Kindergarten
Kindergarten is a special year at Tuxedo Park School as it holds many exciting firsts. As students move through the grades in primary school, they will always remember the first time they:
- Wear the official uniform of TPS
- Play on the “big kid” playground
- Share family-style lunch with the larger community
- Create art in the art studio
- Meet their seventh-grade buddy classmates
- Run the Kindergarten Post Office
- Perform an original play in front of the whole school
These experiences and more make kindergarten a year full of new experiences, challenges, and triumphs. Your child's kindergarten teacher is eager to partner with parents as their child continues building the foundational skills and habits for their current and future learning.
Our kindergarten program is a healthy balance of structure and exploration, work and play, and learning and inquiring. You will find all these qualities intertwined as we structure students’ exploration, encourage play as the work of childhood, and instill that learning happens through asking thoughtfully posed questions and experiencing the world around them. We strongly believe in developmentally appropriate education, also recognizing that chronological age isn’t always an exact match of what children need. We are careful observers of kindergarten learners, which enables us to tailor instruction so we engage each child’s interests and design appropriate challenges.
Five- and six-year-olds are:
- In need of lots of physical activity, including free play, to stretch their imagination, creativity, and cognitive skills.
- Eager to help, seeking adult approval and encouragement, and cooperative.
- In the very early stages of developing the ability to see another viewpoint other than their own.
- Thinking out loud and expressing themselves simply with few words.
- Enjoying repetitive activities, which develop their mastery over new skills and concepts.
- Acquiring new knowledge and skills in high volume, so they are still apt to make occasional reversals of letters and numbers.
- In need of time to attempt their own ways of doing things, even though some of these ways may, in adult eyes, be inefficient or ineffective.
- Responding best to frequent reminders and redirection that is warm yet firm, especially as they become increasingly apt to test limits during the course of their development over the year.
- Enjoying jokes, riddles, and opportunities to guess.
- Developing their story-telling skills, which are heavily influenced by illustrations that they see in books or that they create themselves.
English Language Arts
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Phonics
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Recognize and produce rhyming words
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Segment words into syllables
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Manipulate phonemes wit additions or substitutions in one-syllable words
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Write all manuscript letters in lowercase and uppercase
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Distinguish long and short vowel sounds within words
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Read and spell approximately 200 CVC words
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Spell other words phonetically, drawing on knowledge of sound-letter relationships
Reading
- Using strategies to read tricky words.
- Stopping and thinking about what is happening in books.
- Rereading in different ways.
- Talking about books with a partner.
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Use special powers such as “pointer power” to tap each word, check that their reading makes sense, and notice words they know “in a snap”
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Talk about what is happening in the book and why
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Use context clues, an early foundational skill of using text and pictures to make meaning
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Decode by utilizing phonics knowledge of letter sounds and patterns
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Recognize patterns in words
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Use their knowledge of letters and sounds to read tricky words
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Think and talk about books with motivation and fervor
This is a unit on nonfiction reading for beginning readers. It emphasizes the importance of learning from books. Children will practice thinking carefully about what their book is about and reading closely to look for new ideas and information. Students will be invited to notice all of the details in their books and be encouraged to ask questions such as, “What was this book about?” “What did it teach me?” “What can I teach someone else about this book?”
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Noticing more information in books
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Learning new things and words from pictures and words
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Comparing books about the same topic to create new understandings
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Build fluency and phonological awareness
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Track character feelings across a text
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Identify learned information
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Build literary conversational skills
Writing
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Write using drawings, labels, words and sentences.
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Teach others by writing “all-about” books on an expert topic
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Write stories about their life
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Learn to revise and edit their own writing
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Continuing the work of revision
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Developing writing partnerships
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Taking risks with spelling to write more words
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Incorporate sight words into writing
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Adding endings
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Talk, draw and write about true stories
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Use all I know about sounds, letters, and snap words to write books
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Utilize tools to improve my writing
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Revise my book to make it more interesting
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Edit my writing to make it more readable and share with others
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Use pictures and words to teach people how to do something
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Write and revise my how-to books by using what I learn from real authors
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Think about my reader as I write
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Revise and edit my writing for clarity by using multiple strategies
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Write my opinion to convince others
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Add more to my writing to make it more persuasive
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Craft petitions, persuasive letters, and signs that rally people to address problems in the classroom, the school, and the world
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Revise and edit my writing for clarity by using multiple strategies
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Sticking with one piece of information at a time
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Elaborating to say more on each page
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Making revisions
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Editing for ‘publication’
Literacy Assessments
Listening and Speaking
Children learn effective listening and speaking skills through a variety of classroom activities. In whole class situations, students listen to an individual speaker and take turns as they contribute to discussions. In smaller groups, they learn to communicate effectively to accomplish a task or play a game. We emphasize careful listening to directions and retelling of expectations. Children learn to share air time when speaking without interrupting the speaker. Children practice speaking and listening skills during voluntary sharing sessions, lunch time announcements, Town Halls each week, and Show and Tell. In addition, the Kindergarten performs a play for the entire school and attends the all-school assemblies which provide additional opportunities to listen and share.
Mathematics
The mathematics program in the primary school is designed to build strong thinkers and problem solvers who are proficient in a broad range of mathematical skills and possess a deep understanding of mathematical concepts. The core of our curriculum is TERC Investigations 3.0.
The Investigations curriculum is designed to support students to make sense of mathematics and to learn that they can be mathematical thinkers. A focus on computational fluency with whole numbers is a major goal throughout the elementary grades. Students work individually, in pairs, and in small groups. They learn to express their mathematical ideas as they explore each concept. The goal is for children to learn mathematical content and develop fluency and skill that is well grounded in meaning. Students learn that they are capable of having mathematical ideas, applying what they know to new situations, and thinking and reasoning about unfamiliar problems. A majority of instructional time in kindergarten is focused on representing, relating, and operating with whole numbers and describing shapes and space.
Investigations Mathematical Practices
- Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them
- Reason abstractly and quantitatively
- Construct viable arguments – verbally explain mathematical reasoning
- Model with Mathematics – Apply the math you know to solve real life problems
- Use appropriate tools strategically
- Attend to precision
- Look for and make use of structure and patterns
- Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning: look for general methods and for shortcuts
Recognizing that one-size-fits-all does not comprehensively address the fluctuating needs and skills of children, we enhance and enrich the core of our math program by drawing from a variety of published resources. This allows our skilled faculty to provide appropriate extension and support to meet the needs of each student. In all grades, math homework typically consists of assignments that provide further practice, extend daily topics to home applications, review previous material, and enrich understanding.
Social Studies
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Brazil
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France
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Greece
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Germany
Science
French
The most important skill for kindergartners to develop when learning a modern language is that of listening. Early in the year, students are exposed to a variety of directives in French, accompanied by physical gestures. These phrases are used throughout the year to promote familiarity with the sounds of the language and facilitate transitions between activities. Some of the language spoken at the beginning of each meeting is used for greetings, expressions of well-being, the calendar, and identification. The French specialist teacher reviews topics from the Pre-K French program and introduces new topics, including animals and post office vocabulary. Children learn to identify cognates to create an awareness of the connectedness between the languages of the world. Using art supplies also plays an important role in the development of concepts, as does literature, music, fingerplays, puppetry, games, and movement.
Art
In the art room, kindergarten students begin by exploring primary colors, understanding their relative strengths (i.e. yellow is a weaker color than blue or red) and mixing the primary colors to produce secondary colors. From there we move on to shapes, where we discuss how objects and images are composed of shapes. Students then create their own pictures using those shapes. Throughout the year we read picture books and discuss the illustrations. Often we read a book together and create our own version of either the subject matter or the illustrative style. Three-dimensional projects include cardboard sculpture and projects in clay. Each year, the culture study also inspires an art project. In recent years, such projects have included decorating a paper cut-out “pot” with ancient Greek patterns and figures and a three-dimensional painting of the Eiffel Tower for the study of France.
Music
Physical Education
The kindergarten PE program begins with the basic locomotor movements (i.e. walking, running, hopping, jumping) and non-locomotor movements (i.e. bending, balancing, twisting, swinging, rocking, and pulling). Using these basic movement skills, students learn to safely and efficiently move through space as they demonstrate skills of chasing, fleeing, and dodging. Incorporating rhythm and dance into these movement explorations is vital. The students are then introduced to manipulative skills using eye-hand and eye-foot coordination. Throughout all these activities, the focus is on skill development within the boundaries of correct decision making and cooperation with others.