Kindergarten Curriculum

🧠 CKLA: Amplify | Knowledge Strand (Background Knowledge & Vocabulary)

Kindergarteners engage with read‑aloud units centered on topics like Nursery Rhymes & Fables, Five Senses, Plants, and Farms. These units build background knowledge and introduce content-rich vocabulary in science, literature, and social studies. Each unit includes read-alouds, stories, pictures, and follow-up activities.  Children deepen their understanding of the world, boost their vocabulary, and build a knowledge base that supports stronger reading comprehension as they progress.

🔤 CKLA: Amplify | Skills Strand (Phonics & Early Literacy)

Students receive a daily 60-minute lesson focusing on foundational skills—phonemic awareness, sound-letter correspondence, early decoding, spelling, handwriting, grammar, and writing practice. Lessons are explicit and systematic.  Children will read colorful, fully decodable chapter books (fiction and nonfiction) that reinforce only the phonetic patterns they’ve learned, helping them “crack the code” of reading.

The Heggerty Phonemic Awareness curriculum is also used, providing students with consistent and repeated instruction to help develop a student’s decoding and encoding skills.  Phonemic awareness is a skill that is essential to teaching students to be automatic decoders of print.  Phonemic awareness is the ability to understand that spoken words are made up of individual sounds called phonemes, and it's one of the best early predictors for reading success.  Daily lessons teach early, basic, and advanced skills such as: rhyming and onset fluency; isolating final or medial sounds; blending and segmenting words, syllables, and phonemes; adding and deleting phonemes; substituting phonemes.

🔢 Zearn (Mathematics)

Zearn Math is a full curriculum designed to build strong math foundations and be developmentally appropriate for young students.  Kindergartners spend most of their time learning with their teacher and peer during teacher-led instruction (30-45 minutes doing fluency, word problems, and lessons).  During this time, students build deep understanding of new math ideas by working with concrete manipulatives, drawing pictorial representations, and engaging in back-and-forth math discussions.  Kindergarten has access to Zearn digital activities, which are short, engaging, activities designed to develop kindergartners' number sense. 

🌲 🇺🇸 Science and Social Studies

Kindergarten science and social studies concepts will be integrated in Knowledge lessons, weaving in vocabulary, discussion prompts, read-alouds, experiments, and classroom projects.  Our classroom also uses Scholastic: Let's Find Out (a nonfiction weekly reader) to expand our knowledge on seasonal science and social studies themes.