Language Arts & Social Studies
Kimberly Sherk
A joy for reading and writing is instilled in students through foundational literacy programs to lay the groundwork for reading and writing. Multisensory and interactive strategies help students master foundational literacy skills including phonemic awareness, phonology, encoding, and decoding are employed in our classrooms. Older students are taught to examine language and literature through discussion, analysis, and written reflection of reading and writing.
Our language-rich heterogeneous classrooms encourage:
- Participation in meaningful discourse
- Focus on speaking and listening to make connections and recognize the diverse viewpoints of classmates
- Differentiation to meet each student’s individual needs and growing each child from where they are
- Meaningful synthesis between reading, writing, and social studies through interdisciplinary units to delve deeply into topics
Students begin their Lower School journey learning about how to be contributing members of their communities. They become familiar with the community helpers around them and how to become responsible citizens of their class, school, and world. In depth studies of world and US geography highlight our curriculum over the elementary school years. Students also learn about the area in which we live and the complex history of the relations between settlers, Indigenous Americans, and the land. Students examine the founding of the United States, the creation of a democracy, and our country’s journey through the Civil Rights Movement to modern day.