Middle Grades (3-5)

Middle Grade School

Middle grade teachers incorporate a variety of teaching modalities. They focus on individual student abilities with small group, targeted instruction. Students practice all forms of reading which include read-alouds and silent reading throughout the day in all subjects, developing a love of reading and literature. Math instruction is focused on the development of each students’ number sense, measurement, geometry, and data analysis skills.

WRITING WITH PURPOSE

Beginning in the third grade, students are taught how to write with a sense of purpose. In addition to writing opinion papers on current topics, students are encouraged to write for their larger community, often publishing their work in newsletters, online publications, and other public outlets. Identifying one’s audience helps students establish a consistent tone and communicate clearly in their papers.

By the fifth grade, students are conducting short research papers, drawing on evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research. Students learn to support their points of view with reason and evidence, organize their thoughts logically, and develop arguments with facts, quotations, and concrete details.

SCIENTIFIC MATTERS

What is matter and what happens when it changes? By the fifth grade, students are able to develop models to describe the nature of matter as particles too small to be seen. Students learn about the conservation of energy, the different states of matter, and the conditions for their transformations. Students are also introduced to fundamental ideas of chemistry as the study of the structure of matter and the changes or transformations that take place in it. Learning about the makeup of substances gives students knowledge about how things go together and how they can be taken apart.

MATHEMATICS

Teaching fractions is a centerpiece of our math curriculum. The introduction of fractions often represents a student’s first experience with a math concept beyond the basic skills of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Thus, our instructors create assignments designed to increase confidence in a student’s ability to learn and apply fractions in their everyday life. By the fourth grade, students can add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators, calculate sums and differences of fractions, and make reasonable estimates of them.