Kindergarten Parent Guide
- English Language Arts
- Recommended Books
- Social Studies
- Mathematics
- Science
- Recommended STEM
- Special Education
- English as a New Language
- Library and Media Center
- Physical Education
- Visual Arts
- Music Education
English Language Arts
In our Kindergarten curriculum, we strive for a balanced approach, merging literature and informational texts while integrating phonics instruction and phonemic awareness to fortify your child's language skills. Alongside engaging activities like read-aloud sessions and shared readings, we place emphasis on playful interactions with literacy materials to foster exploration of diverse topics. Our focus extends beyond reading and comprehension; we actively nurture discussions that fuel language growth and unravel the mechanics of how words convey meaning through reading and writing. Within our 'reading or literacy experiences,' we seamlessly weave in printed and visual texts, while dedicating time to phonics instruction, phonemic awareness activities, and opportunities for writing development. By ensuring accessibility and relevance through culturally diverse books aligned with classroom themes, we create a dynamic learning environment. Our aim is to not only ignite a passion for learning but also to cultivate confident readers, equipped with phonetic skills, adept at understanding diverse texts, and capable writers ready to express their ideas.
Lifelong Practices of Readers
- Think, write, speak, and listen to understand
- Read often and widely from a range of global and diverse texts
- Read for multiple purposes, including for learning and pleasure
- Self-select texts based on interest
- Persevere through challenging complex texts
- Enrich personal language, background knowledge, and vocabulary through reading and communicating with others
- Monitor comprehension and apply reading strategies flexibly
- Make connections (to self, other texts, ideas, cultures, eras, etc.)
- Read for multiple purposes, including for learning and pleasure
- Self-select texts based on interest
- Persevere through challenging complex texts
- Enrich personal language, background knowledge, and vocabulary through reading and communicating with others
- Monitor comprehension and apply reading strategies flexibly
- Make connections (to self, other texts, ideas, cultures, eras, etc.)
Lifelong Practices of Writers
- Think, read, speak, and listen to support writing
- Write often and widely in a variety of formats, using print and digital resources and tools
- Write for multiple purposes, including for learning and pleasure
- Persevere through challenging writing tasks
- Enrich personal language, background knowledge, and vocabulary through writing and communicating with others
- Experiment and play with language
- Analyze mentor texts to enhance writing
- Strengthen writing by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach
By the end of the school year students are expected to:
Reading:
- Read emergent-reader texts with sufficient accuracy to support comprehension
- Develop and answer questions about a text.
- Retell stories or share key details from a text.
- Identify characters, settings, major events in a story, or pieces of information in a text.
- Identify specific words that express feelings and senses.
- Identify literary and informational texts
- Name the author and illustrator and define the role of each.
- Describe the relationship between illustrations and the text.
- Identify specific information to support ideas in a text.
- Make connections between self, text, and the world.
Foundational Skills
Print Concepts
- Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print.
- Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page.
- Recognize that spoken words are represented in written language by specific sequences of letters.
- Understand that words are separated by spaces in print.
- Recognize and name all upper- and lowercase letters of the alphabet.
- Identify the front cover, back cover, and title page of a book.
Phonological Awareness
- Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes).
- Recognize and produce spoken rhyming words.
- Blend and segment syllables in spoken words.
- Blend segment onsets and rimes of spoken words.
- Blend and segment individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken one-syllable words
- Create new words by manipulating the phonemes orally in one-syllable words.
Phonics and Word Recognition
- Know and apply phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words.
- Demonstrate one-to-one letter-sound correspondence by producing the primary sound or most frequent sound for each consonant.
- Decode short vowel sounds with common spellings.
- Decode some regularly spelled one-syllable words.
- Read common high-frequency words by sight..
- Read emergent-reader texts with sufficient accuracy to support comprehension
Writing:
Use a combination of drawing, dictating, oral expression, and/or emergent writing to:
- state an opinion about a familiar topic or personal experience and state a reason to support that topic.
- name a familiar topic and supply information.
- narrate an event or events in a sequence.
- Create a response to a text, author, or personal experience (e.g., dramatization, art work, or poem).
- Develop questions and participate in shared research and exploration to answer questions and to build and share knowledge.
- Recall and represent relevant information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question in a variety of ways (e.g., drawing, oral expression, and/or emergent writing).
Listening and Speaking
- Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse peers and adults in small and large groups and during play.
- Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions, including listening to others, taking turns, and staying on topic.
- Participate in conversations through multiple exchanges.
- Consider individual differences when communicating with others.
- Participate in a conversation about features of diverse texts and formats.
- Develop and answer questions to clarify what the speaker says.
- Describe familiar people, places, things, and events with detail.
- Create and/or utilize existing visual displays to support descriptions.
- Express thoughts, feelings, and ideas
A Parent’s Guide to the NYS Next Generation ELA and Math Learning Standards
Recommended Books
- Rainbow Stew written and illustrated by Catheryn Falwell
- Cora Cooks Pancit by Dorina Lazo Gilmore, illustrated by Kristi Valiant
- Rainbow Joe and Me written and illustrated by Maria Diaz Strom
- The Story I’ll Tell written by Nancy Tupper Ling, illustrated by Jessica Lanan
- The Skin You Live In written by Michael Tyler, illustrated by David Lee Csicsko
- Lovely by Jess Hong
- Strictly No Elephants written by Lisa Mantchev, illustrated by Taeeun Yoo
- The Colors of Us by Karen Katz
- Elmer’s Special Day by David McKee
- My Princess Boy by Cheryl Kilodavis
- It’s Okay to be Different by Todd Parr
- Dim Sum for Everyone by Grace Lin
- I Can See Just Fine by Eric Barkley
- Susan Laughs by JeanneWillis
- Lola Plants a Garden. Anna McQuinn
- Mango, Abuela, and Me By Meg Medina
- One Family by George Shannon
- Peeny Butter Fudge by Toni Morrison
- The NEW Small Person Lauren Child
- Where’s Lenny? Ken Wilson-Max
- You Can Do It Too! Karen Baicker
- Me, Too! By Annika Dunklee
- ABC for You and Me by Meg Girnis
- By Day, By Night by Amy Gibson
- Happy! By Pharrel Williams
- Maybe Something Beautiful by F. Isabel Campoy and Theresa Howell
- Lucia the Luchadora by Cynthia Leonor Garza
- The Rain Stomper by Boswell Addie
- Where’s Rodney? by Carmen Bogan
- Alfie (The Turtle that Disappeared) by Thyra Heder
Social Studies
In Kindergarten, the curriculum focuses on "Self and Others" and is structured into five units: Individual Development and Cultural Identity, Civic Ideals and Practices, Geography, Humans, and the Environment, Time, Continuity, and Change, and Economic Systems. These units, representing key social studies themes, can be presented in any order. Each unit aims to help students explore themselves within their immediate surroundings. Students delve into understanding the similarities and differences among children, families, and communities. The curriculum also covers American holidays, symbols, and traditions that foster unity. Emphasis is placed on teaching students about respect for others, as well as the rights and responsibilities of individuals.
Gathering, Interpreting and Using Evidence
- Ask questions.
- Recognize forms of evidence used to make meaning in social studies.
- Identify
- the author or creator of a book or map
- opinions expressed by others
Chronological Reasoning and Causation
- Retell an important life event in sequential order.
- Understand the concept of time measurements, including days and weeks.
- Identify
- causes and effects, using an example from his/her family life.
- change over time in his/her life.
- events of the past, present, and future in his/her life.
- routines and common occurrences in his/her life.
Comparison and Contextualization
- Describe an event in his/her life.
- Identify
- similarities and differences between home and school.
- similarities and differences between him/her and others.
Geographic Reasoning
- Ask geographic questions about where places are located and why they are located there, using location terms and geographic representations, such as maps, photographs, satellite images, and models.
- Identify
- natural events or physical features, such as land, water, air, and wind.
- how environment affects his/her activities.
- Patterns
- a human activity that changed a place.
Economics and Economic Systems
- Identify
- examples of scarcity and choices made due to scarcity.
- examples of goods and services. 3. Identify what money is and how it is used in society.
Civic Participation
- Demonstrate respect for the rights of others.
- Participate in activities that focus on a classroom or school issue or problem.
- Show respect in issues involving difference and conflict.
- Identify
- the role of the individual in classroom participation.
- situations in which social actions are required.
- the school principal and his/her role within the school.
- and follow rules in the classroom and school.
NYSED Social Studies Framework
Mathematics
In Kindergarten, students focus on two main areas: developing a strong understanding of numbers through the use of objects, and recognizing and describing shapes with spatial relations. The primary emphasis is on number development, with activities like counting objects, comparing sets, and solving simple quantitative problems using written numerals. In the Counting and Cardinality domain, students work towards a formal understanding of numbers, using them to represent quantities and solve problems. They also explore basic operations like addition and subtraction, though writing equations is encouraged but not required at this stage. In the Geometry and Measurement and Data domains, students describe the physical world using geometric concepts and learn about two-dimensional shapes like squares and circles, as well as three-dimensional shapes such as cubes and cylinders. Overall, the goal is to build a foundation in both numbers and shapes, preparing students for more advanced concepts in later grades.
By the end of the school year students are expected to:
Counting and Cardinality
- Count to 100 by ones and by tens.
- Count to 100 by ones beginning from any given number
- Write numbers from 0 to 20.
- Understand the relationship between numbers and quantities up to 20; connect counting to cardinality.
- Understand the relationship between numbers and quantities up to 20; connect counting to cardinality.
- Answer counting questions using as many as 20 objects
- Given a number from 1–20, count out that many objects
- Identify whether the number of objects in one group is greater than (more than), less than (fewer than), or equal to (the same as) the number of objects in another group
- Compare two numbers between 1 and 10 presented as written numerals.
Operations & Algebraic Thinking
- Represent addition and subtraction using objects, fingers, pennies, drawings, sounds, acting out situations, verbal explanations, expressions, equations, or other strategies
- Add and subtract within 10.
- Solve addition and subtraction word problems within 10.
- Decompose numbers less than or equal to 10 into pairs in more than one way.
- Find the number that makes 10 when given a number from 1 to 9
- Duplicate, extend, and create simple patterns using concrete objects
Number and Operations in Base Ten
- Place Value concepts 1 -20
Measurement and Data
- Describe measurable attributes of an object(s), such as length or weight, using appropriate vocabulary
- Directly compare two objects with a common measurable attribute and describe the difference.
- Explore coins (pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters) and begin identifying pennies and dimes.
- Classify objects into given categories
Geometry
- Describe objects in the environment using names of shapes, and describe the relative positions of these objects using terms such as above, below, beside, in front of, behind, and next to.
- Name shapes regardless of their orientation or overall size.
- Understand the difference between two-dimensional (lying in a plane, “flat”) and three dimensional (“solid”) shapes.
- Analyze, compare, and sort two- and three-dimensional shapes, in different sizes and orientations, using informal language to describe their similarities, differences, parts, and other attributes
- Model objects in their environment by building and/or drawing shapes.
- Compose larger shapes from simple shapes.
A Parent’s Guide to the NYS Next Generation ELA and Math Learning Standards
Science
In kindergarten, performance expectations guide students in exploring scientific questions like the impact of pushing or pulling objects, understanding animal habitats, and observing weather changes. The expectations cover various Disciplinary Core Ideas, including physical science, life science, earth and space sciences, and engineering and technology. Students develop an understanding of weather patterns, the purpose of weather forecasting, and the effects of forces on object motion. They also learn about the needs of plants and animals, recognizing the connection between their requirements and living environments. Key crosscutting concepts such as patterns, cause and effect, systems, interdependence, and influence of science and engineering on society are emphasized. The performance expectations focus on developing students' knowledge in scientific practices, including asking questions, using models, conducting investigations, analyzing data, designing solutions, argumentation, and information communication. Students are expected to apply these practices to demonstrate their understanding of core scientific ideas.
Matter and Its Interactions
- Plan and conduct an investigation to test the claim that different kinds of matter exist as either solid or liquid, depending on temperature.
Forces and Interactions: Pushes and Pulls
- Plan and conduct an investigation to compare the effects of different strengths or different directions of pushes and pulls on the motion of an object.
- Analyze data to determine if a design solution works as intended to change the speed or direction of an object with a push or a pull.
Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems: Animals, Plants, and Their Environment
- Use observations to describe patterns of what plants and animals (including humans) need to survive.
- Construct an argument supported by evidence for how plants and animals (including humans) can change the environment to meet their needs.
- Use a model to represent the relationship between the needs of different plants or animals (including humans) and the places they live.
- Communicate solutions that will reduce the impact of humans on living organisms and non-living things in the local environment.
Weather and Climate
- Use and share observations of local weather conditions to describe patterns over time.
- Construct an argument supported by evidence for how plants and animals (including humans) can change the environment to meet their needs.
- Use a model to represent the relationship between the needs of different plants or animals (including humans) and the places they live.
- Communicate solutions that will reduce the impact of humans on living organisms and non-living things in the local environment.
Recommended STEM
Special Education
Special Education Programs
A special education program means specially designed individualized or group instruction to address students’ academic goals in the areas of reading, writing, and math. The Committee on Special Education will determine appropriate program recommendations based on the continuum of services and students’ progress.
Related Services
Related services are supportive services required to assist a student with a disability and include speech-language pathology, hearing services, vision services, physical therapy, occupational therapy, counseling services, and parent counseling and training. A student’s need, identified through an evaluation, will provide the basis for written annual goals and appropriate provision of services.
Resource Room & Consultant Teacher
Resource Room is a special education program where students require specialized supplementary instruction in a small group setting outside the classroom for a portion of the school day. Resource Room is capped at five students per group. Consultant Teacher, another special education program, is for students who require additional specially designed individualized or group instruction within regular education classes.
Integrated Co-Teaching, or “Inclusion”
Integrated Co-Teaching (ICT) is a special education program where students require specially designed instruction in an individualized or small group setting for multiple subjects within regular education classes. A general education teacher and a special education teacher jointly provide instruction to a class that includes both students with and students without disabilities to meet the diverse learning needs of all students in a class. ICT is capped at 12 students with a disability.
Special Class
Special Class is a special education program where students with disabilities have been grouped together with similar individual needs and academic goals for the purpose of being provided specially designed instruction in a small-sized class without general education students. Students in a special class are exposed to the general education curriculum and are on a Regents pathway to graduation.
Supplementary Aids and Services
Supplementary aids and services are other supports (i.e., additional personnel, assistive technology, instructional modifications) that are provided in regular education classes, Specials, and in extracurricular and nonacademic settings to enable students with disabilities to be educated with nondisabled students to the maximum extent appropriate in accordance with the least restrictive environment.
English as a New Language
English as a New Language Services and Programs:
The district offers two programs for eligible and identified English Language Learners (ELLs).
ENL: In an English as a New Language (ENL) program, English Language Arts and content-area instruction are taught in English using specific ENL instructional strategies by a NYS certified ESOL teacher. This program typically serves ELL students from many different home/primary language backgrounds whose only common language is English and therefore cannot participate in a bilingual program. In an ENL program, there are two components to deliver instructional services, Stand-Alone and Integrated ENL services.
Stand-Alone: Stand Alone ENL is a separate time devoted to English language acquisition and English language development. The required amount of stand-alone ENL instruction depends on the English proficiency level of each student.
Integrated: In an integrated ENL class, an ESOL certified teacher provides services during the students' content area classes alongside their classroom teacher. Some content area classes that are integrated include English Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and/or Mathematics. Students receive core content area and English language development instruction, including the use of the home/primary language as support as well as appropriate ELL instructional supports to enrich comprehension.
Transitional Bilingual Education Program: Bilingual education uses the student’s native language (Spanish) as a tool of instruction while they begin learning English. This model is for English language learners who speak the same language.
The language goal of the program is for English language learners to learn English as quickly as possible and achieve success in their current academic placement and in the future.
For more information on our Bilingual & English as a New Language Related Services please visit our Bilingual, ENL & World Languages Department Webpage.
Library and Media Center
Information literacy is a skill necessary for today’s world of rapidly increasing information. Students will have to assimilate more information than has appeared in the last 150 years.
As a result of their schooling, students will be able to:
Information Literacy
- Recognize that information is available in a variety of formats, both print and nonprint.
- Identify the difference between fiction and nonfiction.
- Identify the difference between fact and opinion.
- Listen to a variety of high-quality children’s literature, representing a variety of genres, and understand the roles of author and illustrator.
- Actively listen when books are read aloud or viewed and be able to retell a story in correct sequence, identifying beginning, middle, and end.
Technology: Computers
- Identify and practice basic Internet safety rules.
- Introduce proper input techniques.
- Review hardware components appropriate for specific tasks (mouse, keyboard, printer, and monitor).
- Introduce kid friendly search engines, address bar, back and refresh button.
- Introduce symbols such as hourglass icon, cursor, scroll bar, desktop, and task bar.
- Work collaboratively with a team using information technology resources.
- Introduce how to use basic operation commands (opening and closing programs, using mouse to point and click, double click).
- Adhere to safety and security policies.
- Introduce why personal information should not be shared.
- Introduce how to prepare documents that include a variety of media.
- Explain the risks and dangers of sharing personal information.
Physical Education
Physical Education Lifelong Practices
- Demonstrates perseverance and resilience
- Advocates for self, others, and community
- Respects and embraces individual and cultural differences
- Adapts to multiple environments
- Acquires skills necessary to live a healthy life
- Demonstrates a commitment to safety
- Uses motivational strategies to encourage self and others’ participation in a physical activity
- Exhibits civility when confronted with adversity
- Connects the physical well-being to social emotional wellness
Visual Arts
The elementary art curriculum focuses on integrating aesthetics, studio art, collaboration, connections to literature, and art history in an engaging, creative, and imaginative environment emphasizing the Elements of Art and Principles of Design.
Art skills/fine motor skills are taught as scaffolded skills based on appropriate development of the young artist and accommodations are made for students to reach their individual goals.
- Exploring Materials: Students will learn how to hold and use materials such as: pencils, markers, crayons, paintbrushes, and scissors.
- Use of Principles of Design and Elements of Art: Students will touch on all aspects with a focus on line, shape, and pattern
- Cultural Connections: Students will explore worldly examples that coincide with the principles and elements studied to create their art
- Cross-Curriculum Connections: Students will use literature with illustrations to find numbers, lines, and letters that they already know and use it to create new images in art
- Reflections: Students will be introduced to looking and understanding their own craftsmanship i.e., staying in the lines, leaving no white spaces, and tracing on lines. They will also have the chance to look at the work of their peers to observe different variations of the assignment
Music Education
Our art and music programs help our students build perseverance and achievement, teach responsibility, expose students to history and culture, help improve coordination, reading, math, and social skills, as well as nurture self-expression and creativity. The arts connect us to the world and open our eyes to new ways of seeing.
Elementary Music Department Benchmarks & Skills
Music Appreciation
- Students will learn about history and genre throughout their experiences, building knowledge of key musical terms, analyzing melody and harmony, rhythm, and form. Students will learn to read, write, and compose music as well
Movement
- Reinforcing body awareness with various movement activities
Improvisation
- Exploring creativity through movement, rhythm, and pitch
Performance
- Giving opportunities for students to learn to sing, as well as use the recorder, ukulele, and world drumming, as a foundation to performing within an ensemble
Central Islip K-12 Full Music Curriculum