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Curriculum Overview

THE ELEMENTARY CURRICULUM:  ALWAYS A WORK IN PROGRESS

The goal of our instructional program is to produce individuals, anchored in Christ, who demonstrate great character and great competence in service to their parish, local, and/or global communities. We want to produce students who actively and joyfully learn our faith, live our faith and prepare for the future.

Our challenge is to design and implement a viable current curriculum embedded in our Catholic faith; a curriculum that equips our students with the knowledge and skills necessary to successfully negotiate a complex and unknown future.  Not only do our students need  to know how to analyze  information or circumstances they have never seen before and then know what to do next;  but they also need to know how to keep learning and adapting as content and circumstances continue to change with an accelerating pace.  To do so requires us to continually examine both what we teach, how we teach, and how effectively we teach, constantly adjusting to the strengths and needs of the students we serve. 

Character is critical.  That is where we begin to build a strong instructional program. With Christ as our model, we work to prepare our students for global citizenship with a continuous focus on character development.  Both explicitly and implicitly embedded, throughout our daily instructional program, activities help our students understand and acquire, through a Catholic lens, the habits of mind that develop integrity, responsibility, initiative, and perseverance.  It all begins in kindergarten where we start with the guiding principle…. “Always do the right thing…even when no one is looking.”

Competence is essential.  Competence results from mastery of a relevant and engaging instructional program comprised of knowledge and skills from the traditional core content areas, as well as knowledge and skills from areas not typically associated with an elementary instructional program.  For our students to be competent in today’s complex global community, we must expand our instruction to include and integrate the knowledge and skills associated with learning and innovation; information, media, and technology; life and career. We seek to help students understand the “big ideas” or “enduring understandings” that connect and cross disciplines. Once understood, students can use these “big ideas” and “enduring understandings” for problem solving purposes. We work diligently to incorporate these new areas of learning into the core content areas as we build on the longstanding Catholic tradition of academic excellence.

Curriculum design and implementation is always a work in progress. So too is ours.  For a closer look at the specifics of our curriculum click on the appropriate tab on the left.  You will find some areas with lots of information and others with more limited information.  We are in the process of revising and refining our curriculum, as well as expanding our new web-site to include more curricular information.  We thank you for your patience as we work through this process.   Christian character, competence, and instilling a desire and skill set to serve the community, be it parish, local and/or global, drive our instructional program.