Kindergarten

The kindergarten year is a time of incredible growth and development for children, both academically and emotionally. Blake’s kindergarten teachers work daily to understand each child’s strengths, challenges and passions. They use this knowledge to create individual student learning plans to foster their progress in literacy, mathematical concepts, scientific inquiry, critical thinking and more.

Blake’s kindergartners engage with all Lower School specialist programs, including weekly time in:

music
art
Spanish
engineering and programming
physical education
library
strings
theatre

Specialist classes are woven into a kindergartner’s weekly schedule, allowing students to practice transitions and engage in creative problem solving with their peers. Kindergarten, along with PK and first grade, is part of Blake's Early Learning Center.

We are drawn to Blake because of the value it places on developing social and emotional skills in addition to academic learning. We appreciate that Blake’s early learning curriculum incorporates important foundational skills including mindfulness, self-regulation, growth mindset, empathy, and conflict resolution. We believe that these concepts are critical for helping children thrive. Lower School Parent

School Day

Teacher pointing to white board in front students

Classroom doors open at 8:15am each weekday. Families may choose to take advantage of on-site complementary care (no registration required) beginning at 7:45am.

School hours starting in 2025-26 will be 8:15am-3:15pm Monday-Friday.

Extended Afternoon Programs

Blake Extended Day is an after-school, multi-age program that runs weekdays 3:15-6pm. The Extended Day afternoon program is offered for an additional fee and registration is required.

A Week in the Life of a Kindergartner

No two days of kindergarten are the same, and every week is filled with learning opportunities in and out of the classroom. Below is an example of how Blake kindergartners spend their time, taken from a weekly newsletter sent from teachers to parents.

Language Arts

This week we learned how to write a letter to someone. The students learned the different parts of a letter and then practiced writing to a classmate. Some of the kindergarteners have written letters to other students in the Lower School. Our classroom post office is in full swing.The postal workers process the letters and deliver them to the addressees (to the cubbies of the student in the Lower School) before their shift is over.

We talked about another “real” reason to write—lists! The students got to work writing to-do lists, packing lists, birthday lists, etc. The students were excited to bring them home that afternoon to add to them (if needed) and then to cross off the items on their lists!

We read a story entitled “A List” by Arnold Lobel, which is a Frog and Toad story, to get the students ready to write their own lists. We also recently read through several books in our classroom that have word patterns in them that repeat and are also familiar to the students. We also introduced some printable books that have phrases that repeat and also have the kindergarten words in them. These emergent readers help the students begin to not only read the pictures but read conventionally.

Math

Social Emotional Learning

Buddy Time

More Fun

Transportation

Blake owns and operates its own bus services and offers both door-to-door service, as well as central stops throughout the metro area. Busing is available in the morning, at 3:30pm and Fridays at noon for kindergartners not staying for the afternoon program.

Learn more