Lower School Programs and Curriculum

With more time than ever to enjoy in their homerooms, students will experience the curricular enhancements to our core classes of literacy and math whether they are on campus or at home. Through the thoughtful redesign of our schedules, students will benefit from clear and intentional 15-20 minute mini-lessons that will set them up for independent work and practice at their instructional level. 

What to expect:

• Mini-lessons will be taught by our lead teachers and streamed directly into other cohorts and students at home.
• Assignments will be delivered through Seesaw or Google Classroom for students on campus to help students continue to gain comfort and familiarity with these platforms and to support students who must attend virtually.

In Pre-K - 2nd grade, we will be utilizing Really Great Reading, a multi-sensory, Orton-Gillingham based approach to phonics, to strategically strengthen and vertically align our students’ foundational decoding skills to set them up to be confident readers for life.

Our readers and writers will see their skills blossom through the continued use of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Workshop model. We expect to utilize some of the newly released student-facing mini-lessons to support programmatic fidelity.

We will continue our commitment to handwriting through Handwriting Without Tears and typing through Typing Agent and Typing Club. We will also take advantage of the digital tools that have been made available to facilitate the learning of these fundamental skills. 

After experiencing the success of Lexia this past fall, our new and returning students will be able to begin their journey or pick up where they left off through this adaptive and individualized reading support.

Valuing the natural progression of mathematical thinking from concrete to pictorial and later to abstract thinking, we will continue to utilize the Singapore Math approach of Math in Focus. Given that foundations are best built by starting with a tangible understanding of mathematical concepts, we will be providing students with personal manipulatives to increase engagement while maintaining safety.

We will deepen our assessment capacity and further our repertoire for practice through the adaptive and skill-developing tools that Dreambox offers our students.

A defining feature of our lower school experience is our wide offering of co-curriculars from our youngest all the way to 5th grade. In redesigning the schedule, special consideration was given to how to both enhance the experience for students and also minimize exposure for both students and teachers. The results are thrilling.

Depending on the grade, students will be engaging in either our SMALL LEAP or SMArtS or SMArT week-long intensive.

This design will allow for deeper exploration in week-long bursts of inquiry and investigation.

For our Preschool, Pre-K and Kindergarten students, students will make use of both our indoor and outdoor classrooms to dig into everything from scientific concepts to learning through play.

Our 1st through 5th graders will enjoy their favorite co-curriculars in a more enriching framework that promotes critical and creative thinking skills through longer-range project planning. 

With the opportunity to increase student-driven learning, we will be building in a Flex period in our 1st-5th grade classes to be used at the teacher’s discretion. These periods will be available to our learning specialists to provide targeted learning enrichment support to students with identified needs. It might also allow time for students to engage in passion projects of their choosing – self-driven research into student-developed questions.