Kindergarten Planning

The Kindergarten Team at Wexford had a planning day where they spent the morning working on Math and the afternoon working on Language.  It was the full team - Teachers and ECE's - which was great because everyone had some great ideas and suggestions as to what they wanted to see done in their next school year.

The team decided to follow the long range plans that they received at the last Kindergarten PLC.  They also wanted to plan their unit using the template that was shared with them for the Patterning and Algebra expectations.  They focused on planning around the Number Sense and Numeration expectations that "go along" with the specific Patterning expectations.

They started by creating their Learning Goals for the unit.  In this case they ended up being:  

* The number of things I count, is the number of things I say;
* I can choose where I want to start counting;
* When I count I always start at the number 1.

They then created a diagnostic/ending  assessment (which will be done orally) for the children to do.  But they didn't want it to seem out of context so they pulled in the book "Good Night Gorilla" to help them make the diagnostic a bit more "fun".  The discussion they had around it was really rich as it allowed them to predict what answers the children might give, but also discuss about what they would expect to see the children say and do at the end of the unit.  They also discussed what the prompt would be for students who need one (you can see it in the picture labelled with a "P").

Now that they had the beginning and the ending figured out, they then planned what they were going to do "in the middle" to help their children be successful at the end.  They discussed, debated, and deliberated possible activities - all keeping the expectations in mind to make sure they were not going too far off the rails.  They were able to pull in some more literature connections (Ten Black Dots, Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom,) and also discuss what they would do in both the large group and the small group settings.



Overall, it was a great morning - and the best part is, they are pretty well planned (math wise) until November!  Super work team!