Our reading instruction is personalized to each child’s needs. Many students benefit from the Orton-Gillingham approach, which builds decoding, fluency, and comprehension skills through structured, multisensory methods.
Faculty are trained in multiple programs, including Singapore Math® and Stern Structural Arithmetic. Students move from concrete to pictorial to abstract learning as they explore increasingly complex material, continually reinforcing prior concepts before advancing.
Through the Stephen Gaynor School Writing Program, students build skills step by step as they learn grammar, sentence structure, and paragraph development. Graphic organizers help them plan and organize ideas, preparing them for longer assignments such as research papers, reports, and creative stories.
Our social studies curriculum explores themes such as how geography and natural resources shape human life. Integrated with reading and writing instruction, it strengthens literacy while allowing students to demonstrate understanding through art, multimedia, and collaborative projects.
Science in the Lower Division is about hands-on learning through engineering, modeling, and learning experimental design. Some projects that highlight these skills include: "Bee-having" like Honey Bees, a simulation where red cluster students take on various roles within a hive to understand bee behavior and social structures, Big Bad Weather Building Project, where orange cluster students apply their knowledge of weather, climate, and material engineering to design, build and test safe homes for the Three Little Pigs, and Eggstronaut Adventures where yellow cluster students complete a series of experiments to determine how to build the ideal parachute for their "eggstronauts" to safely survive a two-story drop.
