Preschool and Kindergarten Goals

Before you read these, please keep in mind that these are just loose goals.  They give me a trajectory and organization.  I can plan activities better when I know what skills I want them to help him practice.  There is no pressure on Xander (or me) to accomplish these within a given time frame.  I strive to keep him stimulated and challenged, while at the same time make sure learning is fun!    

A lot of this list comes from the Iowa educational standards, although I added some things and took away others.  I also used the lists of goals that accompany his Right Start Math and All About Spelling programs.  I tried to find academic goals that were a natural progression from his current abilities.  For better or worse, most of those came from the kindergarten level (which is why I labeled it both preschool and kindergarten goals).  I'm not sure what that will mean when he is school age and has to go to school , but we will cross that bridge when we come to it.  For now, I'll just work on keeping him stimulated and LOVING learning.

Literacy Goals

• Alphabetizing
• From beginning to end
• What letter comes next from a random point in the alphabet
• With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text.
• With prompting and support, identify the main topic and retell key details of a text.
• With prompting and support, describe the connection between two individuals, events, ideas, or pieces of information in a text.
• Understand beginning, middle, & ending sounds in words
• Sequence events from a story
• Be able to write all of the letters
• Identify basic punctuation(period, exclamation, question mark, comma, quotes)
• Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page.
• Understand that words are separated by spaces in print.
• Recognize and produce rhyming words.
• Identify number of syllables
• Count, pronounce, blend, and segment syllables in spoken words.
• Understand and use question words (interrogatives) (e.g., who, what, where, when, why, how).
• Capitalize the first word in a sentence and the pronoun I.

Math Goals

• Numeration
• Can count out 31 objects and arrange in groups of tens
• Can recognize quantities 1-100 and represent them on abacus
• Can represent quantities 1-100 with numbers (if not physically)
• Counting to 100
• By ones
• By fives
• By tens
• Count to 20 by 2s
• Knows ordinal numbers to 1st-10th
• Knows even numbers to 20
• Knows odd numbers to 19
• Money
• Can identify penny, nickel, dime, quarter, dollar
• Place value
• knows 10 ones is 1 ten
• knows 10 tens is 1 hundred
• knows, for example, 45 as 4-ten 5
• Addition
• Understands addition as combining parts to form a whole or putting together
• Knows number combinations equal to 10
• knows number combinations up to 10
• Subtraction
• Understands subtraction as missing addend
• Understands subtraction as separating or taking apart
• Problem Solving
• Can solve addition problems
• Can solve missing addend problems
• Geometry
• Knows mathematical names of triangle, rectangle, and circle
• Recognizes 3D shapes
• Knows parallel and perpendicular lines
• Can continue a pattern
• Mentally rotate a 2D shape (tangrams)
• Time
• Knows days of the week
• Knows months of the year
• Can tell time to the hour
• Identify math symbols +, -, =, <, >
• Compare numbers (greater than, less than, equal to)
• Compare attributes
• Which holds more, takes up more space, is longer, is wider, etc
• Sort by categories

Science Goals

• Asking questions and defining problems
• Making observations
• Making and testing predictions
• Understanding cause and effect
• Identifying and continuing patterns
• Scale, Proportion and Quantity
• use relative scales (e.g., bigger and smaller; hotter and colder; faster and slower) to describe objects

Practical Life

• Tying shoes
• Sweeping
• Cleaning table
• Hanging towels/wash cloths
• Dressing and undressing by himself

Letter X Week

Letter Formation/Pre-Writing

Tracing the letters with his write and wipe cards and Letter Tracing Pages from 1+1+1=1

Practicing writing in his sand box.

Using See and Stamps on the Dot Letters from Confessions of a Homeschooler

 Using his Build a Letter Templates and HWWT pieces. First he built the letters on the templates, then he built them by themselves.

Letter Maze

(Printable here)

Play Dough Letters

I got out our alphabet stamping play dough mat.

He also ended up stamping his name with the alphabet dough stamps.

Literacy

Still working on All About Spelling (see our post on how we adapted it here).

Cut and Paste Phonics Hunt

(Print it here)

Thinking Skills

Science

We're still doing our Alphabet in Simple Science, and this week was X for X-Ray

Art

What started as string painting, somehow turned into hand painting.

 

Sensory Play

Water beads and a mess of sensory tools.

Fun and Games

Hi-Ho Cheery-O

Combining Toobs and wooden train tracks to make a giant zoo-city

W for Water Cycle

See what we did for other letters in the Alphabet in Simple Science.

W for Water Cycle

Science Notebook Page (Click the picture to print).

     Background

As with all topics, we started off by talking about what the water cycle is.  To do so, we had to review liquids and gases.  We talked about how water just keeps going around and around the cycle.  We also briefly reviewed evaporation (see the evaporation activities here).    We happened to have a ton of books about storms and rain, we did a lot of reading.  His favorite was definitely Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain.  We also watched The Magic School : Wet All Over.

Water Cycle Model

Materials:

Hot water
Clear container (a glass jar with a lid worked best for us)
Ice
Plastic wrap (if you don't have a lid)

A quick search of water cycle models on the internet gets you a bunch of different setups, but the concept is the same.  Put hot water in the bottom of a clear container, put ice at the top of the container, watch the condensation.  We tried a few different methods, which was nice in that it let us talk about the steps of the water cycle multiple times.  Water vapor (gas) evaporates from the liquid into the air in the container.  Then when it gets close to the ice, it starts condensing again.  We actually got fog to permeate the glass jar.  Unfortunately, we only got a little bit of "rain" from the top of the lid.  Maybe it just wasn't cold enough.

As we talked about the different steps I would ask him why he thought things were happening.  Why is the water vapor turning back into a liquid (condensing)? What is it about the ice that makes it condense?  What is it about the freezer that makes liquid turn to solid?

We started with a big bowl.

Adding the ice

It is hard to see in the picture, but the water droplets were visible on the under side of the plastic wrap.

Using a glass.

Using a glass jar.  We got a really good fog in here.  It was also nice that the ice didn't melt all over the table!

Check out my Alphabet in Simple Science Pinterest Board for more ideas!