Teaching Common Core

We need standards to ensure that all students, no matter where they live, are prepared for success in post secondary education and the workforce. learning more and more about it each day. Common standards will help ensure that students are receiving a high quality education consistently, from school to school and state to state. Our kindergarten has jumped on this common core standard wagon and we are learning more and more every day. We have become very familiar with the individual standards, the ways to teach them and the goals the students should accomplish with these skills. One of the biggest changes that I see personally is that we don't teach as many skills but we DO teach our grade level standards deeper. Depth of knowledge is the buzz right now and it is a challenge to be sure that we are doing that, teaching skills deeper. We are gathering the materials necessary to teach these standards and to assess them. It sounds like a lot of effort but in reality it makes great sense. I want to be sure that what I am teaching the children, I teach well. Spending lots of time on each standard helps accomplish this. For a teacher, one of the greatest challenges is sticking to the standards strictly and discarding some of the "fluff" units and themes that we love to work into our lessons. Some of my "cutsy" stuff will have to go. I wanted to send this post out because we are about to begin our work with addition. This will not be a hit or miss unit but several weeks looking at this from many different angles - going deeper. I hope these children will leave my room with the ability to fluently add and subtract within five. To become fluent the children will also need some help at home reinforcing what they are working on. For that support, I thank you!