Kindergarten At The Towne Creek School

Towne Creek enjoyed providing private Kindergarten for 20 years. However, since the time that Bend ISD changed its Kindergarten program from a 3-hour to a 7-hour day, many families have opted to place their children in the public school system for Kindergarten. We offer Kindergarten as one of our programs, but do not always achieve the enrollment necessary to provide the atmosphere that the children need to derive the social benefit from the class. Information regarding our Kindergarten program is provided below:

LANGUAGE ARTS. The Wright Group literature program is the basis for our language arts program. This program utilizes the “shared reading” approach, introducing a “big book” at the beginning of the week. This book becomes alive as we use all of our reading cues and learning styles (phonics, grammar and semantics) to master reading the book throughout the week. This book often serves as the basis for our science, math or social studies projects or assignments. This integrated approach of the disciplines helps the child digest the information and make it more meaningful and useful.

FOCUS is an integrated multi-sensory “listening” curriculum that is explicitly constructed to fine-tune attention and stimulate perception and memory of sounds and sound patterns. Children’s attention is directed to the sounds and oral-motor movements to be remembered, thus increasing their ability to recall them. They participate together and learn that they can use and rely on their own bodies to discriminate, perceive, contrast and produce sounds. Carry-over techniques into spelling and reading help children discover that written words have the same number and sequence of sound units heard in spoken words. FOCUS supplements and complements our reading program. Children are involved in an interactive teaching method where they are able to build upon their successes.

JOURNALS. Our day begins with journal time. This is a growing process which allows the children to become writers by creating stories, spellers by phonetically stretching out words, and illustrators by drawing pictures. Children have a strong sense of accomplishment and ownership from this experience.

DAILY NEWS. Children take turns being reporters. They report on an event that is current and relevant to them. This is written for all to see in big print. From this meaningful and personalized print, we teach phonics, punctuation, spelling and grammar.

MATHEMATICS. Our math curriculum is based on the hands-on program, MATHLAND, EVERY DAY COUNTS. Our goal is to produce mathematically-powerful thinkers and problem solvers who are comfortable using math in their daily lives. Children understand numbers, geometry, and become abstract thinkers by using manipulatives to compare, analyze and bring mathematical relations to life. In MATHLAND, children use all skills – writing, drawing, computing, graphing, to communicate their ideas. This allows us to assess their ability to think, process information and communicate. Frequent group projects promote cooperation and allow children to discuss ideas and appreciate the viewpoint of others. EVERY DAY COUNTS is an interactive Bulletin Board that uses the calendar, coins, clocks, graphs and a number line to count the days in the year and other elements that change throughout the year. As a result, children are offered daily exposure to place value, measurement, time, money, mental math, geometry, estimation, patterns, graphing, and statistics. This exposure is visual, hands-on and interactive. We use workbooks as a supplement and a connection between the classroom and the home.