Curriculum

Children will be able to sort common objects into categories, such as shapes or foods, to gain a sense of the concepts the categories represent. For example, they might group apples, bananas, and carrots separately from circles, squares, and triangles during an activity.

Children will be able to explore word relationships and nuances in word meanings with guidance and support from adults. For example, they might discuss different shades of meaning between words like "tall" and "high" or understand how "look," "glance," and "gaze" differ in context and intensity.

Children will be able to use singular and plural nouns with matching verbs in basic sentences, such as "He hops" for singular and "We hop" for plural.

Children will be able to demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing, for example, by correctly capitalizing proper nouns and the first word in sentences, using periods and question marks appropriately, and spelling grade-level appropriate words accurately.

Children will be able to capitalize the first word in a sentence and the pronoun "I," for example, changing "i am happy." to "I am happy."

Children will understand how to write a letter or letters for most consonant and short-vowel sounds (phonemes). For example, they will write "b" for the /b/ sound in "bat" or "a" for the /a/ sound in "cat."

Children will understand how to spell simple words phonetically, drawing on knowledge of sound-letter relationships. For example, they might spell the word "fish" as "f-i-sh" based on their understanding of the sounds associated with each letter.

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 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 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-."