? for Kindergarten Teachers or those in the know!

[tmarquez]

In your area, what does K do for math over the course of the year?

Our K does numbers up to 20, shapes, days of the week, and the value of coins. Is this the norm? Thanks!

 

[mombare]

My daughter is currently in Kindergarten, and they have been working on numbers (she is getting the concept of counting in the 20's, 30's, etc), coins, and a LOT of patterns! I am not exactly sure where they wil go from here...it probably depends on the Kindergarten arrangements. Our school district is all day, every day Kindergarten...but in the bigger town near us it is half days, every day (only 2 1/2 hours per day). I think they cover less because they have less time each day.

 

[mlynn]

My daughter is now in 1st but last year. She had to know how to count to 100 and write 100 by the end of the year.

 

[clori]

My dd is in 3rd grade. In kindergarten they would write their numbers of graph paper from 1 to 150. They did simple addition/subtraction with answers up to 10. They did shapes, patterns, coins, concepts like more/less etc. I know they did calendar time during morning circle and went on months, days, seasons etc but I didn't think that was part of math.

 

[mjkacmom]

My daughter is now in 1st but last year. She had to know how to count to 100 and write 100 by the end of the year.

Why is it that all of my kids decided to demonstrate that they learned to count to 100 during long car trips? That's one thing I remember about kindergarten!

 

[mom2aredhead]

So far, my son has been working on:

Number recognition, counting, and writing the numbers
Shapes and Patterns
Taller/Shorter, Larger/Smaller,
Above/Below
More/Less
First/Last/Middle, Before/After

And I have his math workbook here, so looking ahead, they'll be be doing...
coin values
graphing
measuring
estimating and comparing
telling time
basic adding and subtracting
the calendar
...but not necessarily in that order.

And some of these skills are repeated/reinforced in the science class which he has once/week.

 

[mlynn]

Why is it that all of my kids decided to demonstrate that they learned to count to 100 during long car trips? That's one thing I remember about kindergarten!

Mine too.

 

[scottish mum]

Ok I'm going off topic here but was just wondering what age your kids are when they are in kindergarten. I live in scotland and my DD is 4 and she is in nursery and moves to "proper" school next August. They are learning about letter sounds and recognising letters and numbers but the biggest part of nursery is the socialising aspect.
Sorry was just curious as i read alot about Kindergarten and 1st grade etc and I'm completely lost. My DS's are 11 and in class 7 and 7 in class 3. This is in primary school and they start class 1 at age 5 and after class 7 they move to secondary school where they stay for 5 or 6 years.

 

[mjkacmom]

Ok I'm going off topic here but was just wondering what age your kids are when they are in kindergarten. I live in scotland and my DD is 4 and she is in nursery and moves to "proper" school next August. They are learning about letter sounds and recognising letters and numbers but the biggest part of nursery is the socialising aspect.
Sorry was just curious as i read alot about Kindergarten and 1st grade etc and I'm completely lost. My DS's are 11 and in class 7 and 7 in class 3. This is in primary school and they start class 1 at age 5 and after class 7 they move to secondary school where they stay for 5 or 6 years.

Kids here start kindy at 5 (actually, they youngest they can be is 4 years, 11 1/2 months old). Elementary school goes up to 6th grade, middle school is 7th and 8th, and high school is grades 9 - 12. We have no public preschools, but most parents here send their kids for 2 years before kindergarten.

 

[scottish mum]

Thanks we get 2 years of funded nursery before they start school but it is just for 2 1/2 hrs a day. Some people chose to pay for all day nursery but my DD just goes 2 1/2 hrs as i enjoy her at home and feel they go to school young anyway

 

[lucigo]

Where I live (Florida) we do...

Age 3-4 preK (some all day if you qualify at the primary school), 5 Kindergarten (all day), 6-7 grades 1-2 in the primary school, ages 8-10 grades 3-5 in the intermediate school, ages 11-13 grades 6-8 in the middle school, and ages 14-17 grades 9-12 in the high school.

I like having it split into 4 schools so the kids are more with kids their own ages and the schools and specialize in targeting those smaller age groups.

 

[mom2aredhead]

Where I live, school starts in the month of September.
We have a Universal (free) Pre-K for 2.5 hours per day, and you must turn 4 by December 31st to attend. So you can start the September before the 4th birthday, but must turn 4 by the end of the calendar year.
To attend Kindergarten, you must turn 5 by the end of the calendar year when school starts.
Kindergarten is not mandatory. If parents choose to hold their child back and not send them to kindergarten when scheduled, (because they feel they're too young, not ready, etc) they will be put in first grade the following year, essentially making them a year behind everyone else. This is done to discourage the practice of "red shirting" kids to make one child older than everyone else when they start school. They schools use the calendar year that you were born to determine the grade you will be in until for grades K, 1 and 2.
Although some still get around it - they lie and use a relatives address to enroll the child in a school in another district, or they'll pay for private school for a few years then transfer them in for 3rd grade.

But essentially, kindergarten kids here are right around 5, give or take a few months either way.

 

[scottish mum]

Thanks it makes it a bit clearer for understanding these forums.
Sorry from going off the original question but it seems our 5yr olds do the same similar stuff as you guys

 

[MALE*RN*777]

At least count up to 100.

 

[barkley]

Ok I'm going off topic here but was just wondering what age your kids are when they are in kindergarten. I live in scotland and my DD is 4 and she is in nursery and moves to "proper" school next August. They are learning about letter sounds and recognising letters and numbers but the biggest part of nursery is the socialising aspect.
Sorry was just curious as i read alot about Kindergarten and 1st grade etc and I'm completely lost. My DS's are 11 and in class 7 and 7 in class 3. This is in primary school and they start class 1 at age 5 and after class 7 they move to secondary school where they stay for 5 or 6 years.

as you can see from the responces so far it can vary depending where in the u.s. you live.

in the last state we lived in a child as young as 4 years/9 months could attend kindergarten (school started end of aug/begining of sept and child had to turn 5 by dec. 2nd). in the state we live in now a child can't attend kindergarten unless they will turn 5 on or before the first schedualed day of instruction (usualy late in august). the only way a parent can get a younger child in is usualy if they've attended k in another state that permitted something like the december date and the kid had attended for so many weeks/months in that other state before moving to the new state. but here's the thing that's kind of interesting-in neither state we've lived in was kindergarten required, it was totaly optional on the part of the parent-so long as the child was in school in our prior state by age 6, and our current state by age 8 eek: which totaly blows me away). in our prior state there were 1/2 day k classes as well as full day. in our current state a law was passed where all k classes in public schools are mandated to be full day.

so it realy varies-and the thing i've noticed since we've lived here (almost 2 years) is that (i'm guessing because of the higher age at which you have to attend) that individual classes seem to have a definate trend of the girls being younger and the boys being older. what you would consider the 'normal' age for members of say a 5th or 8th grade class, will actualy be populated with almost all the girls at that age-but the boys generaly a year or 2 older. and i don't nesc. think it's a bad thing-you hear so much about so many little boys not being ready or able to do k and 1st, so many seem to get held back because they don't have the maturity-i have to wonder if in my state because parents have the option of holding these little guys back for a year or even 2 before they start k or 1st that does'nt help them gain the maturity as well as continue to work on those basic skills that so many schools want them to walk through the door possessing (i can't speak to what they need to know for k here, but in my previous state the expectation was that the kids could already do basic reading, addition and subtraction).

oh-and my kids attend what is consider a very non traditional type of school in the u.s. (but was actualy the norm for decades)-a one room school house. well-actualy it's 2 rooms with 1st-4th in one (no k offered) and 5th-8th in the second (but they do co-mingle for music, some science and other classes). when they graduate from there they would go to a highschool that is 9th-12.



back to the op's question-i don't know what the exact curriculum is where we live now, but when my kids were going to k (my youngest is in 5th now) i know they went up with the skills though 100, and by the end of the year were doing 2 digit adding and 1 digit subtracting. what realy blew me away was when he got to first grade and fairly early in the year they were doing multiplication, multiple digit adding and subtracting-and there were little introductory hints of algebra (though that's proven great-the kids find it great fun in the early grades so now that he's doing it on a regular basis it's like nothing they have'nt seen before ).

 

[jellybeans0607]

Kids here start kindy at 5 (actually, they youngest they can be is 4 years, 11 1/2 months old). Elementary school goes up to 6th grade, middle school is 7th and 8th, and high school is grades 9 - 12. We have no public preschools, but most parents here send their kids for 2 years before kindergarten.

I'm in MA and we are a little different than this. We do have public preschool. Some parents do send their kids for 2 years before K, not something I would do.
Elementary here is K-4( you do have to be 5 to start k, the cut off date is you need to be 5 for 1week before K).
Middle school is 5-8
High school ir 9-12
ETA: K is half day here unless you want to pay for the second ahlf of the day. I'm thinking that also differs quite a bit per area.

 

[carj]

We have full-day Kindergarten. My son is in second grade and my daughter is now in K in the same school.
They learn shapes, colors, numbers, counting, one-to-one correspondence, more, less, ordinal numbers, addition, subtraction, calendar, time to the hour and half-hour, money, sorting by attributes, patterns. (Probably more but that is all I can come up with off the top of my head.)

After Christmas break they start to really focus on presenting math in a traditional format while still including manipulatives and real experiences.

Most of the kids who go to school here have had preschool experiences of some sort.

 

[rt2dz]

Math in K here:

• Know numbers by sight to 100 (must know to 20 before they can start, but they’ll still review it)
• Count by rote, 5s, & 10s to 100 by the end of the year
• Lots of patterns (must know key shapes before they can start)
• Recognize coins & values
• Graphing, lots of graphing
• Estimation
• Calendar (not sure if that’s math though. Should know days of the week before starting)
• Telling time
• At the end of the year they start with simple addition

I can’t really remember the rest. I do know by mid-year 1st grade they are doing fractions, so I’m sure it is a bit more.

 

[rt2dz]

Kids here start kindy at 5 (actually, they youngest they can be is 4 years, 11 1/2 months old). Elementary school goes up to 6th grade, middle school is 7th and 8th, and high school is grades 9 - 12. We have no public preschools, but most parents here send their kids for 2 years before kindergarten.

It's a little different where I live. They must be 5 on or before Sept 1 of the current year to start K (Kindergarten) and school starts 4 days prior to that, so they could be 4 days shy of their 5th birthday. However, you don't have to start at 5, you could wait until 6 (redshirting), which is very common here starting with May birthdays. School starts the last couple days of August and goes through the first week of June, then summer break. The next August they would advance a grade (provided they learn all the material).

It goes K, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th for elementary.
5th and 6th is intermediate school.
7th and 8th is middle school.
9th (freshman) has its own campus, but is considered part of high school.
10th (sophomore), 11th (junior), and 12th (senior) are high school.

Then it's off to college where advancement is based on the number of hours you complete successfully rather than years. Some colleges have semesters, others trimesters.

Preschools are not public in general here (I know several states do have public preschools), but high risk students (including lower income) can get public pre-k. Our preschools generally have a toddlers class (18 months as of Sept 1 of the current school year), 2s (2yo as of Sept 1), 3s (3yo as of Sept 1), and 4yo are pre-k, where they learn the skills they must know to start K. Each class is age appropriate--i.e., toddlers just learn about taking turns and sharing. Most parents start at 2yo, some wait until 3 or 4, but not a lot. K teachers around here can really tell which kids went earlier and which went later (or not at all); most would tell you to send them by 2 or 3.

ETA: K is full day. It is not mandatory. The only thing our state says is that you either have to be homeschooling or start 1st grade at age 7 on September 1 of the current school year. You could turn 8 September 2. Also you can start 1st grade as long as you are 6 on September 1 of the current school year, but you could also start K at age 6 on September 1 of the current school year.

If you want to get a child in younger (say one that turns 5 September 2), you can go to private school that allows it (mainly Montessori around here) and once they successfully complete grade 1 they could transfer to public school (starting with 2nd grade)

 

[java]

5 year old kindergarteners here

So far they have been heavily working on patterns. And writing numbers to 10 only. Lots of "grouping" also . Starting to learn to count by 2's too-(even/odd numbers)
Ds is better at math than reading right now so he is doing some addition and subtraction stuff as well but that is not class wide-

our elementary school is k-4
middle 5-8
then high school

Preschool is not state run yet unless you are special needs.