Kindergarten Program

Reading

Understanding the alphabet and reading comprehension is a primary instruction in Kindergarten. Group discussions of books are lead by teachers as students begin to identify characters, settings, and major events in a story. Children ask and answer questions about essential elements of a story.

Recitation of poems, rhymes, and singing of songs helps children use coherent sentences when speaking. Children spell using their enhanced phonetic ability and growing vocabulary.

Writing

Children begin to develop writing skills with guidance by using a combination of drawing, storytelling, and writing to convey an event or share an opinion.

With the introduction of phonetics, children begin to understand and document their ideas into words. Children are also introduced to the computer as a tool to produce and publish writing projects. They spell independently using their enhanced phonetic ability and growing vocabulary.

Mathematics

Our curriculum focuses on understanding the relationship between numbers and quantities. Kindergarteners learn to count to 100 by ones and tens and write numbers from zero to twenty. Children learn that each number refers to a quantity that is one larger as they count objects and say the corresponding number. Kindergarteners count objects (as many as 20) to answer “how many?”

Addition is represented using a variety of approaches; objects, fingers, drawings, sounds, verbal explanations, and equations. Subtraction is represented by putting together items and taking them apart to solve problems up to 10.

Music is integrated into the lessons to accelerate development of spatial temporal reasoning which is integral to the acquisition of important skills in mathematics.

Science

Our children are introduced to life science, physical science, earth science, and space science. They explore materials, objects, and events by observing them, altering them, and noticing what happens. We encourage our children to use all their senses to make careful observations of objects, organisms, and events, thereby developing measurement and classifying skills. They engage in simple investigations including making predictions, gathering, recording and interpreting data, recognizing simple patterns, and drawing conclusions.

Dance is integrated by adding and subtracting movements from a dance sequence within a science lesson to create a correlation to movement of materials and how their properties change.

Foreign Language

Introduction to foreign language incorporates songs, drawing, coloring, and cultural visual aids. Our children learn more easily when taught by song, especially when hand and body gestures are added. This engages children kinesthetically. Music and song also help to reinforce pronunciation and accent as well as vocabulary.