K-3 Overview
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Our program encompasses many basic understandings of young, bright children. The first basic understanding is that our primary role in an educational setting is to foster a genuine love of learning. To do this we focus on the following:
Creativity:
We create enrichment opportunities for our students by offering guest speakers on a variety of subjects, field trips to a variety of locations, divergent thinking activities, science experiments, and creative writing activities.
Organization:
We work with our students to be organized: spatially, with verbal reasoning, in preparing ideas for writing, and in keeping track of their work and parent/school communications. We provide students with the tools and the practice to be an organized learner.
Independence:
We emphasize problem solving and choices in learning, and work directly in developing a child’s self-confidence. We set up situations for our students to self-direct their own learning by not doing things for them. Students are actively encouraged to get the materials together that they need for an activity and to ask for assistance when it is needed.
Responsibility:
We develop a sense of responsibility by creating a community. Students work on learning empathy and problem solving techniques through our curriculum in order to become responsible citizens.
Another basic understanding we hold for young, talented children is that it can be very difficult to determine their level and rate. Teachers continually assess students so they are giving them the appropriate challenges academically. We feel that allowing children to be children is an important balance in an educational setting, especially when the children are young, bright and talented. K-3 students are striving toward the third grade benchmarks. We also recognize that teachers will work with students at rates reflecting their academic and emotional maturity.