Elementary School Readiness: What Does Your Student Need to Know Going into Each Grade? Advice from the Teachers at Canyon Pointe Academy

Kindergarten:

Welcome to Kindergarten!! Kindergarten is one of the most important years of your child’s life. In our classroom, we not only focus on academics, but social emotional learning as well. To best prepare your child for success, it is valuable for them to have letter/number recognition, letter sound recognition, know their alphabet order, and to have a general idea of counting in order by ones. We place a large emphasis on these topics in our curriculum, and it does become more advanced throughout the school year!

-Ms. Zeppetella

1^st Grade:

Get ready to rock on into first grade! Take everything you know about letters and numbers and put them to the test! In first grade you learn the 6 different types of syllables, addition with more than one digit and so much more! Add in cool experiments and bam! Next thing you know, you’ll be a second grader!

-Ms. Hallas

2^nd Grade:

At the beginning of the school year, a 2^nd grader should be able to: read, recognize and orally manipulate sounds, blend sounds to read written words with accuracy and fluency, and read and recognize sight words, word endings, and syllable types. For math, a 2^nd grader should be able to add and subtract within 10, understand properties of operations, and understand place value and use it to add and subtract.

-Mrs. Vasilescu

3^rd Grade:

A third grader should know: How to read different styles of text (articles, short stories, short chapters in a book), how to ask appropriate questions and answer questions about a text (who, what, where, when, why, and how), how to use proper punctuation, how to add and subtract numbers up to 100 (30+25 or 72-12), be able to solve one-two step word problems, and understand the ones, tens, and hundreds place in a three-digit number.

-Mr. Kotyk

4^th Grade:

It would be very beneficial for students to know some of their multiplication tables coming into 4^th grade. They should also have a basic understanding of the grammar rules, including the use of quotation marks, as this is something I’ve noticed my students struggle with.

-Mr. Haight

5^th Grade:

When entering 5^th grade, it is imperative that students enter with strong multiplication and division skills. Most of what students are learning in 5^th grade requires the use of both concepts. If students do not come in with a strong multiplication and division foundation, they will struggle tremendously. We do not spend time learning either of these skills in 5^th grade.

-Ms. McKinney

6^th Grade:

Students entering CPA 6^th grade should be proficient in:

ELA:

1. Knowing and understanding the role of the eight parts of speech
2. Recognizing and using prepositional phrases
3. Identifying and writing various sentence structures and types
4. Knowing and understanding what makes up a sentence
5. Recognizing and writing narratives, expository, argumentative, opinion, and comparative essays
6. The use of capitalization and punctuation in writing
7. Recognizing and understanding how authors use Literary Plot Structure
8. Identifying word meaning within context
9. Recognizing and understanding the use of figurative language in various forms of written language
10. Using the dictionary and thesaurus as resources to support higher levels of word use

Math:

1. Rules of the order of mathematical operations
2. Addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication facts
3. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing multi-digit numbers, decimals, fractions, and integers
4. Recognize and identify basic polygons and calculating their areas.

-Mrs. Holthusen