Last week, I attended the Ontario Ministry of Education’s Pedagogical Leadership K-3 Regional Face-to-Face in Thunder Bay, where educators from across the north (mainly provincial school boards) explored and discussed the forthcoming Ontario Kindergarten curriculum document and the new Kindergarten report card.
The new kindergarten curriculum will be implemented in Ontario schools beginning in September, with the document anticipated to be available online by the end of June and in print form by the end of the summer. It recognizes that each student will enter, and exit, the two-year kindergarten program at different stages and encourages educators to nurture the growth and learning of each student as an individual. The draft version of the curriculum depicts the kindergarten program divided into four “frames”: Belonging and Contributing, Self-Regulation and Well-Being, Demonstrating Literacy and Mathematics Behaviours, and Problem Solving and Innovating. These four frames are associated with 31 Overall Expectations and provide the framework for the new Kindergarten report card.
To complement the new Kindergarten curriculum document, the Ministry of Education has released Growing Success: The Kindergarten Addendum, which outlines assessment, evaluation and reporting, as it relates to Kindergarten. The document contains templates for the new Kindergarten Report cards, including an Initial Observations report (sent out at the same time as progress reports for other grades) and the Kindergarten Communication of Learning (sent out at the end of term 1 and term 2). Kindergarten reporting on the new templates is strictly anecdotal, no grades or achievement levels are assigned, and teachers report on Key Learning, Growth in Learning, and Next Steps in Learning in relation to the overall and specific expectations and the four frames of learning.
As an organization, Kwayaciiwin is reviewing the Growing Success
Kindergarten Addendum and the aspects of the new Kindergarten program that have been made available to us. We will be bringing this information to our Kindergarten Working Group, so that we can put our heads together to determine what the new curriculum means for our schools and how we can best support the teacher in our district as they implement the program in their classrooms.
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