What To Expect - Medford Public Schools

ELEMENTARY LEARNING - WHAT TO EXPECT EACH MONTH

This page is dedicated to providing K-5 families with an entry point to what their child will be learning each month across content areas. The table provides information on what your child will be learning and how you can support their learning at home.

Please visit the tab that aligns with your child's grade to see their learning.

What Your Child Is Learning This Month: October, 2026

Kindergarten

Subject	Learning Topics	How You Can Help Your Child At Home
Art	Art routines, material exploration, and foundational skills such as cutting, gluing, line, shape, color, and safe use of materials.	Let your child draw, cut, and create with simple materials at home.
ELA	Discovering what Kindergarten is all about. Reading books about school and schools from around the world.	Make a special time and place to read with your child every day & ask: What’s happening in the picture? Who is the story about? Where does it happen? What is the book about? What did you learn? Can the picture help you with the word ?
Library	Library concepts, library rules and how to use the library. Practicing skills of using shelf markers and taking care of resources.	Practice holding books and turning pages gently by the upper right corner. Ask your child how they can help take care of books.
Math	Introducing Basis of Math Instruction, Counting Quantities, Comparing Lengths, comparing and ordering two or more amounts, describing and measuring the length of objects by direct comparison. Students develop strategies for accurately counting quantities up to 10	Practice counting household objects like spoons, toys, or shoes up to 10 daily, emphasizing that the last number said tells how many there are in all. Compare which one is longer or shorter or put in small piles to ask which group has "more" or "less".
Music	Steady beat, movement, singing, and sound exploration, with students beginning to recognize and respond to basic musical concepts.	When listening to music, encourage your child to clap to the beat of a song or sing along!
NEXUS	Disability Awareness	Talk about human diversity and neurodiversity in your home with your children. Be honest and direct and embrace their curiosity.
PE	Locomotor skills	Skill practice: Walk, Run , Skip, Hop, Leap, Jump, Gallop
Science	Trees over the seasons and the place of trees at school and in the community.	Take your child for walks in your neighborhood to observe trees and other plants. Compare how they are alike and how they are different. Your child may be asked to gather some tree leaves to press at school. Help your child choose a leaf from a tree in their yard or local neighborhood to press.
Social Studies	Role of being a citizen	Make a list of people who are helpful citizens in Medford
Technology	Build foundational clicking and mouse practice skills. Students will develop the fine motor coordination needed to comfortably point, click, drag, and interact with early digital learning activities.	Practice using a computer mouse or trackpad at home through interactive drawing tools or simple educational clicking games. Focus on building comfort with steady pointing and clicking.

Grade 1

Subject	Learning Topics	How You Can Help Your Child At Home
Art	Line, shape, color, texture, and pattern through drawing, painting, collage, and other hands-on processes	Ask your child to point out colors, shapes, lines, and patterns they see
ELA	Being valuable members of families and community, and together students make their class a place to learn and grow.	Incorporate questions into everyday conversations: What kind of artwork do we see in different areas of our community? Does a big city have a large or a small population of people? Who are the helpers we see working in our neighborhood?
Library	Library concepts, library rules and how to use the library. Practicing skills of using shelf markers and taking care of resources.	Practice holding books and turning pages gently by the upper right corner. Ask your child how they can help take care of books.
Math	Counting and quantity, place value and the structure of the base-10 number system, the meaning of operations with whole numbers, the development of computational fluency, and generalizations about numbers and operations. Attributes of two-dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) shapes and how these attributes determine their classification.	Read or make up simple addition and subtraction stories using small items (like buttons or coins) and have your child build the quantities with drawings or objects. Give your child a set of objects (i.e 8 buttons) and challenge them to split them into two parts in different ways to practice number composition.
Music	Beat and rhythm, pitch, singing, movement, and tempo, with students practicing simple rhythmic and melodic patterns.	Encourage your child to sing along to songs and clap the rhythm.
NEXUS	Disability Awareness	Talk about human diversity and neurodiversity in your home with your children. Be honest and direct and embrace their curiosity.
PE	Locomotor skills	Skill practice: Walk, Run , Skip, Hop, Leap, Jump, Gallop
Science	Patterns in the day and night sky, temperature patterns, the moon, and how things change over the month.	Point out patterns in the day and night sky. Help them notice changes in temperature over the course of the day, or how moon phases change over the course of a month.
Social Studies	Being part of a community	Talk about what it means to be part of a community
Technology	Exploring the physical components of technology by identifying basic parts of the computer and learning how mouse and keyboard function together.	Ask your child to point out and name physical parts like the keyboard, screen, or power button. Play "find the letter" games on a physical keyboard to help them get used to the layout.

Grade 2

Subject	Learning Topics	How You Can Help Your Child At Home
Art	Elements of Art and design concepts, particularly line, shape, symmetry, pattern, color, and texture, with continued development of studio skills.	Look for patterns, shapes, colors, and textures together.
ELA	The world around us and making new discoveries. Read books about different kinds of matter, explore new & unusual things, and notice things about fine art.	Incorporate questions into everyday conversations: How could you examine that more closely? What did you identify in that picture/story as being unusual or different? How could you record your ideas about ___?
Library	Sharing library resources and space. Following library rules, skills of using a shelf marker to find a book, and skills of taking care of library books and the library space.	Discuss how and why it is important to take care of shared resources. Ask who are all of the people who share the books at their school library and why it is important to take care of the resources.
Math	Counting and quantity, place value and the structure of the base-10 number system, the meaning of operations with whole numbers, computational fluency. Making generalizations about numbers and operations.	Count small collections of coins or practice making a specific monetary value using different combinations of nickels, dimes, and pennies. Pose simple addition or subtraction problems and ask your child to explain out loud how they broke the numbers apart to solve it easily.
Music	Rhythm, singing, ensemble participation, and musical vocabulary, including increasing attention to instruments and musical concepts.	When listening to music, clap to the beat of a song or sing along. Ask to identify what instruments they hear in a song,
NEXUS	Disability Awareness	Talk about human diversity and neurodiversity in your home with your children. Be honest and direct and embrace their curiosity.
PE	Locomotor Skills	Skill practice: Walk, Run , Skip, Hop, Leap, Jump, Gallop
Science	Properties of rocks and the use of various rock sizes (pebbles, gravel, sand, silt and clay)	Support in finding a rock or two that child may contribute to class rock collection
Social Studies	Active Citizenship	Talk about how they can contribute to their community as a productive citizen
Technology	Web navigation and how to manage browser & digital tabs. Through structured keyboarding modules, students practice typing accuracy and speed to prepare for academic writing tasks.	Practice web browsing skills together by letting your child practice opening a new browser tab, typing a known educational URL, or switching between tabs. Encourage them to keep two hands on the keyboard when typing short sentences.

Grade 3

Subject	Learning Topics	How You Can Help Your Child At Home
Art	Drawing, painting, printmaking, pattern, texture, and visual organization, including exploration of foreground/background and dimension.	Point out the foreground and background in pictures or artwork. Look at artwork together and ask what details they notice.
ELA	How people use words to express themselves, with a focus on the poetry genre and letters. Reading texts where people share their thoughts, ideas, and feelings.	Reinforce the topic words express, convey, chronicle, and creative in conversations with your child.
Library	Sharing library resources and space. Following library rules, skills of using a shelf marker to find a book, and skills of taking care of library books and the library space.	Discuss how and why it is important to take care of shared resources. Ask who are all of the people who share the books at their school library and why it is important to take care of the resources.
Math	Counting and quantity, place value and the structure of the base-10 number system, the meaning of operations with whole numbers, and generalizations about numbers and operations. Collecting, representing, describing, and interpreting data through graphs and line plots.	Point out real-world items that come in equal groups (like shoes, or egg cartons) and practice skip-counting or writing multiplication equations. Array Hunts: Look for rows and columns in everyday items like window panes, floor tiles, or muffin tins, and talk about how they represent multiplication arrays.
Music	Musical elements and instrumental exploration, including beat, rhythm, melody, harmony, tone color, and beginning instrumental technique.	Ask to tell you what they notice about a song.
NEXUS	Disability Awareness	Talk about human diversity and neurodiversity in your home with your children. Be honest and direct and embrace their curiosity.
PE	Locomotor Practice	Skill practice: Walk, Run, Skip, Hop, Leap, Jump, Gallop
Science	Seeing water through a new light through water property investigations (heating, cooling, evaporation)	Visit a dam, reservoir, lake, or stream to observe the flow and interactions of water with the earth. Consider ways to conserve water in your home and community. Take a walk around the block after a rainstorm, looking for evidence of precipitation, condensation, evaporation, and flowing water.
Social Studies	Massachusetts cities and towns	Explore some fun facts about Medford - ask what they have learned about their city
Technology	Introduction of Google Suite and the purposes of digital documents, presentations, and spreadsheets while practicing fundamental file management	Have your child log into their school drive account at home to show you how they work with their digital document. Ask them to write a few sentences about their day or a favorite hobby on a Google Doc, and show you how they can name their file.

Grade 4

Subject	Learning Topics	How You Can Help Your Child At Home
Art	Color, value, space, perspective, and visual depth, with students applying techniques and art concepts to more developed artwork.	Talk about how artists use color and space to make things look real.
ELA	The five senses, with a focus on the informational text genre. Read texts and view videos about how people and animals use their senses to navigate the world.	Reinforce the topic words identity, pursuit, experience, and wisdom in everyday conversations
Library	Picking a book based on individual choice and learning book picking strategies.	Discuss what types of books they'd would like to explore this year. Ask to think about or discuss what types of stories they enjoy; what are they interested in learning more about; if they were to pick a new type of book this year, what would that be.
Math	Understanding multiplication through using arrays and multiplicative comparison problems and gaining familiarity with factors and multiples. Generating , interpreting and representing Measurement Data	Write simple word problems about sharing objects equally or combining equal groups, and discuss how multiplication and division undo each other. Use small items like beans or coins to build different rectangular arrays for a number
Music	Rhythm, tempo, dynamics, genre, and ensemble performance, with students developing greater technical and expressive control.	Listen for changes in volume, speed, or mood in music.
NEXUS	Disability Awareness	Talk about human diversity and neurodiversity in your home with your children. Be honest and direct and embrace their curiosity.
PE	Locomotor Practice	Skill practice: Walk, Run , Skip, Hop , Leap, Jump, Gallop
Science	Observing soils and exploring how the weathering of rocks provides the basic ingredients that form soil. Investigate how erosion and deposition move earth materials and shape new landforms through stream-table investigations.	Take a walk around your neighborhood and look for the effects of weathering and erosion. Talk about the impacts of natural Earth processes on your community, state, or region (earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions) and what is being done to reduce the impacts.
Social Studies	Exploring maps and learning the meaning of terms such as continent, city, state, and province.	Name different continents and explore regions in continents other than North America
Technology	Diving deeper in Google Suite through focus on formatting, data entry, media insertion, digital organization, sharing permissions, and collaborative document editing	Create a digital list or family project (like a grocery list or a weekend schedule). Practice sharing the document link and formatting text or inserting images.

Grade 5

Subject	Learning Topics	How You Can Help Your Child At Home
Art	Value, space, perspective, symmetry, balance, and composition, with students using multiple techniques to create and communicate visual ideas.	Ask about the choices made in their artwork.
ELA	Subgenres of fiction, with a focus on different ways to tell a great story. Reading texts and viewing videos about how writers share compelling stories in types of literature.	Reinforce the topic words prose, dialogue, climax, and foreword - in conversation.
Library	Picking a book based on individual choice and learning book picking strategies.	Discuss what types of books they'd would like to explore this year. Ask to think about or discuss what types of stories they enjoy; what are they interested in learning more about; if they were to pick a new type of book this year, what would that be.
Math	Counting and quantity, place value and the structure of base-10 number systems, the meaning of operations with whole numbers, the development of computational fluency, and generalizations about numbers and operations. Techniques, tools and united to measure two-dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) shapes and how these attributes determine their classification.	Write multi-step arithmetic puzzles or number strings using parentheses and order of operations Look at rectangular prism boxes (like tissue or cereal boxes) to estimate and calculate the volume by measuring the dimensions.
Music	Performance, musical expression, genre/style, and analysis, while continuing to strengthen pitch, rhythm, steady beat, and performance technique.	Listen to different kinds of music and ask your child what they notice.
NEXUS	Disability Awareness	Talk about human diversity and neurodiversity in your home with your children. Be honest and direct and embrace their curiosity.
PE	Locomotor Practice	Skill practice: Walk, Run , Skip, Hop , Leap, Jump, Gallop
Science	Ecosystems and the feeding relationships in food chains and food webs involving producers, consumers, and decomposers. Create redworm habitats to investigate the role of decomposers	Take a walk outside in natural areas or in your local community to see evidence of food chains, webs, have your child point out decomposers, consumers, and producers. Look for evidence of decomposition, or what might be able to decompose the leaf litter in the neighborhood. Gently overturn rocks or bark from fallen branches to observe the organisms. Return those rocks and bark to the location so the process can continue and it is left undisturbed after observation.
Social Studies	Relationships of English settlers to Native peoples	Talk to your children about what they know about English settlers and Native Peoples. Think about how differently each group lived
Technology	Verify reliable websites and continuing work on collaborative & organizational features in Google Suite/Canva	Open an article on a spoof website (like the famous Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus) or a mainstream news site. Have your child act as a digital detective using the "3-Step Verify" rule: check the author's credentials, look for the source of the data, and search a secondary website to see if the information can be cross-verified.

Main Menu

In This Section