1. Welcome to Kindergarten! 2014-2015
At Montgomery Knolls, learning is magic!

2. Meet Your Teachers! Mrs. Amy Brooks Room 140 Mrs. Andrea Parker
Ms. Kayla Mayberry
Room 132
Miss Burton
Room 125
Mrs. Amy Erroa
Room 138
Mrs. Karin Weber
Room 146
Ms. Olivia Granata
Room 144
Ms. Christine Greaney
Room 124

3. Curriculum 2.0
You will receive more information at Back-to-School Night, September 16th, 2014!
Parent guides can be found on MCPS website.

4. School-Wide Expectations
Be Respectful
Be Responsible
Be Ready

5. This year we will be using a school-wide behavior management tool called ClassDojo.
ClassDojo is a web based program which allows teachers to track students’ behaviors (positive AND negative) easily and efficiently.
Behavior reports will be sent home on Fridays. Please sign and return to school on Monday.

6. Kindergarten Assessments
Kindergarten Readiness Assessment
Mclass Reading Assessment
Weekly formative data collection

7. Ready for Kindergarten
Maryland’s Early Childhood Comprehensive Assessment System (EC-CAS)
Welcome to this presentation on Ready for Kindergarten: Maryland’s Early Childhood Comprehensive Assessment System, or EC-CAS. In this presentation, you learn background information about this exciting initiative and its key components. Later, you gain an understanding of specific elements of Maryland’s EC-CAS related to the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment.
Professional Development by Johns Hopkins School of Education, Center for Technology in Education

8. Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA)
Why it’s important –
Supports growing knowledge and research about the variability of young children’s growth, development, and learning
Provides insight into children’s readiness for kindergarten
Identifies children’s performance across multiple domains and aligns with best practice for assessing young children
Inform prior early learning and development to ensure that children are entering Kindergarten ready to learn
The KRA is an important component of the Ready for Kindergarten system. Maryland educators and policy makers are committed to ensuring that all children experience an excellent K-12 education. We know that children enter Kindergarten with varying levels of readiness. Some children have strong early learning experiences and come to Kindergarten ready to learn, with a solid foundation in all developmental domains. Other children’s experiences are less positive and result in weaker foundations. The gap between children who come to school ready to learn and those who do not can be wide and difficult to bridge without targeted early intervention and focused instruction. Yet, we know that with excellent early childhood experiences all children can be successful in school and beyond.
Not only will the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment benefit classroom teachers and children, it aligns with other EC-CAS components helps to inform early learning and development prior to kindergarten so that we can work to ensure that all children get the quality educational experiences they need to enter kindergarten ready to learn and grow.

9. Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA)
Social Foundations
Science
Language & Literacy
Social Studies
Now let’s look at each domain included in the KRA.
Mathematics
Physical well-being & Motor Development

10. KRA Domain: Social Foundations
Social and emotional development
Approaches toward learning
Executive functioning
Social Foundations is one of six KRA domains. This domain includes social and emotional development, approaches toward learning, and executive functioning.
Social emotional development includes both interpersonal and intrapersonal skills. It includes children’s ability to develop positive, rewarding relationships with other children and adults, and their ability to identify, manage, and express emotions in positive ways. Brain research established a strong connection between emotion and cognition. The link is undeniable and important for early childhood educators because we now see that by promoting healthy social emotional development in the early years including kindergarten, we support later positive learning outcomes in all domains.
If executive functioning is a new term for you, it may help to think of the brain as a busy airport and executive functioning as the brain’s “air traffic control system”. In recent years, educators have learned about the importance of executive functioning and its impact on learning. Executive functioning includes the ability to manage time and attention, switch focus, plan and organize, remember details, curb inappropriate behaviors, and integrate past experience with present action. Because executive function includes working memory and planning, it plays a critical role in the development of a child’s academic skills such as reading.

11. KRA Domain: Language and Literacy
Reading
Writing
Language
Speaking and listening
The Language and Literacy domain includes the strands of reading, writing, language, speaking and listening. Some essential early literacy skills and knowledge in this domain include the ability to communicate in a variety of situations with different audiences and for different purposes, the understanding of spoken words and individual speech sounds, letter-sound correspondence, the use of words and word meanings, and writing to convey meaning.
The skills measured on the KRA directly correlate with a child’s potential to successfully learn to read and write. Children who have these skills enter school prepared to learn in the areas of reading and writing. Children developing these skills need targeted intervention. According to well-known literacy researchers such as Dorothy Strickland, “Children who fall behind in oral language and literacy development are less likely to be successful beginning readers; and their achievement lag is likely to persist throughout the primary grades and beyond.”

12. KRA Domain: Mathematics
Counting & Cardinality
Operations & Algebraic Thinking
Measurement & Data
Geometry
Mathematics is also measured on the KRA. This domain includes the strands of Counting & Cardinality, Operations & Algebraic Thinking, Measurement & Data, and Geometry. Some of the essential early numeracy skills and knowledge included in this domain are:
knowing number names, count sequence, and relationships among numbers, numerals and quantity;
understanding addition as putting together and adding to;
understanding subtraction as taking apart and taking from;
sorting, classifying and comparing objects;
describing and comparing measurable attributes; and
describing two- and three-dimensional shapes.
Research indicates that early experiences in mathematics in an engaging and encouraging climate develops young children’s confidence in their ability to use and understand mathematics, as well as develops curiosity, imagination, flexibility, inventiveness, and persistence, all of which are important lifelong skills.

13. KRA Domain: Science Life science skills processes
Science is also measured on the KRA. This domain focuses on skills and processes in life science, drawing on children’s innate curiosity of the world around them. The essential skills and knowledge in this domain include constructing knowledge of life science through questioning and observation. Children in kindergarten and beyond apply these basic skills as they construct understanding about how the world works, apply and expand upon these concepts, and as they develop new, more complex concepts through inquiry and exploration.

14. KRA Domain: Social Studies
Rules
Responsible behavior
Past, present & future
Social studies is the fifth KRA domain. The essential skills and knowledge focus on children’s understanding of rules and responsible behavior as well as an understanding of past, present, and future in the context of daily experiences. These skills are essential building blocks for helping children understand their role in the world around them—at home, in school, in their community, and beyond.
According to the National Council for Social Studies (NCSS), “social studies equip [young children] with the knowledge and understanding of the past necessary for coping with the present and planning for the future, enable them to understand and participate effectively in their world, and explain their relationship to other people and to social, economic, and political institutions. Social studies can provide students with the skills for productive problem solving and decision making, as well as for assessing issues and making thoughtful value judgments. Above all, social studies help students to integrate these skills and understandings into a framework for responsible citizen participation, whether in the play group, the school, the community, or the world.”

15. KRA Domain: Physical Well-being and Motor Development
Physical education
Health
The domain of Physical Well-being and Motor Development represents the inter-relationships among the KRA domains. Consider the impact physical well-being and motor development has on all areas of readiness and learning. Children who experience good health and nutrition come to school ready to learn. Similarly, children with well developed motor skills are ready to take on fine motor tasks of using a pencil, manipulating scissors, and interacting with basic school materials. The essential skills and knowledge in this KRA domain include a child’s ability to use large muscles to perform a variety of physical activities and the ability to use small muscles to perform fine motor tasks in play and learning situations. Additionally, the KRA measures a child’s ability to promote safe living by identifying and following rules and identifying ways that adults help keep children safe.

16. NAEYC Quote
Kindergarten can shape a child’s overall outlook on and engagement in lifelong learning.
This quote from NAEYC reminds us that in kindergarten children make great intellectual leaps and continue to develop more personal responsibility, self-direction, self-regulation, and logical thinking. This growth affects their development across a range of domains and affects their success in later schooling and in life.
Assessing children across multiple domains using the KRA helps kindergarten teachers gain a better understanding of the whole child—of each child, including areas of strength and areas of need. Because developmentally appropriate practice is grounded in research on how young children learn and develop, it’s important to understand each child’s profile at the time of entering kindergarten so as effective teachers, you can design targeted, impactful instruction that meets each child as an individual and as a member of their kindergarten community of learners. Each teacher plays a powerful role in the lives of young children. The KRA is one more tool for you to use to maximize your impact on each child you teach.

17. S.T.E.M Centers
This year we will have daily S.T.E.M centers to enhance the science, technology, engineering, and math instruction.

18. Helpful Hint #1 Please look at your child’s name on the class lists.
If it is misspelled or your child prefers a nickname, please let the teacher know when you visit the classroom.
If you do not see your child’s name on any list, please let us know.

19. Helpful Hint #2 The 1st day of school is Monday, August 25, 2014.
Breakfast will be available starting the 2nd day of school!
MKES participates in a special program! Students will have the opportunity to eat breakfast in their classroom from 8:30-9am.

20. Helpful Hint #3
A standards-based report card will be sent home twice a year.
Back to School Night will be on Tuesday, September 16, 2014.
You will learn more about the Kindergarten program, Curriculum 2.0, and the grading system at that time.

21. Helpful Hint #4
Children should wear nametags each day the first week of school.
Please label all backpacks and lunch boxes with your child’s name.
NO TOYS UNLESS WE ASK FOR THEM.

22. Helpful Hint #5
Each child will have a red folder to use for taking messages home and returning messages to school.
Red folders will be sent home every day.
Please check the folder and return to school daily.

23. Helpful Hint #6 Report cards are sent home in February and June.
Student progress reports will be sent home quarterly.
A newsletter will be sent home each quarter to let you know what your child will be learning!

24. Helpful Hint #7 You will receive a cafeteria menu each month.
If your child has special dietary needs, please let us know.
Lunch: $2.55 (Reduced $0.40)
Milk: $0.60
Each child will be receiving a pin # for lunch on the first day of school. Please practice at home.
If applicable, please be on the look out for the Free and Reduced lunch application. Be sure to complete and return as soon as possible.

25. Helpful Hint # 8
Encourage your child to wash their hands frequently, especially before lunch and after using the bathroom.
If your child is sick, please do not send them to school! Please call the office to let us know they will not be coming in.

26. Helpful Hint #9
If you would like to volunteer in your child’s classroom, please contact the PTA to sign up for a required “Volunteer Training.”

27. Helpful Hint #10
Things you can do with your child before the 1st day of school:
Practice saying the teacher’s name with your child.
Practice saying the color of the bus they are riding or if they are in daycare or a walker.
Explain the importance of a fire drill.
Read together! 

28. 1st Day of School
We would like to begin the school routine the first day. If your child will be riding a bus, begin that the first day.
If your child will be going home a different way, please let the office know in the morning (by 11:00).
Parents are invited to attend the “First Day of School Boo-Hoo/Yahoo Coffee” in the cafeteria at 8:30.
If you’re dropping your child off on the first day please bring your child to the gym, teachers will be waiting.
Parents will not be permitted to go to their child’s classroom, in order to make the transition easier for all children.

29. Thank you for coming! We look forward to a great year of Kindergarten!