George M. Davis Jr. Elementary School

The intention of kindergarten reading instruction is to enable students to become engaged, purposeful, strategic readers.  Kindergarten students develop beginning reading and writing skills.  They learn how print works, how letters represent sounds within words, and that we can use those sounds to read and spell words.  Our literacy vision and program is intentionally designed to attend to the five pillars identified by the National Reading Council - phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Within Reading Workshop, teachers demonstrate beginning reading strategies such as using picture clues, recognizing familiar words, and using letter sounds to read new words.  Students have daily experiences reading books independently and with a partner.  At the beginning of kindergarten, readers may "tell" a story by looking at pictures and noticing what they see.  Later on, they learn how to use story patterns to predict what happens next.  Once they learn to recognize some words by sight, they begin to point to words on the page and read the text.  Eventually, they are able to use the letter sounds to sound out new words.  By the end of the year, most students are reading simple books independently.

Our writing curriculum aims to encourage students to express their personal experiences and ideas on paper through pictures and words.  We teach students how to correctly print letters and match letter sounds to the words they wish to write.  Early in the year, students learn about the writing process and they may express their ideas using non-conventional or inventive spelling.  As their skills develop throughout the year, their writing becomes more conventional and the readability increases.

In Kindergarten, instructional time focuses primarily on several important areas. The first is learning numbers and what numbers represent. The second is understanding addition as putting together and adding to, and understanding subtraction as taking apart and taking from. Students also learn to identify, name and describe two-dimensional shapes and three-dimensional shapes.