Lower School Curriculum (K–4)

Krieger Schechter Day School offers a dual language program where students spend about 60% of their day in General Studies and about 40% in Judaic Studies. In addition, all Lower School students also participate in a number of special subject classes including Art, Music, Physical Education, and Makerspace. All of these course offerings mean that our teachers are always working together to build cross-curricular units of study and to reinforce content and skills between the disciplines. This is the key to making the learning robust and memorable. What they learn about sentence structure in English is applied in Hebrew. What they learn about other cultures in Social Studies is applied in Art and Music. KSDS students don’t learn anything in isolation. It’s always about connecting, extending, experiencing, and sharing in all we do every day.

 

Literacy

The Lower School Language Arts curriculum incorporates reading, writing, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and oral language skills with the ultimate goal of instilling a lifelong love of literature and proficiency with the English language in all our students. Students begin their journey in Kindergarten with letter patterns and blended sounds and expand to grow their sight word recognition and decoding skills throughout their years at KSDS. As their reading abilities grow, they are able to interpret ever more complex meanings and comprehend longer sentences, paragraphs, and stories. As all children naturally develop their literacy skills at their own pace, our teachers work with each child to meet their specific needs and provide them with opportunities to grow and delve into deeper literature connections. In the later Lower School years, students will be reading stories and novels, moving towards independence with skills such as story mapping, inferencing, summarizing, making connections, and citing textual evidence to support their conclusions. The writing journey is similarly individualized to give every student the opportunity to develop their ability to write words which become sentences, paragraphs, and eventually multi-paragraph essays. This is accomplished by strengthening spelling, grammar, and vocabulary skills alongside specific writing goals and through the routine practice of editing. By the time students leave our Lower School, they are able to independently read novels, demonstrate comprehension, and write on a variety of topics for a variety of purposes and audiences.