Students entering kindergarten will be exposed to an abundance of songs, rhymes, and age-appropriate texts to foster a love of and competence in reading.

Through explicit teaching and activity-based literacy centers, classroom teachers ensure that students learn foundational literacy skills such as basic features of print, understanding of rhyming, blending, and segmenting spoken sounds, and understanding letter names and sounds. Students are also taught how to blend sounds together to decode words as well as read common high-frequency words. With support from teachers, students will also read a variety of controlled texts and authentic literature in order to understand a story and/or gather information about a topic.

We teach early literacy skills including phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, mapping high-frequency words and handwriting through Heggerty and Fundations as well as other evidence-based instructional strategies to target specific skill development in foundational reading skills.

Our Writing Program is Empowering Writers, which uses literature and other published examples as a jumping off point for instruction. Children will see high quality writing and hear high quality stories to help them understand what their writing should look and sound like. They will then get opportunities to write their own narrative, informational and opinion pieces through drawing and writing. Empowering Writers also provides opportunities for students to learn about sentence structure and early grammar rules through their Sentence a Day routine. In addition to the lessons in Empowering Writers, students multiple opportunities to write while exploring their experiences with the world around them.

Massachusetts has adopted the Common Core State Standards, which has designated specific skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening, and language at each grade level.

Click on the link on the left side of the page and you will be able to view these standards.