By ERIN DAWLEY

Martel School

This year, Martel School has started a federally funded, whole-day kindergarten program called Kindergarten Boost. There are currently sixteen students participating in the program. The goal of the K-Boost classroom is to reinforce the skills taught in the regular kindergarten class and also to prepare students well for first grade. Lessons are focused around basic kindergarten skills and knowledge, including shapes, colors, numbers, letter recognition and sounds, and other basic primary skills.

To get Kindergarten Boost started, we hired Stephanie Davis, a 2003 graduate of the University of Maine at Farmington, to teach the class daily. By itself, Kindergarten Boost is a half-day program. The students who participate in it, however, attend a regular kindergarten class during the other half of their school day. Recently, the students in Davis’s class learned about weather, and the letters A, B, C, F, L, and S. For each letter that they learn, they create an arts and crafts project. The students also have learning centers that they can use each day, as well as books that they create to read.

Even though Kindergarten Boost is still new, we at Martel feel that it has been very successful thus far. We look forward to building and strengthening the program so that we may continue to offer it in the future!