We strive to provide a literature rich environment for children.  Children are exposed to words, language and texts daily through shared reading, choral reading, songs, poems, read-alouds, and small group literacy activities.  As reading and writing develop together, we encourage children to write daily by using phonetic writing.  By ‘writing what they hear’, children expand and apply their letter sound knowledge.  Kindergartners will be exposed to sight words which are words that are usually difficult to sound out, but appear often in text.  We play games with the words daily and look for them in texts throughout the year to help the children learn these words.  Our main goal in literacy is to help children develop a love of reading!  We encourage you to read to your children daily, several times if possible.  Children who are read to daily (both at home and school) will find it easier to learn to read themselves.  We cannot emphasize this point enough.  Learning to read is one of the most important gifts we can give children and kindergarten provides the foundation for reading.

Our goal in math is to develop a strong conceptual number sense which will be built upon each year in school.  We use manipulatives often so that children can ‘see’ and understand numbers and sets.  Children will learn to write numbers, count to 100, use analog and digital clocks to tell time to the hour, and will learn basic addition and subtraction.  The children will take part in ‘calendar math’ daily, and we use this to practice patterns, recognize months, days, weeks, graph the weather, and the passage of time.  Children will also use and learn various tools used for measurement, identify and create shapes, and identify coins and begin to learn to count pennies and nickels

Kindergartners love to observe the world around them, and this is the basis of our science curriculum.  We often integrate science into language arts by encouraging children to write about what they are learning in their journals, and using our science themes as the basis for read-alouds.  Our science curriculum includes plants, animals, weather, seasons, magnets, life cycles and properties of water.