Monticello Academy - Santa Clara, CA Kindergartens

Monticello Academy
3345 Lochinvar Ave, Santa Clara, CA 95051 / 3401 Monroe St, Santa Clara, CA 95051
Lochinvar campus (408) 615-9416 (408) 615-9416 / Monroe campus (408)261-0494

Kindergarten Curriculum Overview

At Monticello Academy, we believe in academic excellence as well as the emotional and social development of a student. The academic curriculum that we implement in our program is based on the California State Standards. Being a developmental based program, our curriculum is gauged in accordance to the educational level of each individual class every year as they progress from one grade level to the next. Our curriculum will vary year to year depending on the developmental ability and level of the upcoming grade. This overview will allow you to have a general understanding of what your child will learn throughout the school year.

Language Arts

Reading

In order to learn to teach reading in kindergarten, students will first develop their understanding about print and language in that they learn about the relationship between the words they hear and the phonemic structure of the language. Students will learn to analyze words at the phonemic level, work with phonemes in all positions in words, and produce sounds and adding, deleting and changing selected sounds. They will further begin to blend, segment, and manipulate words, expand beyond consonant-vowel-consonant words to more complex phonemic structures, and incorporate letters and align words through phonemic awareness activities. Students will develop an understanding for decoding words by reading from left to right simple words, generate sounds from all the letters, and blend those sounds into recognizable words. They learn to read simple three to four letter short vowel words and sight words. Word recognition is also highly emphasize in our program through that students will analyze high-frequency word, irregular high frequency words, word families, and word patterns. The other important step in reading is to learn how to match oral words with printed words, learn the conventions of stories, books, and other forms of literature and discriminate letters, words, and sentences.

Writing

Writing is emphasized at this level through penmanship and spelling. Students are first taught to spell phonemically the words they do not know. As they begin to read words, they should be taught to spell the words they can read. Students will also learn to spell high frequency words correctly.

Vocabulary Development

At the kindergarten level, besides learning about high frequency, sight, or rhyming words, they will also learn about concepts and vocabulary through grade appropriate concepts, such as animals and foods, and the words students hear and read in stories and informational text that are instrumental to comprehension. In addition, they will learn to use context and surrounding text to develop an understanding of an unknown word.

Reading Comprehension

At this level, students are learning to identify text that uses sequence or other logical order. They will be taught to follow one-step written instruction, and respond to who, what, when, where, and how questions. They also learn to use context to resolve ambiguities about the meaning of words and sentences. Students will make predictions about age-appropriate stories with supporting text, and be able to retell the central ideas of a simple expository or narrative passage.

Literary Response and Analysis

kindergartener will gain an understanding about the structure of stories or narrative texts in that there is a beginning, a middle, and an ending. In addition, they will learn the sequence or logical order of informational text, which is important in retelling stories. Students will also learn about plot, setting, characters and important events.

Listening and Speaking

Students will be taught to comprehend information presented orally, communicate ideas through speaking and writing, recall important information from narratives and informational text, and answering questions. They will speak with greater diversity into words beyond sight words (frequently used) with more complex grammatical structures. To respond to or produce complete, coherent sentences that use descriptive words or correct singular or plural nouns, students will be listening orally to various chapter books, poetry, and songs along with questions that will elicit responses from the students. They will be given opportunities to work in groups as well as individually.

Mathematics

In our Kindergarten math program, students will gain an understanding of and how to use the concept of ones and tens in the place value number system. They will add and subtract small numbers with ease. Students will further learn how to measure with simple units and locate objects in space. They can also learn how to describe data and analyze and solve simple problems.

Science

Kindergarten science enables students to learn about the world that is around them through observational activities that will teach them to become objective observers, noting the differences, similarities, and component part of materials, plants, animals, and earth over a period of time. Students learn to classify, compare, sort, and identify common objects. Their knowledge of science expands as they evolve their mind through observation, measuring, and predicting the properties of materials. They learn about evaporation, freezing, melting, plants and animals, landforms, and weather. In Kindergarten they learn about science through stories and relating to the stories through their own personal experiences. As a result, they learn to make predictions by using context and pictures, retelling familiar stories, responding to questions, and initiating questions about essential elements.

History-Social Science

The focus of the Kindergarten history-social science program is learning and working now and long ago. At this level, students learn the qualities of being a good citizen, recognize the national and state symbols and icons (national and state flag, bald eagle, and Statue of Liberty), match simple jobs that people do, identify related jobs at school, local community, and historical accounts, and compare and contrast the locations of people, places, and environments, describing their characteristics. kindergartener will develop an understanding about history in relation to people, events, and places of the past. In doing this, they begin to put events in temporal order through the use of calendar, placing days, weeks, and months in proper order.

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