Kindergarten

Our kindergarten program balances academics, play, and creativity to foster a love of learning in our students.

We utilize Responsive Classroom, which is a student-centered approach to social-emotional learning that focuses on engaging academics, positive community, effective management, and developmental awareness. Throughout their day, students have multiple opportunities to interact with their peers through free choice time, recess, morning meeting, and academic experiences that allow them to learn collaboratively. Our teachers split up the kindergarten day by alternating between teacher-lead focused work time and more relaxed, self-directed experiences. Math, phonics, writing, thematic (social) studies, and reading are all academic areas of focus. 

Our literacy program is built on the science of reading and is phonics-based. Each week, students focus on a different letter, learning the letter symbol, the sound, what it looks like, and how it is used. By the end of the school year, kindergarten students will have learned about each letter in the alphabet, all while working on recognizing high frequency words and working toward blending sounds together to read. 

St. Michael’s was the first school in Rhode Island to adopt the Singapore math program. The program is structured around the belief that every new math concept should be taught first in concrete terms, then pictorial, and lastly, abstract. Students begin exploring new concepts using hands-on manipulatives such as blocks or physical counters. From there, the topic is introduced through pictorial representations, such as illustrations of blocks or toys. Lastly, teachers transition the class into the abstract, using numbers and number sentences to represent a given set.  

Our social studies curriculum, Thematic Studies, focuses on skills taught through a variety of content topics and permeates the students’ school experience.

In kindergarten, the focus is “our place in the world.” Thematic Study truly brings all of students’ different skills together. One unit, for example, is on pond habitats. In this unit, students learn about ponds, animals that live in ponds, the life-cycle of a frog, and the importance of the food chain. They take a field trip to “the pond” each year, where they explore the habitat in the real world and have the opportunity to observe frogs and tadpoles in person. Our thematic lessons incorporate research and creative writing, and students learn how to utilize non-fiction texts to gather information and express what they’ve learned through the written word and pictures. The thematic topics are carried over into the students’ specials classes such as drama, science, and art where they work in our clay studio to create model frogs of their very own.