What to expect in a standards based classroom?
Standards tell us what to teach but not how to teach a young child. Listed below are some of things you can see happen in a standards based classroom. Learning through inquiry means observing how children learn and letting them explore and discover using the learning environment.
Standards:
| Literature:
With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text. | Students will be acting out stories. Students will be drawing story maps. Students may make puppets of characters in a book. Students might have to act out vocabulary words or make a Pictionary of a word like “enormous”. |
| With prompting and support, compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in familiar stories. | Students will be make a diagram on the rug and adding pictures of things that are the same and different. Students will write/draw pictures of things that are the same or different in a story |
| Math: Count to 100 by ones and by tens. | Count the days of the week Sing counting songs Help with calendar Make numbers in order with play dough Practice writing numbers on whiteboards. |
| Represent addition and subtraction with objects, fingers, mental images, drawings2, sounds (e.g., claps), acting out situations, verbal explanations, expressions, or equations. | Students will draw their own stories of objects that can be taken away or joined together to make a group. Students will use objects like animal counters, unfix cubes, dots, or building blocks to tell a story about addition or subtraction. |
| Correctly name shapes regardless of their orientations or overall size. | Students will build with blocks. Students will describe to teacher or others what shapes they used to build a tower, a building. |
| Science Forces and Motion · Pushes and pulls can have different strengths and directions. (K-PS2-1),(K-PS2-2) | Students will be pushing cars, making ramps to see which cars go fast. Students will be building towers to see what can knock it over. Students will be talking about directions and playing directional games. |
| Living Things · Use observations to describe patterns of what plants and animals (including humans) need to survive. | Students will be planting seeds. Students will be using small plants to see what happens when they have no sun, no water, no air or the air is to cold. Pretend to be bears hibernating. Read informational books about animals, plants and humans. |
| Social Studies: K.1 – Identify and describe the events or people celebrated during United States national holidays and why we celebrate them. (H) K.2 – Put events in their own and their families’ lives in temporal order. (H)
| Students will be learning how to cooperate as they learn together Students will play games together Students will learn the importance of rules and authority figures. Students will celebrate major holidays. Students will role play as family members in dramatic play center. |