Our curriculum is advanced, challenging, captivating. After aligning our curriculum to standards set by the Arizona Department of Education, we try to go a few steps further.
The demanding but engaging curriculum seeks not only to inform, but to instill the ability to think critically, as well as creatively. For example, students learn not only learn math, but mathematical thinking through our logic program. Students learn language arts but also creative nonfiction and poetry. We aim to develop an informed curiosity and love for learning.
The real world does not compartmentalize itself neatly into math and science and metaphor. The math of accelerating wind speed and the science of thermodynamics exist together as a messy hurricane.
Our unique, integrative curriculum allows children to learn without the restrictions of subject boundaries, so that they may explore the limitless connections between what they learn in school and what they experience in the world. We focus on the inter-relatedness of all curricular areas in order to help our students recognize, understand, and navigate the connections and relationships which exist among all subjects, and indeed among all things in life.
We teach to different learning styles in the classroom because each child’s curiosity is triggered by focusing on different senses, stories, presentations.
Interventions and enrichment activities like these help all students achieve mastery—and that is when the excitement begins. After mastery, we provide opportunities for bright, gifted students to broaden and expand their learning so that they can begin to truly explore the shape and significant of the knowledge just learned.
These flexible, agile instruction methods are built into our weekly professional development sessions and our quarterly in-service trainings. Our mastery learning approach encourages students to try new concepts, appreciate their abilities, and link effort with achievement. It is our core belief that every student is capable of mastery level learning. Indeed, it is our job as educators to bring students to mastery level.