GOLD® Objectives and Dimensions (WaKIDS) 

Hello Kindergarten Families,

We are so excited to welcome your little one to kindergarten at Lafayette! If you’ve enrolled your child for the 2025-26 school year, you should soon receive a postcard letting you know who your child’s teacher will be. (If you haven’t received your postcard, you can contact the school to check on your child’s placement.)

Once you find out who your child’s teacher will be, please find their name below and click on their link to sign up for a Family Connection Meeting. This is a conference we all get to have together—parents/guardians, teacher, AND student—before classes begin. This gives us all a chance to get to know each other better and allows us teachers to meet our wonderful new students ahead of the school year. So please make sure to sign up for a time that allows your child to attend with you!

If you have questions, please reach out to your child’s teacher. We highly recommend bringing your school supplies to this meeting so that your child doesn’t have to manage them all on the first day of school (which, for kindergarten, is on Monday, September 8th, 2025).

Kindergarten Beginning-of-the-Year Meeting Sign Ups

• Ms. Peterson’s Class
• Ms. Angel’s Class
• Mr. Marks’ Class
• Ms. Sarah’s Class

We look forward to seeing you soon!

Sincerely,

The Kindergarten Team

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Washington Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills (WaKIDS) is a process of connecting families, elementary schools and early education programs so that new kindergartners can be ready to start school.

All Washington public elementary schools participate in WaKIDS, which includes 3 elements:

• Family connection
• Whole-child assessment
• Early learning collaboration

Social–Emotional

1. Regulates own emotions and behaviors
   • Manages feelings
   • Follows limits and expectations
   • Takes care of own needs appropriately

2. Establishes and sustains positive relationships
   • Interacts with peers

3. Participates cooperatively and constructively ingroup situations
   • Balances needs and rights of self and others
   • Solves social problems

Physical

4. Demonstrates traveling skills
5. Demonstrates balancing skills
6. Demonstrates fine-motor strength and coordination
   • Uses fingers and hands
   • Uses writing and drawing tools

Language

8. Listens to and understands increasingly complex language
   • Comprehends language
   • Follows directions

9. Uses language to express thoughts and needs
   • Speaks clearly

10. Uses appropriate conversational and other communication skills
    • Engages in conversations

Cognitive

11. Demonstrates positive approaches to learning
    • Attends and engages
    • Persists
    • Solves problems

12. Remembers and connects experiences
    • Recognizes and recalls

13. Uses classification skills
14. Uses symbols and images to represent something not present
    • Thinks symbolically
    • Literacy

15. Demonstrates phonological awareness
    • Notices and discriminates rhyme
    • Notices and discriminates smaller and smaller units of sound

16. Demonstrates knowledge of the alphabet
    • Identifies and names letters
    • Uses letter–sound knowledge

17. Demonstrates knowledge of print and its uses
    • Uses print concepts

18. Comprehends and responds to books and other texts
    • Uses emergent reading skills

19. Demonstrates emergent writing skills
    • Writes name
    • Mathematics

20. Uses number concepts and operations
    • Counts
    • Quantifies
    • Connects numerals with their quantities

21. Explores and describes spatial relationships and shapes
    • Understands shapes