Grade School
Find Your Resilience
St. Peter’s Grade School Program encourages creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and community in Kindergarten through fifth grade.
As you enter each of our classrooms, you will see our passionate educators using a variety of teaching methods and strategies that engage students during small groups. Small group instruction at St. Peter's enhances student participation, encourages peer collaboration, gives students confidence in sharing ideas, and allows our educators to adapt their teaching to create a more effective learning experience for each child. Through our focus on small group instruction, our teachers are given the opportunity to get to know students as individual learners and challenge them in ways that are focused on what each student needs most at that moment. Growing a community built around a love of learning is what our school strives to accomplish. Our grade school does a wonderful job sewing those seeds when the foundational skills are being set in Kindergarten and nurturing them as they grow into more confident, independent learners.
Our school believes in a true balanced-literacy approach to grow a love of the written word that follows our students well past their time at St. Peter's. Each of our classrooms enjoy the community building benefit of a daily interactive read aloud story. Through these daily interactive read alouds, students are challenged to think about the story in new ways, take their comprehension to a deeper level, find confidence in sharing their voice, and learning to value a variety of perspectives to look at things in new ways.
Reading and Writing Workshop is used in all of our grade school classrooms. This approach to teaching literacy creates an environment that nurtures literacy skills and fosters a love of reading and writing. Workshop provides strong instruction in specific reading and writing skills & strategies across a variety of genre. Students are encouraged to collaborate with one another to enhance and deepen comprehension and writing quality. Through meaningful feedback during reading and writing conferences from the teacher and peers, students and empowered to try new reading and author moves to strengthen self-confidence as strong readers and young authors.
In our Kindergarten through 2nd grade classrooms, we use Heggerty Bridge to Reading. Heggerty provides an explicit phonics program that blends phonics instruction with phonemic awareness lessons for a comprehensive approach to teaching foundational reading skills. We understand that a strong phonics program, in addition to the other components of our balanced-literacy approach, is crucial for building a strong foundation in students learning to read. Our young readers participate in daily active and engaging phonics and phonemic awareness whole group lessons before moving into Reading Workshop and small guided groups for focused phonics and beginning reading time.
The Core Knowledge history and science curriculum is a comprehensive program that spirals and builds upon the knowledge being learned in Kindergarten through fifth grade. It is a hands-on, integrative curriculum that encourages students to share what they have learned through project-base learning experiences that connect with art and writing. The history and geography units in the Core Knowledge Sequence helps students build a strong knowledge of the diverse cultures, civilizations, and concepts across time. The science units follow the Next Generation Science Standards and help students grow a deeper understanding of science while participating in more investigations, experiments, problem solving opportunities, peer discussions, journaling, and writing/multi-media connections.
An important part of child development and growth runs deeper than just academics. St. Peter's understands that meaningful learning happens when students feel loved, valued, heard, respected, and part of a trusting community. All of our teachers are trained in Responsive Classroom and value creating classroom communities that encompass developmentally appropriate expectations, a nurturing environment, a space where all voices are respected, and a true love of getting to know our students as individual people who are going to make a positive impact on the world around them.
We believe our approach offers the best opportunity for our children to live happy, healthy, wonder-filled lives long after they’ve left St. Peter’s.
If you have more questions or you’re ready to talk further about joining the St. Peter’s experience, please contact us.
