Kindergarten
Kindergarten is where the magic begins! All students who turn five by September 30 are eligible to be enrolled in RPS kindergarten. Kindergarten is designed to be a foundational academic year, where students gain critical knowledge, as well as the social-emotional and behavioral skills, that are necessary for their later academic success. Children who enter school kindergarten-ready are significantly more likely to read on grade level by third grade, and strong attendance in kindergarten is linked to future academic outcomes, including high school graduation.
ELA
Your kindergartener will receive daily instruction in phonics, phonemic awareness, and reading comprehension. By the end of kindergarten, students are expected to use letter-sound relationships to blend sounds, decode words, and read grade-level high-frequency words and decodable texts with increasing accuracy and fluency.
Students are expected to build vocabulary and knowledge and demonstrate comprehension of literary and informational texts read aloud to them by adults. With prompting and support, students should ask and answer questions, identify characters, settings, important events, main topics, and key details; retell stories in sequence; make connections and predictions; and use evidence from the text to support their thinking. Teachers use UFLI for phonics instruction and EL Education for language comprehension.
Math
By the end of the year, your child should be able to count to 100, count collections of up to 30 objects, compare attributes of different objects, add and subtract up to 10, and extend patterns. All kindergarten classrooms follow the Eureka Math for VA curriculum, a high-quality instructional curriculum that works to build student knowledge.
Science
Science in kindergarten is all about exploring the world around us. Students use their senses to make observations and explain interactions. They’ll learn to pose simple questions and conduct investigations, and observe, classify, and communicate information about the natural world.
Social Studies
Similarly, kindergarten social studies is all about students understanding themselves, their family, their school, and their community. They’ll gain an introduction to rules and responsibilities, and learn basic geography and about historical figures. By the end of the year, they’ll be able to describe locations using maps and compare the past and the present. All schools use the Five Ponds press curriculum.
Additional Learning Opportunities
Kindergarten students at RPS also receive exposure to the arts, including fine arts and music, as well as the library and PE classes. Many schools also offer periodic Spanish-language instruction — please reach out to your school principal to learn if this is an option.
Social-emotional Skill Development
In kindergarten, students should be developing the ability to recognize and manage basic emotions, follow classroom routines, take turns, share materials, and interact respectfully with others. They should begin building friendships, showing empathy, resolving simple conflicts with adult guidance, expressing their needs appropriately, and demonstrating increasing independence and confidence. Social-emotional growth is evident when students can identify how they feel, use basic calming strategies, cooperate with classmates, listen to others, accept redirection, recover from small frustrations, and participate positively as members of the classroom community.