Welcome to Kindergarten

Welcome! Your child will experience the excitement of learning in kindergarten. This year students will experience a balanced literacy program including phonemic awareness, oral language development, print concepts, read-alouds, shared and guided reading, and shared and interactive writing. In math, your child will use a vast number of manipulatives to learn basic math concepts such as geometric shapes, patterning, measurement, graphing, addition, subtraction, and problem solving. Our hands-on curriculum also incorporates science, health, social studies, physical education, music, art, and technology. We look forward to a great school year.

This year we have six kindergarten teachers and two instructional assistants Mr.Grau and Mrs. Vanetta. We welcome Kathlyn Garrett to our team this year.
 
Lunch Schedule: 10:15-10:45
Recess Schedule: 10:45-11:15
The last five minutes of lunch time are for cleaning up, discarding trash, and lining up for recess.
 
Please help us by doing the following:
-Reading and checking folders daily
-Signing Tuesday Folders on Tuesday night
-Signing any important documents in a timely manner
-Review all the alphabet letters and sounds (upper and lower case
-Review all numbers
-Help, but do not complete your child’s homework.

THE FOLLOWING IS A LIST OF KINDERGARTEN PREREQUISITES, EXPECTATIONS, AND PARENTAL SUPPORT ACTIVITIES FOR ENGLISH AND LANGUAGE ARTS.
 
KINDERGARTEN STRANDS

PREREQUISITES: Before entering kindergarten, students should be able to:
-Use self-help skills (examples: bathroom independently, zip, button, buckle, snap, feed her/himself lunch and snack)
-Speak and share ideas in complete sentences.
-Listen to and talk about stories that were read to them.
-Play with rhyme, rhythm, and repetition in poems, songs, and stories (examples: Dr. Seuss books, Mother Goose Rhymes, etc.).
-Use materials, tools, and toys to develop muscles in fingers and hands (examples: Legos, Play-Doh, scissors, crayons, etc.).
-Think about their experiences with letters and recognize some letters of the alphabet (examples: letters in names, street signs, store names, singing the alphabet, etc.).
-Recognize their first names in print.
-Relate printed words to spoken language.
-Make marks and pictures that look like writing.
 
EXPECTATIONS:
During kindergarten students will:
-Listen and respond to stories, rhymes, conversations, discussions, and one and two-step instructions.
-Recognize that letters stand for speech sounds and convey meaning (example: students’ own names).
-Know that print is read and written left to right and top to bottom.
-Understand that written words are a sequence of letters separated by spaces.
-Know the order of the alphabet and the difference between capital and lowercase letters.
-Recognize that different parts of a book offer information (examples: cover, title page, and table of contents).
-Understand that written words are made of letters that stand for sounds.
-Begin to read and write by learning to match letters with sounds for consonants and short vowels.
-Identify, separate, and combine syllables within spoken words by clapping syllables or by moving objects to represent syllables.
-Make rhyming words and tell rhyming words from non-rhyming words.
-Break down one-syllable words into separate sounds, clearly saying beginning, middle, and final sounds.
-Talk about meanings of words, and learn new words through classroom experiences.
-Show their understanding of a story by retelling the order of important events in the story or by acting out the story.
-Read basic high-frequency words and read aloud from familiar, predictable texts.
-Use correct pencil grip, paper position, and beginning stroke to develop printing skills.
-Use sounds of letters to write their first and last names and to write messages.
-Think of ideas before writing, and write to record ideas and thoughts.
-Use computers to write their own stories.
 
SUPPORT AT HOME:
As parents, please provide opportunities for your kindergartner to:
-Listen to you read daily
-Answer questions you ask
-Sing songs and recite rhymes
-Talk with you about letters and words around them (examples: menu at McDonald’s, food packaging at Kroger, displays at K-Mart, etc.).
-Draw and create with pencils, crayons, paper, and scissors
-Practice writing his or her name with uppercase and lowercase letters
-Watch you write (examples: grocery list, phone message)
-Play letter games (examples: magnetic letters on the refrigerator, find letter ‘C’ on a can of corn, etc.)
 
Thank you,
The Kindergarten Team