Dear TK Families,

Welcome to TK (Transitional Kindergarten) at Montemalaga Elementary School! 

My name is Christine Gardner, and I am your child's teacher for the 2024-25 school year.  This is my 28th year of teaching, with 24 of those years at Montemalaga.  I have taught 1st grade, K (kindergarten), and TK throughout my teaching career. I enjoy nature & hiking, gardening, listening to music, reading, and spending time with my family and friends.

Charlene Kai is the class aide.  She loves working with the students and has been a TK aide at Montemalaga for 11 years.  We are lucky to have such a caring and dedicated person in TK.

We look forward to a year of discovery, character-building, learning, and fun.  We are committed to maintaining students' natural curiosity, love of learning, and confidence in themselves as learners while developing strategies and behaviors that will enable them to become active and focused in the classroom setting.

Play is our brain's favorite way of learning. Play and learning go hand in hand. Play-based learning is essential for childhood development.  Appropriate and meaningful play-based opportunities stimulate growth in all domains of development: cognitive, physical (gross and fine motor skills),  social-emotional, and language. Through play, children learn essential skills of language and literacy, collaboration with peers, critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, imagination, confidence, and content. Children learn best by doing and playing and by being inspired and supported by developmentally appropriate play. Play incorporates all subjects across the curriculum, allowing for a more holistic approach that provides continuity in learning and development. Play gives children the chance to practice what they are learning, and IT IS FUN.

In TK we are using our schoolwide PBIS (Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports) throughout the day.  PBIS encourages students to make good choices as they follow class and school expectations in order to SOAR:  Spread Kindness, Observe Safety, Act Responsibly, and Respect ourselves and others.  This empowers the students to make conscious choices and in turn, become intrinsically motivated.  PBIS focuses on students' strengths rather than their weaknesses.  We focus on Whole Body Listening.  This means Eyes are watching, Ears are listening, Body is safe, Voice is quiet (when someone is talking), Heart is caring, and Brain is thinking.