Kindergarten
Kindergarten is a year filled with explorations. As we welcome our new students to Spence, we fill their days with opportunities to get to know one another and their new school. Our goal is to foster each child’s growing sense of self and appreciation for her classroom and school communities. Students develop ways to care for one another in the classroom, exploring feelings along with the concepts of cooperation, responsibility and respect. We aim for all students to develop a love of learning and a sense of excitement. Two teachers are assigned to each Kindergarten class. Teachers integrate each day’s lessons, frequently presenting academic material in the context of play or creative activities. Children also learn to navigate the building as they travel to the library, gym, dance studio and music room. Art, science and Spanish are taught in the homeroom. K–4 teachers help establish their classroom community within the first six weeks of school and throughout the year. As part of the Responsive Classroom practice, students help create their classroom rules, engage in morning meetings and use collaborative problem-solving strategies. Students are encouraged to care for themselves, one another and their school community.
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In daily read-alouds, students are introduced to new ideas and vocabulary, they make predictions and ask and answer questions. During writer’s workshop, students share stories from home, create books, recipes, lists, signs and labeled pictures for our classroom community. Students learn to read as authors read, looking for words, rhythms and patterns in the English language that they might use in their own writing.
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Class projects focus on students developing fine motor skills. Students learn to represent their ideas in identifiable form and gain artistic independence. They also explore texture and arrangement in collage and learn to convert a 2-D surface into a 3-D shape. Students form and glaze clay pinch pots, make finger puppets and use their puppets to share stories.
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Students learn basic ballet positions and vocabulary through the lens of 15 dance concepts. The class starts with the BrainDance, a sequential and holistic exercise, then explores dance concepts, practices technical skills and creates dances through improvisation.
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Students develop daily math routines; they count and compare amounts, explore quantities and deter- mine what comes next in a sequence. They are introduced to sorting and classification of objects, patterns of two or more variables and simple bar graphs. Students develop a greater sense of the number 10 through the use of visual images, 10 frames and Rekenreks.
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Students engage in foundational locomotor movements, such as running, galloping, skipping, hopping and jumping. Balancing, transferring weight, jumping, landing and rolling skills are also introduced in tumbling.
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Students learn to make careful scientific observations, measure with different tools and record their findings in notebooks with pictures and words. Through engaging content that is connected to the social studies curriculum, Kindergarteners explore their five senses, build wood planters and study the life cycles of plants, butterflies and ladybugs in the science garden.
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Students sing, play group games, read aloud and participate in movement activities and art projects, all of which are part of our immersion pedagogy. They learn an “Hola, buenos días” song and explore the vocabulary for feelings and emotions. They study colors and numbers (0–20) and use their emerging vocabulary to play games, as well as to count and identify familiar objects.
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Kindergarten social studies emphasizes cooperation and interdependence within communities that are important to students’ daily lives: their family, classroom and school. The curriculum begins with an in-depth Identity study where students explore and celebrate their similarities and differences. We work to create an environment that supports the exploration and understanding of identity through the use of accurate language, stories, math projects, art, family shares, and music. During the second half of the year, the Science Department collaborates with homeroom teachers on a farm-to-table curriculum. Students investigate how food is grown, manufactured and transported. Students visit a working farm, local greenmarkets and grocery stores while also growing vegetables on our science terrace. Literacy, math and writing are integral parts of the study.
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Through studying the musical work “Carnival of the Animals,” by Saint-Saens, students learn musical concepts through a variety of multisensory activities. Ensemble singing requires the students to practice concepts such as musical memory and rhythmic, melodic and harmonic accuracy.
