Grade 3
​Grade 3 builds a solid foundation for students to become excellent readers, writers, and critical thinkers. The curriculum is aligned with state and Common Core standards. Students in this class will focus on building vocabulary and applying new words in speaking, reading, and writing. Class size is kept small so that in-class lessons can be highly interactive and focus on issues like punctuation. Each lesson integrates vocabulary building, reading strategies, grammar fundamentals, and essay writing. Students are introduced to essential writing skills starting with an introduction to all eight parts of speech and then focusing on basic sentence construction. Essential paragraphing principles such as stating the controlling idea of a paragraph and paragraph unity are taught.
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Students read a passage in different types of literature every week, so they learn the building blocks of reading comprehension strategies for both non-fiction and fiction texts. Through in-class interactive exercises students learn to read the sentences as written, avoiding common errors like skipping words in a sentence, adding words that are not part of the text's sentence, and not recognizing where one sentence ends and another begins. The building blocks of comprehension include topics such as:
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Framing questions before, during, and after reading the passage;
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Identifying the main idea;
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Identifying evidence
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Knowing when to apply process of elimination when answering multiple choice questions;
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Drafting answers in complete sentences to open-ended questions.
Grade 4
This class focuses on four key areas: vocabulary building, reading comprehension, grammar, and essay writing. Class size is kept small to maximize student-to-teacher and student-to-student interaction. Building on the solid foundation established in Grade 3 (see above), students will enhance their skills and confidence in expressing their ideas. Together, the class will explore engaging texts and develop essential writing techniques prepare for future learning.
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Grade 4 instruction reinforces the skill set students learn in Grade 3. As in Grade 3, reading passages are non-fiction and fiction, but greater emphasis is placed on reading non-fiction given the emphasis on fiction in the student's school. Instruction reviews and reinforces basic comprehension skills taught in Grade 3, and adds more advanced skills, including:
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Reading strategies using visualization;
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Clarifying while reading;
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Making inferences;
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Making predictions while reading;
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Identifying sequence of events;
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Identifying compare-and-contrast and cause-and-effect approaches in passages;
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Distinguishing fact from opinion;
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Strategies for answering more complicated multiple choice, open-ended, and other types of questions.
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Students learn to draft five-paragraph non-fiction expository essays. Young writers learn more principles of paragraphing than taught in Grade 3, such as coherence and providing adequate information to support the essay's topic or thesis. They also learn the importance of commenting about evidence and using logical reasoning to link evidence to the paragraph's topic and supporting ideas. The teacher emphasizes that good writing requires more than a first draft.​​
Grade 5
The Grade 5 class recognizes that this year is pivotal for elementary students. This is the year that prepares students to meet middle school expectations. Reading texts are more advanced, requiring comprehension strategies students will use and perfect in middle school. Students in this class will be introduced to vocabulary at the sixth grade level initially and the seventh grade level by the fourth quarter. Grammar instruction will start with an end-to-end review of grammar fundamentals that students learned in Grades 3 and 4, and then focus on more advanced topics for middle school. These topics include noun and pronoun case, different types of phrases, verb tenses and forms beyond the three simple tenses students learned in school, and how clauses are combined for more sophisticated sentences.
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A significant part of this class focuses on writing to meet teachers' expectations in middle school. Students learn to write different types of sentences based on combining independent and dependent clauses to express ideas in more sophisticated ways. Teaching how to write different sentence types is accompanied by lesson material on more advanced punctuation, such as when to use a colon in compound sentences and proper punctuation for
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conjunctive adverbs. Advanced paragraphing, which goes beyond basic principles like a clear controlling idea and unity, using different internal text structures (such as cause-and-effect, compare and contrast, and spatial organization) is a particular focus. Instruction also covers essay organization depending upon the type essay and when to address alternative points of view and counter arguments. By the end of the course students are prepared to meet and exceed middle school writing expectations.,
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