Welcome to the Kindergarten Program

Hi, I am Lindsay Thompson and I am the Kindergarten Teacher at Bright Beginnings. I started here in 2000 as an Afternoon Teacher, when I discovered I wanted to begin my career as a teacher. I have been with Bright Beginnings for 8 years and I am always excited to come to school everyday! I graduated from Wright State in 2006 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Early Childhood Education.

My two classes of nine children came in this fall with an overwhelming eagerness to learn how to read! I assess each child in the beginning of the school year to find out what skills they have using the DIBELS system, reading records and informal assessments. These assessments help me place students in reading, writing and math groups and inform me what they need to focus on in their year in Kindergarten. Throughout the whole year, I have “reading meetings” where I work individually with each student at their own pace on their personal reading level, making notes as they read. These notes help me decide which reading strategies they need to focus on to help them become better readers. Then we decide together when they are ready to move on to the next reading level. Most of our students will be reading at or above a First Grade level by June. Yeah!

 Our reading program is The Letter People and a letter person visits us every week! They are so excited to see who is coming to our classroom. Every letter person comes with a theme that incorporates all learning subjects, which are reading, writing, and science. We focus on the sound of the Letter Person and each unit comes with a book or two that we use in Guided Reading that features the week’s sight words and other decodable words so that each child feels confident that they are a super reader! They love taking their books home and showing Mom and Dad what a great reader they are!

Having the Letter People program makes it easy to integrate other subjects. Ms. U just visited us and we talked about what was “up, up, up in the sky”! This incorporated our science unit about space. To help us learn what was in the solar system, each class made a 3-D project of the solar system and each child was in charge of a planet. They researched one interesting fact about their planet at home and brought it in to share with the class. Kindergarten Red class made a 3-D solar system out of fruit to show the actual sizes of the planets. Kindergarten Blue class made a 3-D solar system out of Styrofoam balls that they painted to show the different colors of the planets and are currently hanging in our classroom!

We follow the Beavercreek Public Schools curriculum and the Math program we both use is Houghton Mifflin Math. We are learning many concepts such as number identification through 30, writing numbers, measurement, volume and capacity, money, fractions, probability, geometric shapes, addition and subtraction. We are moving swiftly through our money unit and we even have a class store set up in our room. The children love to go to the store and use real money to buy items and work the cash register. This helps us use math concepts in real life situations, which is very important.

One of our big projects in Social Studies is the Flat Stanley project. We read Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown and we make our own Flat Stanley’s to send all over the world to help us learn about maps. The Flat Stanley’s visit a family member or friend for a few weeks and send us back all different kinds of things that tell us about where they live. We get so excited when we receive “mail” because we know a Flat Stanley is here! We really enjoy seeing all the things our friends and family have sent us and get to experience different parts of the world right here in our classroom.    

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