Magnolia Student Center is committed to providing a liberal arts education to all students in grades kindergarten through eighth grade. The students receive instruction in English Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Humanities, Music, Art, and Physical Education. The curricula of all core and enrichment are aligned to the California State standards and performance indicators.
Our curriculum offers an enriching liberal arts education program beginning in kindergarten that contributes to the academic success of our students, and, more importantly, to their development in general. Magnolia Student Center maintains its commitment to offering enrichment classes such as Music, Art, Physical Education as well as extracurricular clubs, all beginning in kindergarten.
English 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 is one that employs various methods to best suit the individual strengths of each student.
Magnolia Student Center uses a variety of literacy education methods which include:
- Shared reading, independent reading and guided reading
- Teaching strategies which enable children to construct meaning from a variety of literary and non-fiction texts
- Building a strong, decoding, 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 Magnolia 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
Humanities
Magnolia Student Center uses Humanities 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 the launching pad for our Humanities curriculum.
Our objectives are achieved through a number of means including: a chronologically and culturally broad program of history; the inclusion of the history of other civilizations and cultures; and an acknowledgement 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 Magnolia Student Center emphasizes the need for students to become familiar with and use the 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.
Magnolia 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.
