Kindergarten News

Later this week, you will receive your student’s first kindergarten report card. Their grades in each subject area will be reported on a three-level scale. Here is a summary of what each grade stands for:

• CE=Consistently Evident: This means the student completed the work up to our expectations for this point in the year with few or no errors.

• Dev=Developing: This means the student’s work is approaching but not quite up to our expectations and/or that the work contains more than a few errors.

• HD=Having Difficulty: This means that the work is well below expectations or that it contains a significant number of errors.

In addition to the grades in academic areas, there is a section titled “Learner Behaviors” to allow us to report on their progress in non-academic areas such as their ability to stay on task while completing assignments. Students in kindergarten do not receive grades from their special classes (PE, Information Technology, Art, Music, Personal Wellness) on this report card, but they will get grades for those classes in the 3rd and 4th marking periods.

In the enVision math curriculum, the third marking period begins with a unit focused on teaching students to do subtraction and how to use the minus and equal signs to write subtraction equations. Then, we will move into a unit in which they have to complete both addition and subtraction to solve story problems. Students will be using a variety of ways to represent and solve these problems such as counting on their fingers, making drawings to represent the story or counting on/counting back.

In our language arts instruction, students will continue to work in leveled reading groups to develop their skills in reading words and sentences independently. Look out for a letter that will come home periodically to report on your child’s current place in the progression of levels. In whole group instruction, we will continue to model and practice comprehension skills through questioning and discussions about fiction and non-fiction texts that we read aloud. We will also be progressing from studying individual letters and letter sounds to working on reading CVC words (three letter words with a “short vowel” in the middle such as “cat” and “big”) and recognizing common spelling patterns such as the -an pattern at the end of words like “pan” and “man.”

Finally, in the third marking period focus shifts from Social Studies lessons to Science lessons. In this marking period, students will complete activities that will help them learn about winter and how people and animals deal with winter, an experiment in which we try to grow seeds and see how withholding water, light and soil affect their growth and the study of the life cycles of animals.