MY EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

               I believe that respectful, caring bonds with children and their families are the vital foundation for a wonderful kindergarten experience. As a teacher of the young, I share with parents the responsibility for teaching their child.  I believe that each child has unique strengths, varied prior language learning experiences, and preferred learning styles. My instruction must be differentiated to provide enough challenge and support for all children to build on successfully and to develop positive attitudes about learning. I believe that emotional engagement is the key to all powerful learning. That is why I bring love, laughter, passion, and meaningful project work into my kindergarten. I always look for ways to personalize learning and engage the child’s imagination. I believe kindergarten is for language. It is the familiarity with the English language that precedes and underlies excellent phonemic awareness instruction. This familiarity allows the child’s decoding to be error-free and reading to be fluent. While systematically and actively “playing with language,” I encourage my “voracious vocabulary learners” and build comprehension skills. I believe that children deserve to memorize, recite, and perform many wonderful pieces of languagein kindergarten — to turn print into sound and the pleasures of sound over to an appreciative audience. My curriculum invites children to talk, sing, dramatize, and perform language. Developing the child’s capacity for language and thought underlies everything I do.