baptism, sin, Advent and Lent, Mother Mary, Jesus’ miracles, and many more. Kindergarteners learn prayers through daily prayer, morning prayer, prayer before lunch, prayer at the end of the day, and school Mass. We also build in the virtue of the month daily to provide examples and understanding of the virtue. 

 

For most students, kindergarten is their first introduction to reading and we make it our goal to help them form a love of reading. In kindergarten the students use the Wonders reading curriculum. Students begin with the basics of how to read, focusing heavily on phonics and phonemic awareness. Forming a firm grasp of letters and their sounds is a vital step in the reading process and students focus on this skill for a majority of the year. Once they’ve mastered letters and their sounds, we move on to using that knowledge to read and write words. We also practice recognizing tricky words, or sight words, by sight. Every student learns to read at their own pace, some are ready to move on before others so kindergarten uses centers to meet with students in small groups. This allows us to meet your child where they are at and provide a more individualized and specific instruction tailored to their needs.  

 

Students use the Zaner-Bloser handwriting series to practice forming letters accurately. As students gain a deeper understanding of letter sounds and word building they begin to form simple sentences. By the end of the year student can write short three and four sentence stories on the same subject. Students focus on many forms of writing including: lists, narrative writing, non-fiction writing, and opinion writing. 

 

In kindergarten, students begin to explore the world around them and we focus on building social skills and community. We focus on national holidays, map skills, transportation, our community and its leaders and the rules that keep us safe, as well as needs and wants of individuals and our community.

 

Through the Foss curriculum, students in kindergarten participate in a variety of hands on activities, experiments, investigations, and explorations to learn more about the world around them. Some of our units include an apple investigation, pumpkin investigation, five senses, discovering force and motion, basic needs of plants and animals, and weather. We often go outside to explore the world first hand with our seasonal scavenger hunt walking field trips, bug hunts, wind sock experiment, egg drop, and stomp rocket exploration!

 

Kindergarten math provides the basic building blocks for their learning for years to come. We tend to dive deep into the different concepts to ensure they have a firm foundation in number sense and problem solving. Throughout the year we focus on recognizing, building, and writing numbers 1 – 100, measurement, patterns, sorting, basic concepts of addition and subtraction, telling time to the hour and half hour, and recognizing coins and their worth. We use a variety of games, songs, hand on activities, as well as workbook pages from our math curriculum to present material in a variety of ways and make math fun!

 

The textbooks we use are evaluated on a five year cycle.  We choose books based on curriculum alignment, grade level appropriateness, and overall quality.