LOOK WHAT WE WILL BE LEARNING!!

Kindergarten is an exciting learning time for your child.  This year we will provide a variety of experiences, activities and emotions that will help develop your child's readiness in the areas of emotional, academic, physical and social growth and build a strong confidence and self esteem. The first month of school we will be adjusting to a new school, new rules, a new classroom and making new friends.  We will be going over the rules for the class, playground, dining hall, gym, library and meeting all of the other teachers and faculty in our school.  We will do this with fun art, music, reading and writing activities. It is my goal to make every child feel important, successful, and independent.

    

READING AND WRITING

We have a new reading program this year!  We have adopted the Scott Foresman Reading Street Series.  Throughout the series, we will be working together and in small groups to practice different skills.  For the first four weeks of school, we will work on letter and sound recognition.  Each week we will explore different topics through concept talk, stories and writing.  As we explore the topics, we practice skills including building oral vocabulary, phonemic and phonological awareness (being able to hear and separate the individual sounds in words), handwriting, comprehension, and sight words.  Throughout the school year we will be exposed to many different kinds of learning experiences through the use of Children's Literature and Poetry.  Both of these play a big role in my classroom, building the foundation in learning through rhythm, repetition and patterns of sounds in language. This is the foundation of phonemic awareness, which is the understanding that words are made up of individual sounds.  Phonemic awareness is one of the key components of kindergarten reading readiness.  I strive to give each child a love of reading and books.  We will make and illustrate several class books throughout the year.  Along with making books, each child will have their own journal to write in.  This means that each child will write at the developmental stage of writing where they are at.  It may start out scribble writing, go into drawing a picture, from there to writing one word to describe the picture and then, through modeling and direction it will blossom into letters and words to make sentences.  Later in the year, we will make some individual books in which the children use phonetic spelling.  We will also do interactive writing in which we "share the pen."

  

   

MATH

In Math, we use the Harcourt program.  This program features "hands-on" learning.  We have many different manipulatives we use each day while learning a new skill.  They make patterns with teddy bear counters and than later in the year they will use the counters again for addition and subtraction. When we have our unit on time and money, they will have their own bag of money and clocks to use. Skills we will learn are Positional Words, Sorting, Patterns, One to one Correspondence, Estimation, Graphing, Calendars, Numbers 0-30, Geometry and Fractions, Counting by 2;s, 5's and 10's, Measurement, Time and Money, Addition and Subtraction.

     

RELIGION

In Religion, we will learn and practice the following prayers in school and in mass throughout the year. Please say the prayers at home with your child, as well. 

1. The Our Father 

2. The Morning Offering  

3. The Angel of God  

4. The Prayer Before Meals 

5. The Sign Of The Cross and Genuflecting 

6. The Hail Mary  

7. The Glory Be

After a meeting with Father Klasek and visiting the church, we will begin attending the primary grade mass and the all school mass. The children will be encouraged to participate in the songs and responses of the mass and will be expected to sit reverently and quietly with their class.

    

SCIENCE

We also have a new science curriculum.  Kindergarten is using the Scott Foresman Science program.  We will be exploring our world through a lot of hands on experiments in small and large groups.  We will begin the year learning who a scientist is and what he does. We will begin with life science and learn about non-living and living things and what they need, how plants and animals grow and change, and habitats.  The next unit is Earth science where we begin to explore our world-the land, sea, and air and how we experience the weather and seasons.  Our third unit is exploring physical science.  We will experiment with solids, liquids, and gases; sunlight and shadows; magnets; and even how things move.  In the final unit, we learn about space and technology.  We will study how the sky changes both during the day and at night.  Finally, we will explore machines, how they work and how they help us complete tasks easier.  Throughout the unit, we will practice the scientific method as we conduct experiments and observe.

    

SOCIAL STUDIES

We explore our neighborhoods and the world around us through Social Studies.  The year starts close to home with a unit about school, including discussions of why rules are important.  We later expand to explore our neighborhood and look at maps of the area around school.  We learn about colonial times and pretend to live long ago in the time leading up to Thanksgiving.  During the holidays, we learn about family traditions and compare those to traditions of other countries.  One of our favorite units is about occupations, when we ask the parents to send in items relating to their jobs.  We often use the globe to locate different countries that we discuss, and the children should be able to locate the United States by the end of the year.  Other topics covered throughout the year include the various holidays, treating others equally during our studies of Martin Luther King, Jr.,  our country and its symbols, voting, and forms of communication and transportation.