The Ontario Kindergarten Program

Welcome to Kindergarten!

Full-Day Kindergarten is an engaging, inquiry and play-based program for four and five year-olds in Ontario.

Kindergarten students learn from an educator team consisting of an Ontario Certified Teacher and a Designated Early Childhood Educator.

This partnership helps create a nurturing learning environment that encourages new ideas and supports the unique needs of each child. Learn more here.

An Overview of the Full Day Kindergarten Program

The Power of Play-Based Learning

Learning Through Inquiry

Play is how children make sense of the world. Much of children’s learning takes place through play. Play engages children’s attention when it offers a challenge that is within the child’s capacity to master.

When children are learning through play you might see them:

  • Making choices, sharing materials, trying new things;

  • Noticing letters on signs and using letters and words to make signs;

  • Labelling their drawings and writing simple stories;

  • Filling a container with sand or water, pouring it out, measuring it, counting the number of scoops, comparing;

  • Arranging, stacking, and building with blocks of different sizes and shapes;

  • Drawing, painting, creating and animal with modelling clay;

  • Running, jumping, throwing, catching, hopping, skipping;

...Or you might hear them:

  • Talking, sharing ideas, discussing something with each other and with adults;

  • Wondering aloud, questioning, using new vocabulary;

  • Explaining, suggesting, planning.

Children are naturally curious about their surroundings. They want to explore and investigate how things work and why things happen the way they do.

When children are learning through inquiry, you might see them:

  • Exploring objects and events, noticing patterns and properties;

  • Observing using all of the senses, and recording observations;

  • Comparing, sorting, classifying, interpreting, building, creating.

… Or you might hear them:

  • Making predictions and sharing theories (“I think that…”);

  • Generating questions;

  • Sharing and discussing thoughts and ideas.

Literacy and Learning

Children have already had a wide range of experiences with spoken, written, and visual communication, and have used language in familiar contexts before beginning school. They have also developed ways of using language that are specific to their cultural and linguistic contexts.

When children are engaged in literacy, you might see them:

  • Sorting and comparing magnetic letters and using them to make their name;

  • Sharing their solution for joining the structures they made with blocks;

  • Dramatizing a familiar story;

  • Holding books the right way up, using a finger to demonstrate left to right directionality;

  • Beginning to recognize the difference between letters and words;

  • Following the print using a finger or a pointer and recognizing some words;

  • Writing random strings of letters and beginning to leave a space between words.

...Or you might hear them:

  • Saying “ I knew it said “ spider” because I used the picture.” ;

  • Saying “ It is a ‘T’. It starts just like my name.” ;

  • Asking to hear familiar stories over and over again;

  • Expressing their thoughts, ideas, and opinions;

  • Asking questions;

  • Retelling familiar events or stories.

Making Meaning of Mathematics

Children have an intuitive knowledge of mathematics which they have developed through their curiosity about the world in which they live and the experiences that they have had in it.

When children are engaged in mathematics, you might see them:

  • Counting everyday items such as cars, stairs or the number of steps from place to place;

  • Estimating the number of steps from the front door to the kitchen and then checking out their prediction;

  • Filling containers with water in the bath to find out which holds more, which holds less, and how many smaller containers it takes to fill a bigger container.

...Or you might hear them:

  • Solving problems using numbers: “ Four children want to sit at the snack table. There are only two chairs there. How many more will I need?”;

  • Identifying different shapes in their environments: “ This juice can is a cylinder. The carpet is a rectangle.”;

  • Singing songs or reciting stories with a pattern: “ Old MacDonald had a Farm, e-i-e-i-o.” “ Brown Bear, brown bear what do you see…”;

Click below to read more about the Kindergarten Program.

Click here to access some documents in other languages.

Communicating Children's Learning.mp4