Summary of the Pre-K Technology Applications TEKS

As a child begins their educational career, Pre-Kinder is probably the most important grade level for a child in Texas. The 2008 Texas Pr-Kindergarten Guidelines feature five very important domains that a child needs and will use throughout elementary, middle school and high school but most importantly in college and in the real world. The five domains are: Social and Emotional Development, Language and Communication, Emergent Literacy: Reading, Emergent Literacy: Writing, and Mathematics. These are the five basic domains a child will hopefully take with them as they go from one grade level to another.

After reading about a spiral curriculum, I have come to the conclusion that it is when a teacher teaches or exposes a student about a certain topic for a short period of time and then brings is up again a few weeks or months later or even a year later. If the student does not understand or pick up the topic the first time, then maybe he will understand it when it is brought up a later time. Reading over the Technology Applications TEKS (K-12), one example of spiraling curriculum are in Grades 3-5 and Grades 6-8. In the Grades 6-8 TEKS, the students build on the Grades 3-5 knowledge and skills. The students continue to demonstrate keyboarding proficiency in technique and posture while building speed. A second example of spiraling curriculum is from Grades K-2 and Grades 3-5. In Grades K-2, students learn the basic skills of keyboarding and inputting information; they use technology to access information and make projects. In Grades 3-5, the students take what they learned in Grades K-2 and expand on it by using the technology to solve problems and using the correct keyboarding techniques.

Overall if the student does not learn keyboarding that well in the 1st Grade, then maybe he or she will pick it up better when he or she is the 2nd or 3rd Grade. The student might not have picked up keyboarding too well in the 1st Grade but he or she will know the basics so that when he or she is in the 2nd and 3rd Grade keyboarding will become a bit easier and understandable. There has been time that I am discussing adjectives in my theatre class because I want them to use them when describing a certain character in a play. There are times when I get the question "What is an adjective?" so I tell them that they should have learned what an adjective was when they were in elementary but I go ahead and give them the definition and refresh their minds. Most of the time, refreshing our students' minds is all a spiral curriculum does. We teach it once and then come back to it later.