Building Positive Engagement by Connecting With Your Students
Your students are learning more with each passing day, and you’ve been learning too – about your students’ unique interests, abilities, and needs! The value of getting to know your students as individuals and continuing to nurture your relationships with them throughout the year cannot be overstated. Although it’s true that simply building strong relationships […]
Family Connections Build Strong Foundations!
As kindergarten teachers, you are the first contact that many families have with their child’s educational career—they are so lucky to have you! Taking advantage of the opportunity to connect with families helps them to stay positively engaged in their child’s education, which has long- term positive impacts for children. As you reflect on children’s […]
Using PALS Data: End-of-the-Year Tips
Part I: Sharing with Colleagues for First Grade Transition Spending time analyzing, reflecting, and sharing data can feel like “one more thing” during this busy time. We have found that it is one of “the things” that can make a huge difference in supporting the successful transitions of our students. Step 1. Reflect as a […]
Computation: Exploring the Progression of Skill Development
Mr. Williams is reading the book, Caps for Sale, about a peddler and some monkeys, to his kindergarten class. He recognizes that the book presents a great opportunity to practice addition and subtraction, as the monkeys take away and give back some of the 11 caps that the peddler is trying to sell. Today, he […]
Promoting Social Skills
Students’ interactions with their peers are important not only in their development of positive relationships, but also in their emerging attitudes toward school. A student who frequently gets in arguments with their classmates, for example, is less likely to look forward to going to school than a student who has mostly positive experiences with their […]
Geometry: Shape Recognition and Properties
Recognizing shapes and their properties is an essential skill we use daily in our lives. In kindergarten, learning this skill is not just about identifying shapes in an isolated way, but really seeing how they connect to the physical world we live in. For example, during an outside walk, students can find triangle shapes on […]
