What Will My Kindergartener Learn?

Social Development

• Develop positive self-esteem.
• Learn to work and play with others.
• Learn to work independently.
• Learn to follow directions and classroom expectations.
• Demonstrate respectful and responsible behaviors.

Physical Development

• Learn to use classroom equipment and supplies appropriately.
• Develop large motor skills involving body movement and coordination through running, skipping, and rhythmic activities.
• Develop small motor skills by using clay, tracing activities, and cutting.

Reading Readiness

Kindergarten is a critical time to lay the foundation for becoming a successful reader.  Your child will learn to:

• Recognize and name both upper and lower case letters.
• Correctly say each letter’s sound.

Concepts of Printed Materials

• holding a book correctly;
• tracking words left to right;
• reading from the top to the bottom of the page;
• identifying the front and back cover and title page;
• understanding the correlation between spoken and printed words.

Beginning Reading Skills

• Identify initial and final sounds in spoken words.
• Identify rhyming and non-rhyming words (sun/run vs. sun/man).
• Determine word meanings from the way they’re used in a sentence.
• Identify characters, setting, and key events in a story.
• Retell stories in the correct sequence.
• Follow two and three-step directions using picture clues.
• Identify facts in non-fiction text.

Writing

Early writing skills are reported using one of five stages, showing continual growth from kindergarten through the primary grades.

1. Stage 1 involves pictures and scribbling.
2. Stage 2 moves your child to the use of random letters, sometimes with correct initial sounds.
3. Stage 3 involves the use of initial sounds or both the initial and final sounds—mostly consonants (i.e., lk for like).
4. Stage 4 increases the use of vowels (lk becomes lik). As the words become longer, students begin to show an understanding of multiple-syllable words.
5. Stage 5 uses many correctly-spelled words in multiple, related sentences.

Writing Objectives

• Generating story ideas as a class and drawing pictures to match.
• Working as a group to draft a story.
• Writing from left to right and showing space between words.
• Writing the alphabet in both upper and lower case letters.
• Writing first and last name on school papers.