Elementary
Elementary Curriculum
Encounter is a seamless curriculum that is intentional about exploring big-picture, biblical concepts with the goal of making a difference for eternity. This curriculum uses the classroom context to help build a life-long relationship with Jesus Christ, using the Bible as the source of truth. Through rigorous pedagogical practice, it seeks to develop each students' personal friendship with God and develop reasons for faith, lifestyle choices and ethical decision-making from a Biblical worldview, all the while nurturing interpersonal relationships and service to others.
The Reading and Writing Project's approach to instruction recognizes that “one size fits all” does not match the realities of the classroom. When you walk into a workshop classroom at any given moment, you'll see instruction that is designed to:
- help teachers address each child's individual learning.
- explicitly teach strategies students will use not only the day they are taught, but whenever they need them.
- Support small-group work and conferring, with multiple opportunities for personalizing instruction.
- Tap into the power of a learnin community as a way to bring all learners along.
- Build choice and assessment-baed learning into the very design of the curriculum.
- Help students work with engagement so that teachers are able to coach individuals and lead small groups.
The routines and structures of reading and writing workshop are kept simple and predictable so that the teacher can four on the complex work of teaching in a responsive manner to accelerate achievements for all learners.
Big Ideas Math allows students to grow as independent learners and experience the joy of mathematics. The instructional design guides students through concepts from surface-level to deep-level learning and allows them to transfer these skills for success in higher-level math courses.
Our elementary classrooms use the ByDesign curriculum which is an engaging, rigorous, and developmentally appropriate curriculum that nurtures children's natural curiosity as they explore the wonderment of God's Creation through the lens of the Bible. It is bade on national science standards and built on a foundation of inquiry that encourages wonderment, questioning, exploration of multiple resources to conduct research and investigations (i.e., textbooks, informational books, articles, websites, pictures, observations, hands-on activities, etc.) and collaboration.
Our Social Studies curriculum builds a solid foundation in the core subjects of social studies – history, geography, economics and civics – with conceptually coherent units of study. Each unit provides active engagement with a rich variety of informational texts, primary sources, and media. In a developmental approach across grade levels, students use disciplinary tools and strategies to think like a historian, a geographer, an economist – and as an informed and engaged citizen.