Curriculum

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Cycle One (Grades One and Two) is in its fifth year of reform implementation. Its most important dimension is the desire to offer opportunities to have all students meet with success. It is a competency-based pedagogy which employs cross-curricular strategies. The ultimate goal of this approach is to have the child be able to transfer and apply his knowledge to lifelong learning. Teachers are the initiators and facilitators in an ongoing process where the students interact at various levels of learning.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS

The four areas of the Language Arts Curriculum are:

• Listening
• Speaking
• Reading
• Writing

Listening - Daily activities involve areas like listening to directions, to a lesson, to a story, for specific items, to people speaking etc.

Speaking - Many opportunities are provided every day through oral discussions, talk time, participation in poems, songs, etc. oral reading, communication etc.

Reading - A very integral part to the program. The five approaches used to develop reading skills are:

• Whole Language - Relevant language acquisition around themes.

• Sight Words - (Ex: look, say, the...)Words recognized upon sight.

• Phonetic - (Sounding out words.) Increasingly used as the children learn letter sounds and can blend sounds together.

• Phonological Awareness - How sounds are used in our language to form words and how these sounds are represented by letters.

• Thematic - Acquisition of knowledge through a variety of resources across subject areas.

Guided Reading Program - 'Bookshop 1 & 2' by Thomson Nelson Publishing

Levelled Readers -

Home Reading Log - Students are encouraged to read books daily at home. A monthly reading goal is set each month. Students are required to complete one Reading Response per month.

Hello Readers - Your child will be given 'Hello Readers' daily to supplement the regular reading program. These will help to increase your child's sight vocabulary and oral reading fluency. Please return these books daily.

Writing - This involves two areas:

Printing - There will be strong emphasis on the correct formation of letters, learning to write in the lines, and learning the correct spacings. Students will learn handwriting after the second term.

Creative Writing - The Writer's Workshop will be help twice a week. This involves a read-a-loud, group story, and individual writing time. Students select topics of their choice, and are encouraged to write stories using conventional and inventive spelling of words. Finally, the Writer's Workshop concludes with a reading response time, which allows students to share their stories with the class.

SCIENCE AND HEALTH

Science and Health are no longer separate subjects under the reform. Science and Health will therefore be integrated into the cross-curricular themes. Emphasis is still on the child discovering new concepts about himself/herself and creating an awareness of the world around him/her.

MATHEMATICS

Program: "Nelson Mathematics" by Thompson Nelson Publishing Canada

Numeration
Operations
Measurement
Geometry
Data Management
Problem Solving Strategies

Until now, students have usually been taught computational procedures as sequences of prescribed steps to be memorized and practiced. Using these standard paper and pencil algorithm students learned to perform rote operations whether or not they understood what they were doing. Students’ attention was focused on remembering steps rather than on making sense.

Research over the last ten years strongly indicates that students who have been encouraged to rely on their own thinking devise their own ways of solving computational problems. They invent strategies and procedures that make sense to them, and work for them.

The Nelson Mathematics Program is built on the belief that students should use computational procedures that are personally meaningful for them. The program does not require students to use any one specific procedure, such as a standard paper and pencil algorithm for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Rather students are encouraged to invent their own strategies and procedures.

Activities in the Nelson Mathematics Program provide repeated opportunities for students to develop and reflect on their procedures. They share their invented procedures with their classmates and explain the reasoning behind them. "Jump In" activities focus on exploring alternate ways of doing the same calculations.

All methods are valued and supported. Students do their own evaluations of the procedures they see and try. They adopt those that make sense to them.

During the reflect and communication portion of the "Jump In" activities, the standard algorithm may be brought up students who have been shown it by friends and family members. The teacher may wish to present it to the students at this time as another alternative for them to consider.

This new approach to developing computational procedures requires some shift in thinking and expectations. It requires that teachers value and trust students’ natural ability to think and make sense of numerical situations. All students must not be expected or required to master the same procedures for computations. They must be allowed to develop personal strategies and procedures that make sense to them by building on the knowledge they already have.