Our Upper Elementary Program (grades 4-6) is a multi-age environment designed to meet the social, emotional, and academic needs of students 9-12 years of age, with enriching curriculum designed to build upon concepts and skills learned in the early elementary grades.
The curriculum of the Upper Program is designed to provide each child the opportunity to explore their independence and research topics they are most interested in. Students are consistently given opportunities to plan projects that exhibit their unique interests and the level of understanding of these topics, as well as give them a chance to share these efforts with their peers. Students build on the concrete understanding of concepts that are formed in the lower elementary years, and dive into abstract thinking. Through independent and group work, planning and research, they explore themes and topics in a greater depth.
Students develop research skills to learn how to collect and organize the information they have collected. Students utilize their repertoire of academic writing to choose the format of their final project.
Math concepts and operations learned in lower elementary grades are advanced to a more abstract level with increased difficulty and performance quickly in the Upper Elementary grades. Mastery of math facts is key to progressing in operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) factors, fractions, and decimals.
The Upper Elementary curriculum engages students to explore a higher level of concepts and themes in great depth, critically examine their work, and develop reading fluency, analysis skills and writing strategies.