Educational Standards of Excellence

Enriched Setting and Environment

  • Provides a warm, nurturing environment where students feel comfortable being with other creative and/or bright students like themselves.
  • Offers semi-private groups that never exceed six students, so each student receives a great deal of attention.
  • Assumes that teachers can learn to facilitate active learning while maintaining structure and organization.
  • Introduces an interdisciplinary program that naturally integrates history, visual arts, science, and computers in a three-year progressive course of study.
  • Supplies students with state-of-the-art materials and manipulatives from computers, animation equipment, drafting boards, weaving looms to architectural tables.

Challenging and Creative Curriculum

  • Acknowledges that students learn in different ways.
  • Encourages the teacher to apply open-ended questioning techniques with more than one answer to a given problem.
  • Generates a participatory exchange where concept, process, and product are balanced, based on a highly structured scope and sequence.
  • Guides students through a series of thematic instruction exercises, through direct hands-on, real life experiences.
  • Recognizes that students’ active participation in discovering content creates enthusiasm. This, in turn, can motivate students to master content.
  • Respects the active learning method because it helps teachers identify each student’s specific strengths. Once these strengths are recognized, the teacher can help the student recognize and build upon them.

Students as Leaders: Enhancing Communication and Speaking Skills

  • Promotes an environment where students feel comfortable voicing their opinion and embarking on conversations with their peers and teacher.
  • Invites risk-taking behavior through an accepting atmosphere where the powers of thought are respected and critiqued.
  • Uses many forms of communication to generate creative thinking, problem posing, and problem solving so that students’ cognitive strengths of higher-level thinking are tapped.
  • Presupposes that mastery of content enhances the self and develops self-esteem.
  • Maintains that student strengths are a classroom resource, where success breeds success.

Sample of First Year Studies: Prehistoric Life

Students decipher information from a pictorial essay depicting prehistoric life. They have fun making fossils, designing prehistoric masks, and conducting an archaeological dig. By observing the attributes on the found bones, students play a matching game to determine whether or not the items are related to prehistoric people or to the dinosaur.

Children refine their skills by engaging in an exploratory, problem-solving “archaeological dig” on the computer. This is followed by constructing a diorama made of clay, displaying a scene in prehistoric times. Students photograph each movement of the clay characters using a digital camera, import the images into the computer, and create an animated movie. Children have fun presenting their animated motion picture to peers and parents.