Kindergarten

Curriculum

In Kindergarten, we spend our year working on building a foundation of computer skills! At the beginning of the year, we start with learning the physical hardware of the computer, and begin to talk about the difference between hardware and software. We also discuss important rules and expectations for the computer lab before students are able to log in for the first time.

Once students are comfortable in the computer lab and are able to identify the different parts of a computer's physical hardware, we jump right into learning to log in! Students in Kindergarten log in using Clever badges, which are small QR codes. The first set of skills we focus on in Kindergarten are mouse skills. Students tend not to have much background with computer mice, so we spend time discussing the 3 different buttons, how the mouse needs to be on a flat surface, how when we click it needs to be still. Once students have a good idea how the mouse works, we play games that focus on two main mouse skills; point & click, and drag & drop. I will be including links to various games used to support these skills at the bottom of this page!

After students have mastered working with the computer mouse, we move into the very beginning of keyboarding. Kindergarten focuses on finding the letters on the keyboard so they can begin to type their names! I will also be including two games I use to support keyboarding skills at the bottom of this page as well.

These skills bring us to the month of December, which is where a shift in curriculum occurs! In December each year, techies worldwide celebrate something called "The Hour of Code," which is a campaign organized by Code.org to inspire students to learn more about coding. Believe it or not, our Kindergarten students spend the month learning to code basic computer programs! Teaching them these basic programming skills is an important prerequisite for our January curriculum, which is all about programming robots! Students will be working with age appropriate robots, and will be collaborating with one another to program their robot through an obstacle course in the classroom!

After our unit on robots, we spend February, March and April working with different websites to help build students' numeracy and literacy skills. These websites are also helping students continue to build their mouse and keyboarding skills as well!

We end our year with two last units; one on Internet Safety, and an intro to word processing (Google Docs) to help prepare them for the 1st grade curriculum. These two units help to pull everything we've worked on over the course of the year together.

Online Resources