Texas Pre-Kindergarten Technology Applications TEKS

The Texas Pre-Kindergarten Technology Applications TEKS has been divided into five domains: Social and Emotional Development, Language and Communication, Emergent Literacy: Reading, Emergent Literacy: Writing, and Mathematics. The first domain, Social and Emotional Development, uses skill outcomes such as self concept, self control, social competence, and social awareness. The second domain, language and communication, has outcomes of listening comprehension, speaking skills, speech production, vocabulary skills, and sentence and structure skills. The third domain, Emergent Literacy: Reading, shows how motivation to read, phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and comprehension of text read aloud are necessary skills for young children. Emergent Literacy: Writing, the fourth domain, outlines skills that involve motivation to write, independently conveying meaning, forming letters skills, and concepts about print skills. The final domain, Mathematics, demonstrates counting skills, adding to/taking away, geometry and spatial sense, measurement skills, and classification and pattern skills that are outcomes for pre-kindergarten classrooms using technology. The TEKS are guidelines that foster cross-curricular, multifaceted and engaging lessons that integrate technology to meet multiple skills simultaneously.
By following the guidelines, the students will gain better insight as to the future grade levels material. Students are further advanced, more familiar with applications, and foundation-ally secure.
A spiral or scaffold curriculum is one in which the skills taught are built upon lesson by lesson, theme by theme, year by year. It's reteaching, building in new concepts, and reviewing old concepts. Students need repeated review because, as most good educators are aware, showing them something once does not mean they got it and will remember it. A particular series of TEKS that scaffolds instruction well would be that of vocabulary development. When introducing a new word to elementary students, it is common to use student friendly definitions. As students move forward into middle school and high school with new vocabulary, more technical terms can be used. Expanding students' vocabulary gives more leverage towards comprehension, mathematics, and development of many other skills. By beginning basic, using synonyms that students are familiar with and use regularly, teachers can expand and build students' knowledge.