Our Curriculum

The lower school provides students a challenging and exciting curriculum, strong in basic skills and broad in enrichment, for grades K-5.

Integration among topic areas is a mainstay of our academic program. This approach broadens a child’s overall understanding of a subject. For example, a third grade child may be studying Native Americans in social studies, studying Indian design in art and visiting the American Indian exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and dramatizing tales in the classroom.

The lower school’s learning design is built around self-contained homerooms for students. Each kindergarten through fourth grade classroom features a teacher and an assistant teacher who teach language arts, social studies and math. Fifth grade students also have homeroom teachers and assistant teachers, but they have a separate teacher for math, social studies and language arts. Each of the fifth grade teachers specializes in one of these three disciplines.

The children leave the homeroom classes to attend art, music, band (grade 5), computer, physical education, library, foreign language and science (grades 2-5). Teachers in these areas are knowledgeable about the topics taught in language arts, social studies and math and work with the homeroom teachers to integrate the subject areas whenever it is appropriate.

Our program/organization utilizes the Mindful Schools Curriculum. www.mindfulschools.org
A boy wearing green safety goggles and a lab coat dips a piece of paper into a small cup containing solution at a science lab
Two girls sit at drums and play triangles
A student shows a stuffed animal to an excited teacher