KINDERGARTEN
ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS
Kindergarten is rich with opportunities for students to develop a love of reading and to see themselves as successful readers and writers. Kindergartners learn about the alphabet and its role in reading. They explore and practice rhyming, matching words with sounds, and blending sounds into words. Significant time is spent discussing fiction and nonfiction texts to learn about the world and to build vocabulary. Academic conversations help students apply foundational listening and speaking skills to learn how to understand, speak, and use words to communicate and actively engage within and beyond the classroom. Additionally, students experiment with writing through drawing, dictation, and writing to share information, ideas, and feelings. The ultimate goal of a balanced language arts curriculum is to build skills, independence, and passion to become lifelong readers, writers, and speakers.
Throughout the year, teachers use a variety of assessments to examine students’ strengths and areas of focus to support progress toward grade-level expectations.
Kindergartners learn and apply social and emotional skills in a variety of ways to become self-aware and nurture positive and respectful relationships with their teachers and peers. Creating a safe and inclusive community is foundational to a great year of learning for all.
SOCIAL STUDIES
Myself and Others
Using events from their own lives, kindergartners begin to explore and learn the basic historical concept of time. They study maps and learn about their place in relation to our region and the local environment. Kindergarten begins the foundation for the study of civics and government by recognizing that they are active classroom citizens. There are expectations to follow with appropriate rules for making their learning space special for everyone. Kindergartners develop economic awareness through the exploration of how families meet their needs. Students are introduced to the core values of democracy as they interact with others in their school community.
Visit the Michigan Social Studies Academic Standards for a complete view of the grade standards your child will be working toward in social studies. This curriculum is also aligned with the College, Career & Civic Life Framework for Social Studies State Standards.
SCIENCE
Kindergartners are curious about the world and how it works. Throughout the year, students engage in science learning experiences to connect their thinking, make observations, formulate new ideas, and make sense of the natural world and how it works. Kindergartners learn to apply Science and Engineering Practices to think like scientists.
MATHEMATICS
Kindergartners begin their math journey, developing their mathematical skills while applying the practices mathematicians use. They…
- Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
- Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
- Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
- Model with mathematics.
- Use appropriate tools strategically.
- Attend to precision.
- Look for and make use of structure.
- Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.
Kindergarten mathematicians are encouraged to be creative problem solvers and flexible thinkers. They work through challenging problems in small groups and on their own and develop independence and persistence. They develop their fluency skills by playing with numbers which allows them to think flexibly with methods and strategies to solve problems efficiently and accurately.
