All students at River Springs Charter School learn in six unique learning areas: Language Arts, Math, History, Science, Life Skills & Special Interests. At Palm Academy, students receive their academic content through an arts-integrated curriculum and problem-based learning. Our arts-integrated curriculum model focuses on using the arts to enhance the learning experience for our students.
Language Arts:
Recent research has shown that while there are many successful methods for teaching reading, none of them is a perfect fit for all students. We believe that a truly comprehensive approach to literacy education employs various methods to best suit each student’s individual strengths.
Palm Academy Student Center uses a variety of literacy education methods which include:
- Shared reading, independent reading, and guided reading
- Teaching strategies that enable children to construct meaning from a variety of literary and non-fiction texts
- Building a strong, decoding, and spelling foundation in the early grades using a blend of phonetic, visual, and kinesthetic techniques
- Teaching skills and strategies which enable students to read in the content areas
- Developing rich language experiences through reading, writing, speaking, viewing, and listening
Mathematics:
Mathematics taught at Palm Academy Student Center is the mathematics the student sees in her/his world. The student is in control of his/her own mathematical learning. Students are encouraged to become owners of mathematical ideas and to construct meaning out of the experiences provided by the classroom activities and guidance of the teachers. All students will also master the facets that are essential components of Mathematics, including basic facts, algorithms, and problem-solving.
Students are exposed to numerous and varied interrelated experiences that encourage them to:
- Value mathematics
- Develop mathematical habits of mind
- Explore, guess, evaluate and re-evaluate solutions so that they gain confidence in their ability to tackle complex problems
- Read, write and discuss mathematics
- Conjecture, test, and build arguments about conjecture’s validity
History:
Palm Academy Student Center uses history as a vehicle for inquiring into the historical and social forces that have created our distinctive culture and world situation. We believe that students should be taught to make logical connections between what they learn in school and what they observe as to how society actually functions. We use the collective experiences, observations, and surroundings of our families as a launching pad for our History curriculum.
Our objectives are achieved through a number of means including: a chronological and culturally broad program of history; the inclusion of the history of other civilizations and cultures; and an acknowledgment of the multiplicity of world views and a diversity of traditions. Through all of these pursuits, our students gain increased sensitivity to important social issues and to their own social responsibilities.
Science:
Science at Palm Academy Student Center emphasizes the need for students to become familiar with and use the practices of processes of science, such as observing, classifying, describing, experimenting, measuring, inferring, and predicting. We also recognize that science is a structure of concepts and principles that students need to understand to be successful in the ever-changing technological world of the twenty-first century.
Palm Academy Student Center believes that children are natural investigators. We make use of this innate curiosity by using their questions as a starting point for helping students investigate and discover answers through the method of inquiry – sensing the problem, hypothesizing gathering data, drawing and testing conclusions.
For our students, Science consists of exploring the world around them. Students try out things to see how they work, experiment and manipulate. These investigations allow them to ask questions, seek answers, to be curious. Science is interwoven with other interests and topics. We live with science and we want students to think scientifically and be scientifically literate.
Life Skills & Special Interests:
Palm Academy Student Center integrates PE, STEM, art, and electives into the core subjects during classroom days and plentiful time is allocated for students to pursue their individual interests during the enrichment blocks.
