Lower School / Grades 1-3
Children in Pine Cobble’s Lower School, make joyful new discoveries each and every day. Your child will be guided on that path by caring and knowledgeable teachers who are expert at keeping students excited about learning, helping them gain the fundamental skills they need for later academic success, and connecting the curricula to the world around them.
Lower School students explore the process of experimentation, begin testing the laws of nature, delve deeper into language and mathematics, make history come to life, and further expand their creative minds. But what they find in the Lower School is far more than the sum of their academic experience. Here, they discover confidence, personal responsibility and an increased independence. Most important, they discover within themselves a capable, curious, and confident young person who plays a meaningful role in a wider community.
Highlights:
- Program offers a balance between fundamentals and an open, creative exploration of their world.
- Acquisition of literacy and arithmetic skills is understood to be a process, and students are guided through that process by caring, capable teachers who are dedicated to helping students achieve the highest standards in a personalized, low-pressure way.
- Lower School literature program helps children grow into successful readers and writers by incorporating guided, shared and independent reading and writing sessions.
- A robust arts program encourages free creative expression using a variety of canvasses, materials, tools, instruments and palettes. Over the course of three years, students will dabble in nearly every art form and examine and experiment with the elements and principles of art. Music and stage opportunities allows students to explore and experiment with performance as another avenue of creative expression.
- A hands-on science program introduces students to scientific observation and reasoning. Children learn why phenomena occur, test hypotheses and prove theories, collect and analyze data and make predictions and draw conclusions based on observation.
- Our hands-on math program keeps the subject stimulating for a wide range of mathematical abilities. Through classroom activities and projects, children discover the role that math plays in our everyday lives. This recognition of real-world relationships inspires students to seek out the real meaning behind numbers, and to articulate mathematical processes and ideas.
- Regular physical education programs inspire a healthy and positive attitude towards exercise in a confidence-building environment. In addition to strengthening and developing motor skills and coordination, children learn the concepts of teamwork, effort and good sportsmanship.
- Students take language classes (Spanish) twice-weekly and have the opportunity to participate in language roundtables on a regular basis.
- Social studies, geography and history allow students to understand their world in context, and to envision landmark moments in time. Students develop a sense of how past events shaped the world we live in today.
- Community service — both within the school environment and outside of it — is a strong part of the Lower School curriculum, just as it is at every grade level.
- The environment is intimate and friendly, so students of all abilities and backgrounds feel supported and empowered to strive for their personal best, inside the classroom and out.