Welcome to Room K-1!  It is going to be a great school year!  All our kindergartens are starting the year with class sizes of over twenty students.  We will each have a partner teacher to help during academic work times.  This year, my partner teacher is Lynn Scales, who teaches AM kindergarten.

 

I have been teaching various grade levels at Rescue School since 1985.  For the past several years, I have been teaching kindergarten and transitional kindergarten.  My own children attended Rescue School.  My son earned a degree in Microbiology from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and is now a senior scientist at a lab off of Latrobe Road.  My daughter earned degrees in Engineering and English Literature from USC and then a law degree from Harvard.  She is now an attorney for the Department of Justice in Washington DC.  Rescue School gave them a strong foundation for their continuing education! 

 

Kindergarten is a very exciting time for children, their parents, and their teachers!  Many children begin the year without knowing anything about phonemic awareness tasks, print concepts, letters and sounds  By the end of the year, they are reading and writing words, sentences, and yes, even stories.  This transformation takes a great amount of work by both the students and teachers.  Parents are also key players in this amazing growth. The most important activity parents can do is read every day to (and with) their children.

 

We will be following the State Standards in other curricular areas as well as in language arts.  For example in math, students will build a strong foundation for understanding numbers through the hands-on use of manipulatives.  They will then move on to representational activities, using pictures and drawings.  They will also be expected to be able to do some abstract tasks such as being fluent with basic addition and subtraction facts to five.

 

We welcome parent help in our kindergarten program!  For the first month or so, we will not have volunteers in our classrooms.  This gives children the opportunity to be comfortable separating from parents, understand routines, and be able to follow classroom norms and expectations automatically.  Parents can support our program in many ways including, prepping materials, putting books together, and donating items listed on the wish list and on the "Giving Tree." 

 

Teachers and parents are partners in the education of children.  Working together and communicating with each other is essential to being an effective team.  Please feel free to email or call me with any concerns or questions.  My email address is cpatterson@rescueusd.org.  Rescue School's phone number is 530-677-2720.  My extension is 3082.