Curriculum

Children will be able to produce and expand complete simple and compound declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences** in response to prompts. For example, they might respond to a prompt by saying, "I like ice cream" (declarative), "Do you like ice cream?" (interrogative), "Please pass the ice cream" (imperative), or "Wow, that ice cream looks delicious!" (exclamatory).

Children will be able to determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on kindergarten reading and content. For example, they might use context clues from a story to figure out that the word "bat" can mean an animal or a piece of sports equipment, depending on the sentence.

Children will be able to demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings.** For instance, they might discuss similes and metaphors, such as "as fast as a cheetah," and explore the meanings of words that are similar or related, like "happy" and "joyful."

Children will demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking. For example, during a classroom presentation, they might correctly use past tense verbs or plural nouns in their spoken sentences.

Children will be able to demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.** For example, they will write sentences that correctly use capital letters at the beginning and proper punctuation at the end, such as "I love to read!"

Children will be able to identify new meanings for familiar words and apply them accurately. For example, they will recognize that "duck" can refer to a bird and also understand it as the verb "to duck" under something, using context clues to determine the correct meaning in different situations.

Children will be able to sort words into categories to gain a sense of the concepts the categories represent.** For example, they might group words like "red," "blue," and "green" under the category of "colors," or "shirt," "pants," and "hat" under the category of "clothing."

Children will be able to print all upper- and lowercase letters. For example, they might write the alphabet, showing correct formation of letters like "A," "b," "C," and "d" in both uppercase and lowercase.

Children will be able to capitalize dates and names of people.** For example, they might write, "My birthday is on April 5," and "I met Emily at the park."

Children will be able to use the most frequently occurring inflections and affixes (e.g., -ed, -s, re-, un-, pre-, -ful, -less) as clues to the meaning of an unknown word. For example, they might deduce that "helpful" relates to providing help because of the suffix "-ful," or understand that "redo" means to do again because of the prefix "re-."