Greeting parents! My name is Gao Vang and I am excited to join the Saint Paul Music Academy kindergarten team. I bring over ten years of experience in early childhood teaching. Most recently, for the past five years, I helped develop and start the Hmong Dual Language program at Jackson Magnet Elementary. I was proud to be a pre-school and kindergarten teacher there.

As kindergarten teacher for your child at Saint Paul Music Academy, I'd like to acquaint parents with our curriculum. We use Mondo for reading and phonics. For math, we utilize Everyday Mathematics. Our curriculum is implemented using a workshop model for the major three components: reading, math, and writing. The workshop model consist of three major parts. They are the mini-lesson, worktime, and share. The mini-lesson last about 15 minutes. Students spend the majority of time in the worktime, which last 40 minutes. Lastly we regroup after independently working to share with our class what we learned or worked on during our worktime.

After all the hard work we spend on our core curriculum, we make time for fun that we do here at school. We have many exciting things happening here at Saint Paul Music Academy. As a part of our music focus here at Saint Paul Music Academy, your child receives 20 minutes of violin lessons everyday. In addition to violin lessons everyday, they rotate going to physical education, computer, music, science, and gifted.

We also have a few field trips planned as well. We are planning trips to the planetarium and Gibbs Farm. We will also have a guest speaker from the Saint Paul Fire Department coming out in November to talk to your children about fire safetly.

I am excited to be here and look forward to an exciting year with your child. If you have any questions please call me at 293-8620 or email me at gao.vang@spps.org.

Thank you!

Gao Vang

KIndergarten Teacher

Room 1305