How Well Do You Know Your School Community?

By: Lauren Temte

This semester I have the privilege of being placed at Pearl Harbor Kai Elementary school

(PH Kai) for my student teaching. Founded in 1942, this school was built to meet the educational

needs of many military families in the surrounding bases and military housing areas. Presently,

Pearl Harbor Kai’s student body of 430 consists of anywhere from 95% to 97% of students

whose families contain one or more parent on active duty. Because of this, only about 35% of

students will continue their education at PH Kai for more than three years. As students ebb and

flow through the school they come with great diversity and learning experience. This rate of

transition has been gracefully addressed by the school staff and they have created an

environment that is welcoming and aimed at helping all students achieve their personal best

while attending school here in Hawaii. I am greatly looking forward to serving these families and

gaining experience where local Hawaiian and Military culture combine.

This year I am working with Ms. Ikeno’s kindergarten class. On the very first day of

school, all of the kindergarten classes planned to do their parent orientations and initial student

assessments. While the parents listened to policies and procedures, their children were

individually assessed on basic skills that should be mastered by the end of the school year.

Although the students are not expected to know any of the content on the test, this information

gives the teachers a baseline understanding of their students academic knowledge coming into

their classrooms. This assessment tested the students knowledge of letter recognition, letter

sound recognition, number recognition, counting in sequence, rhyming, blending, syllabication,

and color and shape recognition. Once all of our students were assessed, Ms. Ikeno and I were
able to determine what lessons we were going to start with and the pace in which we would

move forward.

Upon looking at our baseline data, we identified that while most of our students had a

firm grasp on colors and basic shapes, they had little to no exposure to the alphabet or numbers.

Also, many of them were unable to write their names or would write in reverse. Some of the

students were confident in identifying rhyme but had never been exposed to syllabication and

word parts or blending.

For the reading and writing skills, Ms. Ikeno decided that she would incorporate phonics

into her wonders lessons to help students speak and identify letter sounds correctly. This will

later benefit the students when they learn to blend letter sounds to make words. Name writing

practice has been incorporated on every handout that the students work on and and letter tracing

and writing is already a part of their Wonders curriculum. While rhyme and syllabication are also

included in the Wonders curriculum, Ms. Ikeno has also had the students learn songs about

rhyming words and has incorporated games that require students to practice identifying rhyming

words out of a group of other words. She has also began to teach students how to clap out

syllables and has explained to them that they are word parts.

Math skills are being addressed in similar fashion. The students practice counting

consecutively at morning calendar and during their math block. They have also begun to learn

rhymes to teach them how to write their numbers from 1 to 10. As the year progresses, we will

gradually increase this and expect the students to be able to count, write, and recognize numbers

from 1 to 100.

Later on in the school year our students will take the same assessment again. This will

allow the teachers to see again where the students are and if they have mastered the content they
have been learning. Since all of these basic skills are addressed thoroughly throughout the year,

we are hopeful that our students will be able to pass it with confidence as they move on to first

grade.