Page • Ms. Coots Kindergarten Year at a Glance

ELAR-

Oral Language: Students practice listening actively, asking and answering questions, following multi-step oral directions, speaking clearly, sharing ideas, taking turns, and participating appropriately in discussions. They also develop everyday social communication skills such as greetings and expressing needs and wants.
Phonological Awareness: Students learn to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken language. Skills include rhyming, identifying beginning sounds, recognizing words and syllables, blending and separating syllables and phonemes, and manipulating sounds to form words.
Phonics and Spelling: Students connect letters with their sounds and use these relationships to read and spell simple words, including VC, CVC, CCVC, and CVCC patterns. They also learn to recognize and spell at least 25 high-frequency words.
Print Concepts and Handwriting: Students learn how books work, including the front and back covers, title page, direction of reading, spaces between words, and the difference between letters and words. They identify uppercase and lowercase letters and practice correctly forming all letters.
Vocabulary: Students expand their vocabulary by using picture and digital resources, illustrations, and texts. They learn and use words related to actions, directions, positions, sequences, categories, and locations.
Independent Reading: Students begin selecting and interacting with age-appropriate texts independently for increasingly longer periods.
Reading Comprehension: With adult support, students learn to ask questions, make predictions, visualize, make connections, draw inferences, identify important information, use evidence, synthesize ideas, and monitor their understanding while reading or listening to texts.
Responding to Text: Students respond to stories and other sources through speaking, writing, drawing, and other forms of communication. They retell texts, make personal connections, use text evidence, and apply newly learned vocabulary.
Literary Elements: Students identify basic elements of stories, including characters, setting, main events, problems, resolutions, and themes.
Genres: Students become familiar with different types of texts, including folktales, fables, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, poetry, drama, informational texts, persuasive texts, and digital/multimodal texts.
Author's Purpose and Craft: Students begin recognizing why authors write and how authors use words, text structures, pictures, print features, and graphics to communicate ideas and influence readers.
Writing Process: Students learn to plan, draft, revise, edit, and share their writing. They practice basic grammar, capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and sentence formation with adult support.
Writing Genres: Students compose or dictate personal narratives and informational texts, using pictures, oral language, or written words to communicate ideas.
Research and Inquiry: Students learn to ask questions, follow simple research plans, gather information from different sources, understand the information they find, and present their findings through written, oral, or multimodal formats.

Math:

Counting and Cardinality: Students learn number names and counting sequences, count forward and backward to at least 20, and connect numbers to quantities. They understand that the last number counted represents the total number of objects, regardless of how the objects are arranged.
Number Sense: Students read, write, represent, and compare numbers from 0 to at least 20. They identify quantities that are more than, less than, or equal to another quantity and understand one more/one less. They also compose and decompose numbers up to 10.
Addition and Subtraction: Students understand addition as joining and subtraction as separating. They solve addition and subtraction problems within 10 using objects, drawings, models, and number sentences and explain the strategies they use.
Mathematical Problem-Solving: Students apply mathematics to everyday situations. They learn to analyze information, make a plan, find and justify solutions, and evaluate whether their answers make sense. They use manipulatives, real objects, drawings, paper and pencil, technology, mental math, and other appropriate tools.
Mathematical Communication: Students communicate mathematical thinking using words, numbers, symbols, diagrams, graphs, and models. They learn to explain and justify their mathematical ideas using appropriate terminology.
Money: Students identify common U.S. coins by name, including pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters.
Patterns and Number Sequences: Students practice counting to at least 100 by ones and tens, beginning from different numbers.
Geometry: Students identify and describe circles, triangles, rectangles, squares, cylinders, cones, spheres, and cubes. They classify and sort shapes and solids based on their characteristics, regardless of size or orientation, and create two-dimensional shapes using different materials.
Measurement: Students identify measurable attributes such as length, capacity, and weight. They directly compare objects and describe which has more or less of a particular attribute.
Data Analysis: Students collect, sort, and organize information into two or three categories. They create real-object and picture graphs and use the graphs to draw conclusions.
Personal Financial Literacy: Students learn basic financial concepts, including ways people earn income, the difference between income and gifts, skills needed for jobs, and the difference between wants and needs. They learn that income can be used to meet wants and needs.

Science

Scientific and Engineering Practices: Students ask questions, identify problems, conduct simple and safe investigations, collect and organize observations, use tools, analyze information, develop models, and design solutions.
Scientific Safety: Students learn and demonstrate safe practices during classroom, laboratory, and outdoor investigations.
Tools and Models: Students use age-appropriate tools such as hand lenses, thermometers, rain gauges, sifters, flashlights, measuring objects, and plant-life-cycle models to observe, measure, compare, and investigate.
Data and Evidence: Students record observations and measurements using pictures, numbers, words, symbols, and simple graphs. They use evidence to explain findings and evaluate whether designs work.
Communication and Collaboration: Students communicate explanations and solutions in different formats, work with others, listen to classmates, and participate respectfully in scientific discussions.
Nature of Science: Students learn that science uses evidence to develop explanations and predictions. They are introduced to observations, inferences, hypotheses, and scientific theories and understand that scientific knowledge can change as new evidence and technology become available.
Science and Society: Students learn how scientific discoveries and innovations can help people and explore the work of scientists and engineers such as Isaac Newton, Mae Jemison, and Ynes Mexia.
Recurring Science Concepts: Students identify patterns, cause and effect, systems, structure and function, energy, matter, change, and stability and use these concepts across different areas of science.
Matter: Students identify and classify objects according to observable properties such as shape, color, texture, and material.
Force, Motion, and Energy: Students investigate how magnets push and pull and explore how light affects what they see. They learn that light can pass through some materials and be blocked by others, creating shadows.
Earth and Space: Students explore patterns involving day and night, the Sun, Moon, stars, clouds, and weather. They classify rocks by observable characteristics and investigate air and wind.
Earth Materials: Students learn that rocks, soil, and water are useful resources in everyday life.
Plants and Animals: Students learn that living things depend on their environments for basic needs. Plants need air, sunlight, water, nutrients, and space, while animals need air, water, food, space, and shelter.
Plant and Animal Structures: Students identify plant structures such as roots, stems, leaves, flowers, and fruits and explore animal structures that help animals see, hear, move, and interact with their surroundings.
Plant Life Cycle: Students observe and describe the stages of a plant's life cycle: seed → seedling → plant → flower → fruit. They also recognize similarities between young plants and their parent plants.

Social Studies

History: Students learn about patriotic holidays such as Independence Day, Veterans Day, Presidents’ Day, and Constitution Day. They also learn about historical figures, including Stephen F. Austin, George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and José Antonio Navarro.
Geography: Students learn basic location concepts such as over, under, near, far, left, and right. They use maps and globes and identify physical features, weather, resources, and ways geography influences people's lives.
Economics: Students distinguish between needs and wants, identify basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter, and learn how people meet those needs. They also identify jobs and understand why people work.
Government: Students learn why rules are necessary for order, safety, and security and identify authority figures in the home, school, and community.
Citizenship: Students recognize the U.S. and Texas flags, recite the U.S. and Texas pledges, and practice voting as a way to make group decisions. They are introduced to American beliefs, principles, patriotism, and democratic values.
Culture and Family: Students identify similarities and differences among people and explore the importance of family traditions and customs, including comparing traditions among families.
Technology: Students identify technology used at home and school, explain how it helps people accomplish tasks, and consider how life would be different without modern technology.
Social Studies Skills: Students gather information from oral, visual, and historical sources; identify evidence and artifacts; organize and sequence information; communicate through speaking, writing, pictures, and maps; and understand chronological terms such as before, after, first, last, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Problem-solving and decision-making: Students practice working independently and collaboratively, using democratic procedures, identifying problems, considering possible solutions, implementing decisions, and evaluating results.