Our day begins at 8:00 a.m. We welcome the children into the class room. After morning prayers, the children get settled at their tables and we begin our morning journaling period. Journaling time is designed to help the children develop and strengthen many skills including: fine motor skills, proper writing, paper and pencil position, sound and letter recognition, recognizing letters and their most common sounds.

Inventive Spelling: to help children become comfortable and knowledgeable with the process of writing, using pictures and text to create a story.

Calendar and Weather studies follow at 8:45 am. This is a critical time of the morning. The Calendar and Weather Frog are invaluable tools that help to teach: days of the week, today, yesterday and tomorrow, the correct use of weather words, sentence structure, one-to-one correspondence, quantities and numerals, counting 2-digit numbers, counting to 100, counting on, patterns, graphing, place value (ones, tens and hundreds).

Snack time begins at 9:30 am, and is a favorite with the kindergarteners. A healthy snack or “brain food” is always suggested.

Math comes after snack. We work together on learning and developing the following skills: recognizing numbers 0 through 30, writing numbers clearly, rote counting, skip counting by 2’s, 5’s and 10’s, understanding math vocabulary, understanding patterns, constructing simple graphs, identifying one-to-one correspondence, understanding non-standard measurement and weight, placing objects in sequential order, recognizing and understanding ordinal numbers, developing concepts of addition and subtraction, learning about time, using estimation skills in a variety of math scenarios and understanding positional/directional words. As our 100th day approaches, many of the children can already count to 100!

Language Arts follows Math. We strive to achieve the following goals for reading readiness: developing the children’s ability to recognize upper and lower case letters and their knowledge and understanding of: rhyming words, beginning, middle and ending sounds of words, high frequency words, recognition of first and last name, recognition of classmates’ names, reading and identifying color words, understanding key elements of stories, making predictions in a story, identifying fiction and non-fiction texts. The experiences the kindergartener has throughout the school day helps to build their language skills. Group discussions, being read to in the classroom and during library period, music (songs associated with the printed word), interactive games on the Smart Board as well as other creative games help develop their alphabet awareness and sound/letter correspondences.

After Language Arts, we prepare for recess and lunch.

In the afternoon Religion is taught. We base our curriculum around the church calendar, following the We Believe text and striving to be faithful to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Our book embraces the four pillars of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Creed, Liturgy and Sacraments, Moral Life and Prayer.

Through our curriculum, our daily lessons may also include: Science, Social Science, Physical Development and Health, Fine Arts, Foreign Language, Social/Emotional Development (developing self-awareness and self-management skills to achieve school and life success). Another afternoon favorite of the kindergarteners is “Star of the Week.” Each child takes a turn becoming the class’ center of attention for the entire week. With the help of family members, each child brings in a poster with pictures and stories concerning their family, friends and favorite events. They enjoy and take pride in explaining to their classmates, in detail, each picture and what it represents to them. There is a question and answer period afterwards (which, left to the students, could go on indefinitely). The “Star of the Week” brings in four of his or her favorite books and towards the end of the day, can pick a book to be read to the class. The “Star” gets to sit next to the teacher as the book is read to the class. We also have a variety of specials throughout the week. They include the following:

I thank you for visiting my website. I look forward to having you visit our kindergarten classroom!