St. John's Episcopal School

Our kindergarten program prepares our students for first grade and beyond. Phonetically oriented reading instruction, mathematics, spelling, and penmanship form the core of the kindergarten curriculum.

Each day begins with a chapel service which includes Bible stories, Morning Prayer, and weekly Bible verses. The children enjoy singing hymns of praise and learn to be attentive, reverent, and enthusiastic in their response to questions asked during the service.

Phonics—This is a key component to independent reading. Students will identify & produce rhyming words, identify and isolate the initial, middle and final sounds of spoken words, blends, digraphs, and diphthongs. Also, included are weekly spelling list and sight word flash cards to help children hone reading skills.

This process builds throughout the year until the child has learned the various sounds of the letters as well as blends to form a solid foundation upon which to perfect skills of reading and writing.

Writing—Students progress to writing of short, simple sentences through dictation and journal writing. The components of a sentence are introduced such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, as well as capitalization and punctuation usage.

Reading—Students are introduced to cause-effect, drawing conclusions, summarization, sequence, characters, setting of a story as well as parts of a book. Simple books are sent home with the children to read to their families and children are encouraged to read to their classmates.

Math—Students learn to count to one hundred by ones, fives, and tens. Number and quantitative reasoning include meaning of numbers, place value, compare and order and ordinal numbers. As the year progresses students will also cover money, fractions, addition, subtraction, classify, equations and expressions, length, capacity, weight/mass as well as the concept of time.

Science—Science is introduced through the study of animals, plants, earth’s land air and water, weather and seasons through class experiments and individual at home projects.

Social Studies—Units include Presidents’ Day, Columbus Day, Ground Hog Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., families, communities, and self-awareness.

Our full-day program allows ample time for music, physical education, and computers.