Kindergarten
Kindergarten Overview
The kindergarten program establishes solid foundations for each child’s future work in the major subject areas as well as in the fundamentals of appropriate social behavior, such as sharing with others, taking turns, and listening. Kindergarten uniquely features a fully integrated Judaic Studies and General Studies curriculum, in which the two teachers teach side by side all day, creating a classroom rich in American and Jewish stories, songs, and traditions.
Kindergarten Language Arts
Children in kindergarten are immersed in quality children’s literature. Teachers read stories aloud to an audience of increasingly attentive and eager students, who become inspired to tell stories of their own, incorporating their new vocabulary. Children in kindergarten learn to recognize letters (both in Hebrew and in English) by sight and by sound, pairing each new letter with short words that include that letter. In addition to practicing forming letters, children freely explore written language, often labeling drawings or dictating captions for a teacher to transcribe. These essential experiences in literature and phonemic awareness are the foundation for more formal reading instruction in later grades.
Kindergarten Social Studies
The focus of the kindergarten Social Studies curriculum is the sequence of holidays of the Jewish calendar and the American calendar. As each holiday approaches, the class hears stories, learns songs, and engages in art activities that reflect the significance and traditions associated with that day. Through block building, playing “house,” creating art, circle time, and playground activities, kindergarteners, with their teachers’ loving guidance, learn the most fundamental, yet challenging, skills of positive social interaction.
Kindergarten Math & Science
Children learn the basic mathematical principles of numeric order, patterns, measuring, and estimating, and see these principles in action as they count, sort, and organize collections of objects. Students celebrate the one-hundredth day of school by interacting with sets of one hundred items, from pennies to braids. The kindergarten Science curriculum is centered on the natural world, observing and caring for plants, animals, insects, and learning about the many cycles of nature. They begin to learn how the process of scientific observation works, observing, among other things, the metamorphosis of butterflies.
