Kindergarten

Literacy includes reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Our kindergarten literacy curriculum develops foundational skills and competencies, enabling our students to: 

• Demonstrate phonemic awareness.
• Recognize and name capital and lower-case letters.
• Use knowledge of letter sounds to decode words and read kindergarten sight words.
• Demonstrate comprehension of stories and informational texts; ask/answer questions about key details from a text; compare/contrast adventures and experiences of characters in a text.
• Read and understand grade-level text with independence.
• Apply sound-letter knowledge in written work and begin to understand the writing process.
• Write using illustrations, including writing text that accompanies a related picture and self-generated writing.
• Participate in collaborative conversations with peers and adults.

Our kindergarten math curriculum focuses on the foundational skills and essential concepts that enable our students to:

• Know number names and the count sequence.
• Count to tell the number of objects. 
• Compare numbers. 
• Understand addition as putting together and adding to, and understand subtraction as taking apart and taking from.
• Work with numbers 11-19 to gain foundations for place value.
• Describe and compare measurable attributes.
• Classify objects and count the number of objects in categories. 
• Identify and describe shapes.
• Analyze, compare, create and compose shapes. 
• Developmentally appropriate understanding of the eight Standards for Mathematical Practice.

Our kindergarten science curriculum focuses on the foundational skills and essential concepts that enable our students to:

• Compare the effects of different strengths or different directions of pushes and pulls on the motion of an object.
• Analyze data to determine if a design solution works to change the speed or direction of an object with a push or a pull.
• Make observations to determine the effect of sunlight on Earth's surface.
• Use tools and materials to design and build a structure that will reduce the warming effect of sunlight on an area.
• Use observations to describe what plants and animals need to survive.
• Share observations of local weather conditions to describe patterns over time.
• Use a model to represent the relationship between the needs of different plants or animals and the places they live.
• Ask questions, make observations and gather information to define a simple problem that can be solved through the development of a new or improved object or tool.

Our kindergarten social studies curriculum focuses on the foundational skills and essential concepts that enable our students to:

• Create questions and explore facts.
• Gather information with guidance.
• Evaluate a source by distinguishing between fact and opinion.
• Ask and answer questions about arguments and explanations.
• Explain how weather, climate and other environmental characteristics affect people’s lives. 
• Compare life in the past with life today. 
• Explain the significance of our national holidays.

Our kindergarten social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum focuses on the foundational skills and essential competencies that enable our students to:

• Develop social-emotional life skills such as listening, focusing attention, following directions and identifying emotions.
• Collaboratively work and play with peers in activities that require sharing, taking turns and cooperation.

Our kindergarten health curriculum focuses on the foundational skills and essential competencies that enable our students to:

• Identify and employ methods of health promotion and illness prevention (e.g., hand washing, brushing/flossing teeth, cleanliness).
• Demonstrate and employ safety methods to reduce risks (e.g. traffic, strangers).

Our kindergarten art curriculum focuses on the foundational skills and essential competencies that enable our students to:

• Engage in exploration and imaginative play with materials.
• Engage collaboratively in creative art making in response to an artistic problem.
• Through experimentation, build skills in various media and approaches to art making.
• Identify safe and nontoxic art materials, tools, and equipment. 
• Create art that represents natural and constructed environments.
• Explain the process of making art while creating.
• List details and identify subject matter of works of art.
• Create art that tells a story about a life experience.

Enrichment class exposes all kindergarten students to in-depth learning experiences from the following curricula:

• ReadyGEN curriculum for English language arts (ELA)
• Go Math! curriculum for mathematics
• STEMscopes curriculum for science

Kindergarten is the first of three consecutive grade levels in which all District 401 students are provided enrichment instruction. All students in grades K-2 receive weekly enriched lessons, which are taught by the District's elementary school enrichment teachers.

Our kindergarten music curriculum focuses on the foundational skills and essential competencies that enable our students to:

• Create musical ideas for a specific purpose.
• Demonstrate and choose favorite musical ideas.
• Apply personal, peer or teacher feedback in refining musical ideas and performances.
• Demonstrate a final version of personal musical ideas to peers.
• Explore and demonstrate awareness of musical contrasts in a variety of music selected for performance.
• Demonstrate awareness of expressive qualities that support the performers' expressive intent.
• Perform music with expression and appropriately for the audience.

Our kindergarten physical education curriculum focuses on the foundational skills and essential competencies that enable our students to:

• Demonstrate control when performing fundamental locomotor, non-locomotor and manipulative skills.
• Participate in moderate to vigorous physical activity while performing basic movement patterns.
• Understand spatial awareness and relationships to objects and people.
• Understand how to execute basic movement patterns.
• Demonstrate safe movement in physical activities.
• Follow directions and procedures while participating in physical activities.
• Work independently on tasks for short periods of time.
• Work cooperatively with another to accomplish an assigned task.

Our kindergarten technology curriculum focuses on the foundational skills and essential competencies that enable our students to:

• Recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world, and act and model in ways that are safe, legal and ethical.
• Communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals.