Kindergarten Curriculum (a guide for parents and caregivers)

Introduction

The Kindergarten curriculum includes the following subject areas: reading, mathematics, science, writing, technology, arts, social studies, health and physical education, and social skills. Within each subject area there are essential understandings, essential skills and processes, and critical content students are expected to know. Essential understandings are the most important concepts students should understand. The content is the vehicle students will use to learn the essential understandings. Using skills and processes is the strategy students will develop to build and apply knowledge and understanding.

The following example illustrates how essential understandings, critical content and essential skills and processes work together in a social studies unit:

• Students will investigate how they are similar and different.
• Students will collect, organize and apply information through various methods, for example; graphing.
• Students will use reading, writing, and oral language to learn and communicate about oneself and each other.
• Students will work and interact in a variety of group situations.
• Students produce projects to display their growth and understanding of their self and others.
• Students will apply skills to home and community.

Subject Areas:

Reading: Students explore real and imaginary worlds through immersion in wide variety fiction and nonfiction literary genres. They practice their developing skills in independent reading that includes fiction, nonfiction and environmental print.

Processes

Decoding and vocabulary

Comprehension study skills

Mathematics: Mathematics includes number sense, spatial relationships, probability and statistics, measurement, patterns and functions.

Science: involves studying the Earth including seasonal change, physical features in local environment (e.g. trees, soil, plants and streams); Life including basic needs and characteristics of living things and the five senses; Physical properties of matter (e.g. size, shape, color, texture, hardness).

Writing: Forms of writing include recount/retell, narrative, signs/posters, books, graphs and charts. Concepts and conventions include letters and sounds, directionally (top to bottom, left to right), basic sentence structure and punctuation.

Technology: Literacy in technology provides our students with access to an ever-changing world dependent on information. In order to participate in our technological age effectively, our students must be information navigators, critical thinkers and analyzers, creators of knowledge, and communicators using a variety of technologies. Integrating technological instruction throughout the curriculum provides the essential skills to meet world class standards.

We will go to the computer room once a week where the children will work at their own pace on lessons that reinforce concepts introduced in the classroom. We also have computers in the classrooms that will be used for reinforcing activities with reading and math as well as some beginning word processing.

Other multimedia includes VCR's, camcorders and filmstrips.

Art: Elements include line, shape/form, color, texture, value, space and pattern. Production of visual art includes design, medium, organization, layout and technology. Multimedia art forms include graphics, photography, animation, moving image, audio and video.

Social Studies: Sense of self. This section identifies the specific required content students will use to learn the Essential Understandings, Skills, and Processes. It will involve the following: History which includes people, places, events related to self, family, personal timeline; Geography and environment; knowledge/care of immediate environment, mapping; culture, family/personal roles; elements/expressions of culture; civics including citizenship role, rules/responsibilities in home and classroom, democratic process, decision making, and conflict resolution; economics including needs/wants related to self.

Health and P.E.: Movement including locomotor and non-locomotor skills, manipulative skills, movement concept vocabulary, spatial awareness, body management rhythmic development and dance; Fitness including participation, fitness vocabulary, fitness activities and games, fitness components-cardiovascular strength/endurance, muscular strength/flexibility/endurance, body composition, goal setting; Nutrition including food pyramid, food preparation/handling healthy foods; Human growth and development involving physical growth and change and human differences; Emotional, social, community and consumer health, disease prevention and control and personal health and safety practices.

Social Skills: Life skills involving perseverance, flexibility, effort responsibility; Thinking Skills involving comparing, classifying, decision making, investigating and problem solving; Presentation Skills including volume and eye contact, sequence of ideas, use of visuals and technology; Interpersonal Skills including respectful words and actions, making friends, cooperation, solving problems through discussion; Study and Organizational Skills involving goal setting, short term planning, completion of work, use an care of school supplies and resources; Work Production Skills including resource and materials management (e.g. tools, equipment, supplies, work space), awareness of standards/goals, effort toward accuracy, self-evaluation (What do I like about my work/efforts? What would I like to work on for next time?)