Curriculum

Students are at the center of everything that we do at ISB Elementary School with parents being important and valued partners whose involvement in their children’s education is critical to their success.  It is our belief that when parents know what is expected at school, they are better able to provide the learning support at home that all students need.

The ISB Curriculum specifies what all students Pre-Kindergarten to Grade 12 are expected to know and be able to do in all subject areas.  It is designed to enable teachers to make connections across subjects, and to develop programming which accommodates a range of student needs.  Teaching methods and schedules will vary from class to class to allow the meeting of the diverse learning needs of all students.

CORE CURRICULUM
Integrated Language Arts (Reading, Writing, Spelling, Listening & Speaking, and Managing Information)

At ISB, our curriculum focuses on developing students' comprehension, fluency, and stamina. At the center of our program are the reading and writing workshops. The workshop framework includes a mini-lesson to explicity model skills and strategies, followed by a chunk of time for private reading or writing while the teacher confers with individuals or guides small group learning (i.e. guided reading, strategy lessons, and interventions). The workshop also includes partnership time to develop communication and collaboration skills. In addition to the workshop time, the components of our balanced literacy framework include:

• Daily interactive read-aloud
• Shared reading and Interactive Writing (Primary)
• Word Study
• Literacy development in content areas
• Digital literacy (Intermediate)

READING
Our reading curriculum focuses on developing students' comprehension, fluency, and stamina. The reading units of study in K and 1 are primarily built around skills and strategies for beginning readers to be able to decode and think about what they're reading. The reading units of study in grades 2,3,4 and 5 transition into mostly genre based (ie. mystery, fantasy, poetry, historical fiction, realistic fiction, etc.) with embedded skills and strategies.

WRITING
Our writing curriculum focuses on developing fluent writers who write to convey meaning through daily writing practice, studying how authors write, writing for a specific audience, and cycling through the writing process regularly as they write, rehearse, draft, revise. edit, and publish their writing. Our writing units of study include personal narrative, expository, poetry, persuasive, and fiction.

For detailed information about the reading and writing units of study at each grade level, please visit the grade level spectific curriculum descriptions of this website or the ES Wiki: http://isbelementary.wikispaces.com/ and select the corresponding grade level.

Mathematics
Our mathematics program takes an investigative approach, which helps students build conceptual understanding as they transition from the concrete to the representational to the abstract. Our instructional program is built upon a framework for teaching, learning, and assessing in mathematics at all grade levels using the following mathematics process skills:

• Problem solving: Students will apply a wide variety of mathematical concepts, processes, and skills to solve a broad range of problems in various content areas and everyday situations.
• Reasoning and Proof: Student will apply mathematical reasoning skills to investigate, evaluate, justify, and connect approaches and solutions to situations in mathematics and in other disciplines.
• Communication and Representations: Students will accurately and clearly present and justify mathematical ideas in diverse formats.
• Connections: Students will develop the ability to use connections among mathematical ideas to build on one another when solving real-world problems and to interconnect ideas to produce an integrated coherent whole.

Our content standards are all from the following strands of mathematics:

• Numbers and Operations
• Geometry and Measurement
• Algebra
• Data Analysis and Probability

For detailed information about the mathematics units of study and specific benchmarks at each grade level, please visit grade level specific curriculum details on this website our the ES Wiki: http://isbelementary.wikispaces.com/ and select the corresponding grade level.

Social Studies
The purpose of the ISB’s social Studies  program is to develop in students the ability to think critically about the human condition in order to make informed decisions that guide social action.  Students are encouraged to reflect upon their own cultural identities as well as to recognize and respect cultural similarities and differences within a global perspective.

Science
The elementary science curriculum is based on an inquiry approach to learning. Students are actively involved in hands-on discovery, as real scientists conducting investigations. They use scientific thinking processes to connect to what they already know, make claims, and support new findings with evidence. We aim to develop scientifically literate learners. Thus, teaching students to communicate their scientific discoveries is a focus. FOSS ( Full Option Science System ) is the program that is used in grades PreK-5. This program is aligned to our PreK-grade 12 science standards.

ISB Science - Units of Study
                                                                    PreK-5

Health
The following general outcomes provide the framework for the elementary school health curriculum.  Through a variety of grade-level specific units students will demonstrate a developmentally appropriate understanding of:

• how to maintain mental and emotional health
• human body systems and how they interrelate
• the essential concepts of nutrition and diet
• the essential concepts of prevention and control of disease
• the aspects substance use and abuse
• the essential concepts and practices concerning injury and prevention and safety