The building of reading skills is integral to school and LIFE! We practice reading-to-self so that we can build up our stamina to read more and more challenging texts for longer and longer periods of time. We dive into a text to find the author's intent and how an author paints a picture with words. We examine a text to find evidence to support a claim or answer a question. We share our learning through BookTALKS, designing and constructing projects to explain our experience with text, and examine an author's work through the lens of social justice.
Eureka! It's math time at SVDP! We have relay races to build our understanding of the distributive property! We work collaboratively in groups to solve problems and we work independently on ST Math to develop our skills. We are piloting the ST Math program K-8 this last quarter. It is a diagnostic based program that identifies a student's individual strengths and areas of growth in mathematics. This allows for a personalized approach to building math skills. The methodology of learning is called Productive Struggle... it means make mistakes, try something again, think about a concept another way. When we struggle we tend to better understand a skill or concept and are able to commit it to memory and then apply it to a multiply-step or real world problem.
We have experiential opportunities to learn more about ourselves as learners. We venture outdoors to explore how early Californians worked, lived and played. Community service projects extend beyond making sandwiches and gift baskets for those less fortunate, we also make-n-bake dog biscuits to support our four-legged friends who are trained as service dogs for the blind. Did you hear that?!? It was either middle school students strumming a tune on their ukulele, or fourth graders practicing their recorder. If you listen carefully, you can almost hum along...
A culminating experience for middle school students is the Academic Decathlon! Schools from across the diocese compete in all curricular areas. Students spend extra time studying the nationally selected topics for the event. This year you can ask our 1st place winner in Social Studies about NASA and the women engineers who were instrumental in its success! Think Hidden Figures...