What to Teach the First Month: Getting Kindergarten Off to a Great Start ~ Ep. 96

If you don’t spend the time to build these routines and introduce materials and expectations, it will be much more chaotic in your classroom and you will be spending most of your time later on in the year, like putting out fires and talking about expectations as opposed to actually teaching.

~ Zeba from Episode 96 of The Kindergarten Cafe Podcast

Episode Summary

The first month of kindergarten is not easy!! Not going to sugarcoat it…there’s a reason people compare it to herding cats! But it does get better, and how you use this first month truly sets the tone for the rest of the year.

In this episode, I’m walking you through exactly what to focus on during those first few weeks – from establishing routines to introducing materials, building classroom community, and keeping things playful and developmentally appropriate. I’ll also share how I ease into academics because it’s not about jumping into the curriculum right away.

In this episode I share:

• What routines to teach and how to teach them
• When to start academic work and how to keep it simple
• How to help students build stamina, independence, and social-emotional skills…

Related Episodes:

• The Magic of Back to School Scavenger Hunts ~ Ep. 47
• Launching Morning Meeting in Kindergarten ~ Ep. 46
• 7 Activities for Your First Month of Kindergarten ~ Ep. 44

Resources:

• Kindergarten Back to School Activities | First 2 Weeks Kindergarten Lesson Plans
• First Month of Kindergarten Success Kit | Back to School Activities Mega Bundle

Connect with Zeba:

• Instagram – @kindergartencafe
• Facebook – @kindergartencafe
• Website – www.kindergartencafe.org
• Tik Tok – @kindergartencafe

Read the Transcript

[0:00] Hey there, kindergarten teachers. It’s Zeba from Kindergarten Cafe, and today’s episode is all about what to teach for the first month of kindergarten. And some of you might already be launching into the first month. Some of you, like me, might be a couple weeks away or a month away. So let’s dive in and talk about what to teach the first month of kindergarten so that no matter where you are in your summer or back-to-school journey, you can have a clear goal in mind for the first month of kindergarten. You’re listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast, where kindergarten teachers come to learn classroom-tested tips and tricks and teaching ideas they can use in their classroom right away. I’m Zeba, creator and founder of Kindergarten Cafe, and I help kindergarten in teachers with everything they need from arrival to dismissal in order to save time, work smarter not harder, and support students with engaging and purposeful lessons. I’m here to cheer you on through your successes and breakthroughs and offer support and resources so you never have to feel stuck or alone. Ready to start saving time and reducing your stress all while using effective and purposeful lessons that students love? Let’s get started.

[1:25] Okay, so the first month of kindergarten, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. It’s tough. Is tough, but it gets better. Remember that. If someone says that it shouldn’t be tough, like you don’t listen to them because they’re lying. It is in fact going to be tough. They say it’s like herding cats and it kind

[1:44] of is, but it gets better. It gets better. It gets better. Just remember that it gets better. And so it’s really a critical, critical time to lay the foundation for a successful year. It is a critical month to set kids up for success so that they can be independent and so that the end of the year can actually get better or the middle of the year can actually get better. Everything I’m going to talk about today and more is included in my free August-September teaching guide. It’s made so that no matter when your first month of kindergarten is, you will know exactly what to teach. And let’s say you teach in August, you can still get ideas for what to teach in September. So definitely a helpful guide to check out with lots and lots of information. I have these guides for every single month of the school year. So if you haven’t checked them out already, they are definitely worth checking out. They’re everything that I do with my students and what I teach in that month. You can get that in the link below and at my website, kindergartencafe.org slash August.

[2:44] Okay, so when we talk about the first month, we really want to break it down into the first week or two and then the second half of the month. So the first week or two is really, I spread it out over two weeks generally, but it’s really about building that foundation of routines and expectations.

[3:05] The first week is all about setting up those routines. The first two weeks and the rest of the month, but the first weeks especially, is all about setting up routines. You are going to be spending your day basically introducing a routine.

[3:19] Practicing it, doing a quick activity. Introducing a routine, practicing it, doing a quick activity. You are going to want to be introducing every single routine. You want to introduce every single material that you’re giving them and how to use that material and then let them practice with that material and maybe let them play a game with that material. The whole time is spent doing that. You are not introducing curriculum yet. You are not launching into your curriculum routines. This is the time to teach routines like how to come to the rug, how to push in your chair, how to line up, how to walk in the hallways, how to hold a pencil, how to use a marker and put the cap back on, how to use the bathroom appropriately, how to do morning meeting, how to show that you’re listening.

[4:13] All of these things is what you’re focusing on. It does look different than your normal schedule and your normal routine, and that’s okay. Like, you might not do necessarily literacy during the literacy block, but that’s okay because everything you’re doing is going to support you in teaching literacy and teaching math down the road. If you don’t spend the time to build these routines and introduce materials and expectations, it will be much more chaotic in your classroom. And you will be spending most of your time later on in the year, like putting up fires and talking about expectations as opposed to actually teaching. So when you take the time before jumping into curriculum, it pays off. You’re able to do a lot more with the curriculum. The other thing you want to focus on in that first couple weeks of school is making kids feel welcome, helping them to get to know each other, get to know the people in the class, make friends, get to know their names. You want to do a lot of stuff with names because you want to help them be able to talk about their friends or use their friends’ names.

[5:17] So it’ll be important to spend time doing classroom building, community building activities. And you’ll also want to introduce areas of the classroom so that kids know where they can go, when they’re looking for things, when they want to, you know, read a book or do an art activity. Where do they go? How do they use the area? What materials are available? how do they use them, and most importantly, how do they clean it up? You want to introduce all of those areas. After you’ve done that, like middle of week two, but most likely more like beginning of week three, you’ll start to very slowly introduce some academics.

[5:56] But it’s really not like jumping into curriculum. It’s really instead introducing some basic academic routines or academic materials, things like that. For math, you might.

[6:09] Teach them how to use a couple math materials, and you’ll be teaching them the routine of math stations if you do that, or math centers. Like, what does that look like and how do you do that? You’ll do that with very simple activities that are all about practicing using the math materials or math tools, and you’re not actually teaching them math yet. You’re not diving into that yet. You are just talking about the routine of how to do the math in the classroom.

[6:37] That way they know the expectations of using the math tools as tools and not toys. It’s a big teaching point. In literacy, you’ll probably start exploring with names, maybe introducing letters just in a playful, fun way. I love to do a whole week on student names with different activities for names. I also love to do a whole week on like Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and, you know, introducing the letters specifically the letters that go with their names because that’s like the great a great place to start learning about letters is the letters in their names you’ll want to do some work with rhyming i love to do down by the bay for this just things like that so i use books to help i’ll do a read aloud and then i’ll do an activity to help with like i said the names is a big one so we’ll do brown bear brown bear or who stole the cookies from the cookie jar and we’ll make class books and they’ll write their names and we’ll sing the songs in morning meeting as a greeting and they get to read the class books when they want. Like all these things are connected and they’re quick activities, but they have a purpose. The purpose is we’re helping kids to learn each other’s names, to learn their own names, to start writing their names, all that stuff.

[7:51] Science and social studies were just very basic introducing some activities. Maybe you’ll have them exploring in the science center or like reading books about what it means to be a scientist or like doing work with the five senses and how to observe that kind of thing and social studies any work you’re doing on community building and following rules is important work on social studies but you can also start by doing like identity work and talking about their eye color their skin color, like what, or their names, what makes them them? What do they like to do? That kind of thing is all important social studies works.

[8:31] But just keep in mind that as you’re going through this first month, keep the learning playful and engaging because they’re going to learn better when they have hands-on experiences. This month is all about building up stamina so that they are able to do more of the work and the curriculum that you’re going to start giving them. You want to have it be, like I said, more hands-on, more playful so that they can stay longer at an activity and be more engaged with the activity. But generally plan for learning to be in about 10 or so minute chunks and remember that we are building up their stamina so at the beginning of the month definitely focus on 10 minutes at a time after the month you could be up to make to like 15 or 20 minutes depending on the activity if it’s playful and they have choice in the matter if you’re doing math stations and they can move from station to station yeah they can do it longer but if it’s one activity that they’re all doing one worksheet.

[9:29] Like 10 minutes max, because they’re going to start to check out. When kids are not engaged, that’s when behaviors happen. And it’s not fair to expect kids at this time to be able to sustain attention for longer than that, because they’re just, they haven’t had to. It’s developmentally not appropriate for them, and we need to build up their stamina. So until they’re ready for it, we shouldn’t expect them to do it, or else behaviors will happen. And it will be setting them up for having these behaviors. We want to avoid that. So just keep that in mind as you’re planning your first month of kindergarten. It’s always good to have extra activities to pull at the ready that you can do at different times if you need to fill up. Some 10-minute chunks.

[10:10] Another big part of the first month of kindergarten, like I was talking about for the first two weeks, but throughout the whole month, you want to do just as much social-emotional learning as you want to do any academics, because you are teaching all the routines, and that is included with social-emotional learning. You want to teach students how to interact with others, how to be a learning partner. That is a huge routine to learn, how to be a good you know winner and loser and how to be flexible and how to take turns and how to share ideas you want to help them to learn how to be independent how to ask three before me or how to do their classroom jobs how to put away materials independently by using the labels in your classroom you’ll want to teach listening skills how to follow directions how to show that you’re listening why it’s important to listen to our friends and our teachers like all that stuff you want to focus on in the first month of kindergarten. And you’ll definitely want to introduce a calm corner to help start the process of teaching self-regulation and emotional regulation. And I’m going to get into that more in a couple episodes from now. So stay tuned for that. But you’ll dive more into like emotional regulation throughout the whole year. But this first month, you really want to focus on how to listen, how to be independent, and how to work with other kids.

[11:35] How to play with other kids. By the end of the month, you really want kids to be comfortable with classroom routines. Begin to have a sense of what learning will look like throughout the year, even if it’s much shorter and smaller chunks than we’ll be expecting them later on throughout the year. Definitely make sure to grab that free August-September first month teaching guide. It has a clear scope and sequence. It goes into more detail than what I’m saying here. And if you want all of the activities that I’ve mentioned and then some, you can get all of my first month activities of kindergarten that I use and my first month of kindergarten survival kit. It is a mega bundle with everything I do the first month of kindergarten. It will make your life so much easier. That’s what I’m here for. And so definitely recommend you checking that out. If you have questions along the way, reach out. You know where to find me. And definitely share this episode with a friend who is maybe starting kindergarten soon or leave a review. It really helps to be able to spread the word about the podcast. It would mean a lot to me to see some reviews. We’re almost at 100 episodes, and I would love to have some more reviews in place between now and then. Thanks so much.

[12:50] Thanks so much for listening to the Kindergarten Cafe Podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for more information and resources, or just head straight to kindergartencafe.org for all the goodies. If you liked this episode, the best ways to show your support are to subscribe, leave a review, or send it to a friend. I’ll be back next week with even more kindergarten tips. See you then!