Mrs. Ramirez
Hello, my name is Mrs. Julie Ramirez. I am a parishioner here at St. Theresa Catholic Church and am happy to be working here in my sixth year in Kindergarten/Pre-K catholic education. I love this age when the children are first starting to reason and think. They start asking deep questions, both about the Catholic faith they are learning and the world around them. I decided to work in the Catholic schools because I wanted to be able to teach children about the most important things, God and their faith, along with their other subjects. Here they learn prayers, Bible stories, saint stories, about the sacraments, the items used at Mass and the parts of the Mass. Every day in the classroom I see the children’s grace from Baptism at work as they learn about the faith and start putting it into practice.
What is Distinctive about St. Theresa Catholic School’s Kindergarten Class?
This is the exciting year when the children greatly advance in their reading abilities. (They started learning how to read already in Pre-K) Children advance in reading at different speeds and so I give them different books on their individual levels in order that they are all challenged. We use a phonics program that enables the children to move very far in reading and writing over the course of one year. By the end of the year they are reading small children’s books, they are able to write sentences, and some of the children are able to write small paragraphs. They learn about nouns and verbs and can alphabetize to the first or second letter.
We, along with the other classes, use Singapore math, a math program that teaches children to become fluent in math and to love it as well. It teaches children math concepts by taking them from the concrete, to the pictorial and then to the abstract.
The children learn poems and love to recite them as a class or individually. They learn all of the states and capitals and the planets. They go to music for a half hour each day and learn how to sing correctly and how to read simple staff notation.