Kindergarten
Kindergarten is a time to build the educational foundation of our young students. They are eager to explore and learn through various experiences, and teachers help develop a familiarity of routines and the structure of a classroom. Kindergarteners enter school with a variety of skills and strengths. As a result, children are continually challenged and supported as opportunities arise through play, instruction, and exploration. We aim to build confidence in our students as learners in the classroom and to foster caring relationships and social skills as we nurture our learning community.
Learning in Kindergarten
Through a variety of experiences, students are provided with a foundation of literacy skills including letter identification, sound symbol correspondence, rhyming, blending, segmenting, decoding, and encoding skills. They will learn sight words, begin to use reading strategies, and be introduced to basic comprehension skills. Writing in kindergarten begins with storytelling allowing students to learn the key elements of a story. During the year, they will write procedures, narratives, and nonfiction pieces. We use the Fundations Literacy program, Michael Heggerty’s phonemic awareness program, the Guided Reading model, small and whole group lessons, as well as independent work.
Lessons in the Everyday Math program provide the foundation of math skills for kindergarten students at Westshire. Supplemental lessons, activities, and games are also part of the math program. Together, these experiences allow students to develop understanding in counting and cardinality, reading and writing numbers, patterns in numbers, basic addition and subtraction, shapes, graphing, comparing numbers and groups of items, and relationships between numbers. They use math language to explain and support their thinking daily.
In Kindergarten Science is approached as a hands-on interactive process. Through the scientific method children are learning about themselves and the world around them including the five senses, magnets, animal and plant life cycles, and weather.
The Kindergarten Classroom is a Responsive Classroom. We focus on understanding the roles and responsibilities of being part of a caring group of learners. We learn about our immediate community and the people who comprise it as well as an exploration of a variety of cultures in our world.