• To realize that God calls us to celebrate ourselves, our world and His love.
• To experience a deeper understanding of faith concretely by exploring a variety of ways that God is present in Creation.
• To engage in teaching behaviors that have a profound, positive effect on daily experiences in the classroom and by complimenting religious efforts in the home.
• To explore the range and intensity of human emotions by encouraging self esteem, self acceptance and self expression.
• To create an atmosphere for treating others with care and learning to believe in a caring and loving God by identifying with Jesus who came to serve, and by affirming loving acts, e.g. sharing, waiting, listening and helping.
• To create an atmosphere for understanding the goodness of God and the meaning of deeper realities of life found in Tradition and Scripture by presenting the Bible as a special and holy book of faith.
• To build upon the sense of wonder in recognizing the presence of God in our lives, and responding to Christ’s call to lead others to prayer establishing that prayer is a way to share thoughts and feelings with God.
• To create a readiness for growth in God’s family through relationships and simple rituals, by introducing feasts of Mary, Joseph and the other saints and by presenting special opportunities for joy in living the spirit of the Liturgical Year.
  

• Students love to hear the stories of Jesus and are very willing to share their faith experiences. The use of the “big book” (This Is Our Faith) is a springboard for discussion.
• The “prayer table” changes monthly and introduces the children to the sacramentals of our Faith. . . (holy water, statues of Jesus and the Children, the Blessed Mother Mary, St. Joseph and the Crucifix, medals, rosaries etc.).   The Bible is also prominently displayed on the table.
• A “church tour” provides the students an up close and personal view of things they see from the pew. It affords them the opportunity to ask questions about what interests them in the church setting.
• The season of Advent has many hands-on types of activities as the students learn the story of Jesus’ birth. The “advent wreath” and the “strawless manger” activities encourage daily acts of kindness and are sent home to share with family members.   The “nativity scene” is built in stages as the story of the birth of Jesus unfolds.
• A separate “church visit” during Lent focuses on the “Stations of the Cross” as depicted in the windows. The students use stations books as they learn the story of the Passion. During Lent they pray the Stations as a part of their daily prayer.
• In the “We Believe” text the students make little “take home booklets” centered on the weekly lesson. Again, this is a way of sharing faith with their families.
• The students have the opportunity to attend Mass on the holy days, All Saints’ Day, the feasts of the Immaculate Conception and the Ascension. They attend    prayer services on Ash Wednesday and in May for May Crowning.
• During the month of May lessons focus on the Mysteries of the Rosary. As the students learn to pray the rosary they visit the various statues of Mary on the grounds of the school and say a decade of the rosary.   In the classroom we make a May altar and the students are encouraged to bring a flower to decorate the table.  

Course Title: Reading Readiness/Language Arts

• To provide a literature enriched classroom in which students are immersed in communication skills which develop their abilities to listen, read, think, write and speak.
• To focus the language arts program on providing opportunities to build on language development and to emphasize reading as a form of communication.
• To stimulate creative expression through rich language experience by reading various forms of literature.
• To encourage progress in language skills in relation to individual ability and learning style.
• To develop the ability to use language with ease, clarity and purpose in both oral and written communication.
• To respond to literature in creative and enjoyable ways through writing, speaking, drama and the visual arts.
• To provide opportunities to develop library skills so as to use the library as a source of information on a wide variety of subjects.
• To develop the students auditory and visual discrimination skills.
• To develop phonics, word recognition and comprehension skills. 

• To have the students develop an understanding of the value of mathematics.
• To have the classroom atmosphere foster the development of logical thinking and problem solving.
• To have students use concrete materials regularly on varied activities.
• To provide many opportunities to explore, investigate and discover.
• To encourage students to interact with each other to enhance understanding through verbalizing and visualizing.
• To have students understand numbers, ways of representing numbers, relationships among numbers and number systems.
• To have students understand the meaning of operations, how they relate to one another and to compute fluently.
• To have students understand the measurable attributes of objects and the units systems and processes of measurement.
• To have students formulate questions that can be addressed with data and collect, organize and display relevant data to answer them.

• To permeate the content and process of science with Christian values, namely, the sacredness of all life, the establishment of peace in the world, and the never ending work of justice and the responsibility to be co-creators in the continuing progress of humanity.
• To temper scientific knowledge with Christian values.
• To see that students, through the use of basic scientific skills and Christian values, will be prepared for citizenship in the global community.
• To sort and categorize facts from home and school and explain the categories to others.
• To recognize the great diversity in animal life and their specific characteristics.
• To identify different types of plant life and their usefulness to people.
• To recognize that the environment around us made up of living and non-living things and their impact on daily living.
• To identify the characteristics of the seasons and the impact the changes of the seasons have on plant and animal life.
• To describe the physical and material properties of objects and how these properties predict how and object will interact with other objects. 

• Members of a family care for each other, have different duties to each other and share affection and responsibility for one another.   Every member of a family has value and is needed.
• All individuals depend on other people and on the environment to provide for their needs.
• In their places of employment, some workers produce good (farmers, miners etc.) and some provide services (clergymen, public officials etc.).
• There are connections associated with time: past, present, long ago along with those of yesterday, today and tomorrow.
• Our country, church, parish, catholic school and community have a history.
• Groups of people have rules and expectations. Some are written, some are spoken (i.e., families, classrooms athletics, clubs etc).  
• All people are brother and sisters regardless of where they are in the world.
• The family is the first and most important group to which the child belongs.
• There is conflict, cooperation and interdependence among individuals, group and cultures of the world.                            
  

Significant Curriculum Guidelines

Religion readiness is a vital part of the Catholic School Kindergarten Program. From concrete life experience, they will learn the meaning of love and being loved in a family setting. Students realize that they are special not only in their own family, but in God’s family through Baptism. In a loving atmosphere of security and trust, the student is introduced to loving goodness of God as shown in the gifts of creation and through His great gift, Jesus. By becoming acquainted with the life of Jesus, the student learns by being guided by the Spirit of Love, to witness to God’s love in the world.

Therefore the students will:

1. Realize that God calls us to celebrate ourselves, our world and His love.
2. Experience a deeper understanding of faith concretely by exploring a variety of ways that God is present in Creation.
3. Engage in teaching behaviors that have a profound, positive effect on daily experiences in the classroom and by complimenting religious education efforts in the home.
4. Explore the range and intensity of human emotions by encouraging self-esteem, self-acceptance and self-expression.
5. Create an atmosphere for treating others with care and learning to believe in a caring and loving God by identifying with Jesus who came to serve, and also by affirming loving acts e.g. sharing, waiting, listening and helping.
6. Create an atmosphere for understanding the goodness of God and the meaning of deeper realities of life found in Tradition and Scripture by presenting the Bible as a special and holy book of faith.
7. Built upon the sense of wonder in recognizing the presence of God in our lives, and responding to Christ’s call to lead others to prayer establishing that prayers is a way to share thoughts and feelings with God.
8. Create a readiness for growth in God’s family through relationships and simple rituals by introducing feasts of Mary, Joseph and the other saints and by presenting special opportunities for joy in living the spirit of the Liturgical Year.

Teaching Strategies Used

Students will:

• Take part in whole group discussions as students work though the topics from the “We Believe” textbook.
• Participate in a variety of think-pair-share activities.
• Complete a multiplicity of hands on activities.
• Be allowed to act out many stories from the Bible.

Special Features

Students will:

• Use the textbook “We Believe.” It will be used as a resource to initiate important class discussions. For homework, students will share this learning with their families.
• Share their faith with their families by constructing a booklet from their textbook
• Be permitted to pray at a prayer table that is set up in the classroom.  The items on it are changed according to the each season in the Liturgical year.
• Participate in a church tour, which provides them with an opportunity to ask questions about the church so to have a better understanding of the environment in which they are praying.
• Take part in a “Nature Walks” during the 4 seasons of the year to discover God’s world that surrounds our school.
• Practice and pray on a daily bases in the classroom. The students will have many opportunities to practice during class and at a weekly mass.
• Participate in Paraluturgical celebration to enhance the meaning of their faith.
• Be taught the Mysteries of the Rosary during the month of May. As the students learn to pray the rosary we tour the school and visit the many statues of Mary to enhance the devotion to Mary.
• Attend Mass with an 8^th grader on a weekly bases, and for any holy day celebrations.
• Use multi media to reinforce learning.

Evaluations

• Students are evaluated by their ability to express an understanding and devotion to God as they complete personal assignments in their workbooks.
• They are also evaluated on the reverence they demonstrate when praying in class and during liturgy.
• Evaluations are recorded on report cards.

• For homework students will practice the Sign of the Cross, Glory Be, Angel of God, Hail Mary, and the Our Father.

Significant Curriculum Guidelines

Reading readiness/language arts begins at birth and continues throughout a lifetime. It develops through many informal and planned activities of within the family and school environment during felid trips, show and tell and the use of audiovisual materials. Some of these activities are: distinguishing between left and right, top bottom progression, eye-hand coordination, recalling stories and happenings in sequence, following directions, perceiving rhyming words, developing phonemic awareness, recognizing the alphabet in mixed order along with the sounds associated with each letter, to learning to appreciate books in a literature rich environment by listening to stories read aloud and taking part in picture reading.

The students will develop skills in phonics, fluency, comprehension, listening, speaking, and literature appreciation. They are offered opportunities for reading to their own readiness level. In addition decoding skills are offered to students in a multi-level format.

Handwriting skills are also developed and as students individually evidence a desire to print, they are shown the correct letter formation and instructed to write on the baseline. Students are encouraged to use their natural hand preference for all handwriting work.

Communication skills are fostered when students have the spontaneity and encouragement to express their ideas verbally through written and picture form. With all thin is mind the students will:

• Be provided with a literature rich classroom in which they are immersed in communication skills that develop their abilities to listen, read, think, write, and speak.
• Be provided with an opportunity to build on language development, and to emphasize reading as a form of communication.
• Be provided with an opportunity to stimulate creative expression through a rich language experience by reading various literacy forms.
• Encouraged to develop their language skills in relation to individual ability and learning styles.
• Develop the ability to use language with ease, clarity, and purpose in both oral and written communication.
• Respond to literature in creative and enjoyable ways through writing, speaking, drama and the visual arts.
• Be provided with the opportunity to communicate using technology such as computers, audio videotapes, and cd’s to give students experience in composing and delivering communications for such media.
• Be provided with the opportunity to develop library skills so as to use the library as a source of information on a wide variety of subjects.
• Be provided with the opportunity to develop the student’s auditory and visual discrimination.
• Be provided with the opportunity to develop phonics, word recognition, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension skills.

Teaching Strategies Used

Students will:

• Develop phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension through the use of the Harcourt Kindergarten “Trophies” reading program.
• Participate in large group instruction to develop phonemic awareness tasks. They will follow a systematic, developmental sequence and will be able to isolate, match, blend, segment, delete, and add phonemes to build an awareness of words through a variety of phonemic awareness activities. 
• Take part in small and large group explicit systematic phonics instruction. Students will learn the letter sound correspondence and how to decode and build and blend words on a daily bases.          
• Be introduced to a variety of literature selections that help students build vocabulary with the use of big books, read-aloud anthologies, library book collections, and individual decodable books.
• Listen to stories being read aloud, and on tape, they will also choral read, echo read, and read independently to develop reading fluency.
• Develop comprehension strategies as the teacher guides students before, during and after reading. The students will explore many story elements such as characters, setting, and important events to monitor comprehension.
• Participate in educational games to reinforce Reading Readiness concepts.
• Use multi media such as shaving cream, water, play dough to enhance the curriculum.
• Listen to music to develop listening skills.
• Role-play stories to develop reading comprehension.
• Write in a journal to develop at early age the connections between reading and writing.
• “Show and Tell”, and “Make and Tell” to build verbal skills.
• Participate in a movement and dance program to develop Reading Readiness skills.
  

Special Features

Students will:

• Participate in a “Kindergarten News” activity to develop phonics instruction so children understand the relationship between the letters and sounds of spoken language and to use this relationship to read and write words.
• Participate in introductory phonics lessons on each letter of the alphabet and their corresponding sound. This will be presented in a large group format using reprintables from the Trophies instruction manual. Instruction is used to teach children to notice, think about, and work with sounds in the spoken language.
• Participate in word wall and sight word activities. Reproducible books will be used for phonics instruction to help children recognize familiar words accurately and automatically decode new words.
• Sequence storybooks and story cards to develop fluency, and to provide a bridge between word recognition and comprehension.
• Participate in a word search and portable words walls activities to develop vocabulary. This will allow the students learn to the meaning of new words that are not a part of their oral vocabulary.
• Share book shares to develop instruction in comprehension. This activity can help students understand what they read, remember what they read, and communicate with others about what they have read.

Evaluations

• Hand writing samples to evaluate writing skills
• Periodic quizzes are given to evaluate sound letter correspondence
• Individual screening of letter and sound recognition.
• Diocesan writing assessments are administered at the end of the academic year.
• Portfolio writing samples are collected and evaluated through out the kindergarten year.
• Testing is administered: PMA (Primal Mental Abilities Test); MRT (Metropolitan Readiness Test) Writing Assessment
• Homework will be assigned once a week and will focus on the skills being taught that week.

Significant Curriculum Guidelines

Science will enable the students to develop an awareness of their own living environment. Using their senses, the students experience the natural world through experimentation, observation, and discovery about plants, animals, weather and the four seasons.

Students will:

• Permeate the content and process of science with Christian values, namely the sacredness of all life, the establishment of peace in the world, and the never ending work for justice and the responsibility to be co-creators in the continuing progress of humanity.
• Temper scientific knowledge with Christian values.
• Understand that students, through the use of basic scientific skills and Christian values, will be prepared for citizenship in the global community.
• Categorize and sort artifacts from home and school and explain the categories to others.
• Recognize the great diversity in animal life and their specific characteristics.
• Identify different types of plant life and their usefulness to people.
• Recognize that the environment around us is made up of living and non-living things and their impact on our daily living.
• Identify the characteristics of the seasons and the impact the changes of the seasons have on plant and animal life.
• Describe the physical and material properties of objects and how these properties predict how an object will interact with other objects.

Teaching Strategies Used

Students will:

• Participate in hands on science experiments to provide for a better understanding of science concepts in our science lab.
• Record/draw predictions and results of a science experiment.
• The use of the KWL chart to assess prior knowledge, what they will learn and what they have learned.
• Develop a “Tree Journal” to record and observe seasonal changes.
• Use multi media to reinforce learning.

Special Features

Students will:

• Participate in simple science experiments.
• Visit the local Children’s Museum.
• Plant seeds to have a better understanding of plants and how they grow.
• Carve a pumpkin according to the class vote at Halloween.
• Make a collection of seeds and display them in mini muffin pans.
• “Bird watch” out the window.  Discuss migration and our responsibilities toward wildlife. 
• Take an “Observation Walk” to note seasonal changes outdoors.
• Read science based literature to develop specific science concepts.

Evaluations

• Homework will be assigned once a week and will focus on the skills being taught that week.
• Student observations during experiments in the science lab.
• Journal writings.
• Work in Young Explorer evaluated.

Course Title: Social Studies   

• Learn and be happy in school. Every student must respect teachers and all the other persons who serve them during their school day.
• Understand that members of a family care for each other, and share affection and responsibility for one another. They will also learn that every member of a family has value and is needed.
• Recognize that all individuals depend on other people and on the environment to provide for their meals.
• Understand that in their places of employment, some workers produce goods (farmers, miners etc.) and some provide services (clergymen, public officials etc.)
• Describe and speculate about physical system changes, such as seasons, climates, weather, and the water cycle.
• Explore connections associated with time: past, present, long ago, along with those of yesterday, today and tomorrow.
• Recognize that all people are brothers and sisters regardless of where they are in the world.
• Know that there is conflict, cooperation and interdependence among individuals, groups and cultures of the world.
• Understand that science and technology play an important role in helping us to understand the world around us.
• Know that the family is the first and most important group to which the child belongs.

Teaching Strategies Used

• Be introduced to the customs of a community and around the world during large group instruction.
• Participate in class discussions about their personal experiences in relationship to their families and communities. 

• Use vocabulary preview poster to reinforce social studies skills.
• Read big books to make connections between family, friends and community.
• Use big atlas to help students develop basic map skills.
• Sing songs, recite poems, use fingerplays, and drama so students can become active participants in their learning.
• Participate in the “Give Me 5” strategy is used to follow reinforce classroom rules.
• Make a classroom flag at the beginning of the year to enhance cooperation and citizenship.
• Participate in role play to demonstrate fair/unfair situations.
• Participate in a daily job chart to develop socialization skills.
• “3 Strikes, You’re Out” discipline code is followed and used when/if necessary.
• Visit a Fire Station.
• Learn about the Postal System.
• Read stories about famous presidents of the United States.
• Use paper dolls to show the differences and functions of clothing of various cultures of the world.
• Use multi media to reinforce learning.
    

• Fill in and complete monthly calendar.
• Observe students as they complete daily calendar activities.
• Responses to questions before, during, and end of each lesson to assess for understanding.
• End of unit chapter assessment.
• Homework will be assigned periodically and will reinforce skills being taught.

Course Title:  Library Science

Faculty Name:  Bernadette Durkin

Textbooks:   N/A

Publisher:  N/A

Copyright:  N/A

Website:  N/A

Significant Curriculum Guidelines                                                                         
Students will be introduced to the process of using and enjoying the library.  These objectives will be utilized in structuring the lessons:

• To demonstrate an ability to follow library procedures and maintain appropriate

      behavior in the library.

• To identify and select books from the library.   
• To identify and utilize information from specific parts of a book.
• To demonstrate an appreciation for various types of literature.
• Enjoy literary selections by listening to stories and poems read by the teacher.

Teaching Strategies Used

The children will have a library class each week.  They will become familiar with the circulation procedure, care of materials, and identification of the specific parts of a book.

They will be encouraged to become acquainted with the “Easy/Picture Book” section of the library.

Special Features

·        The children will be permitted to select and borrow a book from the library. 

·        Books are borrowed for a period of one week. 

·        A fine of five cents per day is assessed for overdue books.

·        A story will be read to them during each library class. 

·        Various types of literature and authors will be presented.

Evaluations

There will be a weekly review of library etiquette and procedures as well as a discussion of previously read stories.