Kindergarten through Sixth Grade

View/Download our Curriculum Overview - a complete copy of the curriculum is available in the Academic Director’s office.

At the Susan Odell Taylor School, our emphasis is on fostering children’s curiosity and creativity while enabling them to become highly literate students with strong mathematical, scientific and social understandings. Children will come to know themselves well as learners and people, identify their own interests and passions and follow, research, and act on them. Our primary goal is to instill in children a love of learning they will carry with them throughout their lives.

Our classrooms in first through sixth grade are multiage and we maintain a low student/teacher ratio. This allows us to support each child’s academic progress while maintaining high expectations. Emphasis is placed on academic rigor within the friendly, caring atmosphere of a community of learners.

We believe that instruction should take place in real contexts and for real purposes and to that end we rely on authentic texts and artifacts, visits from experts and field trips to teach the concepts within our curriculum. We are also aware of differing learning styles and design our learning experiences with these differences in mind. The arts are incorporated into our curriculum as we have found that children of all learning styles respond to music, movement, and art and that these disciplines enliven and support classroom instruction.

We are a community of learners and create weekly opportunities for cross-age groupings. Every Friday morning our students, their families and friends are invited to start the day with a Community Meeting. On Thursday afternoons, children participate in Reading Buddies with friends from all the other classrooms. We also have an All School Project each month where children across the grades work together on an artistic creation. Through these experiences, the children learn how to work cooperatively and develop positive attitudes towards themselves and others. We believe that positive self-esteem and self-confidence are essential to a successful educational experience.