Kindergarten

The youngest children begin to learn about social structures through what they know: their families and each other. How families and individuals are similar and different are subjects that are explored through play, discussion and stories. Some of these experiences become departure points for other discoveries of countries and cultures. Holidays, birthdays and celebrations also provide opportunities to begin widening the perspective of students as they start to understand that not everyone is the same when it comes to festivities, food and community.

A sense of classroom identity and responsibility is fostered through rotating classroom jobs, daily cleaning and meetings and participation in some of the decisions that affect individuals and the group as a whole. 

Kindergarteners are active do-ers, makers, learners and players who need to move their bodies and explore their world with all their senses. They especially enjoy doing this with friends, and they begin to play more cooperatively with greater understanding about rules and fairness. Their dramatic play, block play and physical games illuminate moments of compassion, cooperation and social maturity alongside occasional conflict or disagreement.

Teachers build classroom environments, daily routines and learning opportunities that are emotionally safe and enjoyable for children, where supportive interactions and trust are the norm. From this foundation, teachers support children to build ownership of the class expectations and responsibilities, to understand the give-and-take of play and to use their words to express feelings, wants and needs.

Other important social-emotional work at this age includes learning to work cooperatively with a group and following norms for listening, sharing ideas and participating in the range of learning tasks and activities. The Second Step curriculum also supports students learning about important skills of emotional awareness, self-regulation and social communication. 

In the language-rich environments of kindergarten classrooms, children grow their capacity for verbal expression, listening and early literacy skills as they experience the books, songs, games, circle times and activities that incorporate these language skills into each day. They work with letters, print and symbolic representations in a natural and playful setting, as well as in small group lessons and activities. Phonological awareness — the essential component of later reading ability — is developed and practiced through word play, rhyming, singing, reading the morning message, making lists, learning letters, sounds and syllables.

Play allows for rich social interactions for literacy to emerge, and children begin to use written language in meaningful ways such as writing their name and the names of friends or family members, labeling pictures, writing about their experiences in a journal, making signs and charts, writing or dictating simple books, stories and poems individually or as a class. 

Children are immersed in the reading-aloud of many picture books and beginning chapter books and learn to identify and discuss some of the elements of story, characters and other interesting details. Reading aloud non-fiction is also an important part of the curriculum, as children build understanding about emergent themes, interests and areas of study.

The school library program provides a weekly opportunity to explore and pursue their own reading interests and further develops their joy for reading. The Handwriting Without Tears curriculum is used to help build foundational writing skills like pencil grip and letter formation. 

At this level the main focus is the foundation of number sense: counting, one-to-one correspondence and the understanding of numerals to represent quantity. Children gain the ability to sort and count quantities of objects, to group numbers and objects into sets and to understand and represent relationships in number, size, shape and quantity. Recognizing patterns and sorting by attributes are intrinsically satisfying ways for young children to see numbers as relationships among objects, not isolated facts.

The foundations of understanding addition, subtraction, equality, zero and bigger numbers are established as children work with concrete objects and problems in the real world. Place value — the understanding that a numeral’s position impacts its quantity (ones, tens, hundreds) — is practiced through daily calendar routines and other activities. Teachers plan math experiences with many materials, games and visual models, to allow for a hands-on construction of mathematical knowledge — talking about and using numbers in blocks, puzzles, games, manipulatives, nature and real-world situations, stories and songs. As children explore and play in the classroom and outdoor settings they gain experience with comparison, measurement, geometry, collecting and representing data. Math activities at circle time, picture books and a daily calendar routine allow teachers to model mathematical curiosity, vocabulary and interest. 

The Bridges math curriculum, beginning in kindergarten, serves as a foundational resource to build consistency of method, language and experience. 

Science with the youngest children is centered on observation, sensory exploration and asking questions aloud: What will happen if…? How do you know that…? Why is…?

Curiosity in children is understood to be innate, but the focusing of it helps build cause and effect reasoning and other critical thinking skills. Making predictions is encouraged before an experiment is undertaken. Physical experience and play with a rich assortment of materials (e.g., blocks, sand, water, marble runs, magnets, prisms, bones and natural artifacts) provide important opportunities to explore and test ideas and construct scientific knowledge.

Teachers scaffold this learning by extending an experiment, asking open-ended questions, guiding discovery, presenting contradictory experiences and encouraging children to share what they learn with their classmates. Exploration of animal and plant kingdoms is often based on the woods, the gardens and the meadow right outside our classrooms. Other popular topics at this age include trees, insects, spiders, dinosaurs, space, magnetism, force and motion, mixing colors and cooking or kitchen science.