The Lower School at Augusta Prep encourages the
fun of being a child while teaching the skills necessary to be a good student.
A nurturing and devoted faculty welcomes and encourages creativity and
acknowledges individual accomplishments. In a safe and friendly environment, Lower School
students learn academic basics as well as Spanish, research skills, computer,
art, music, and physical education. The Lower School
encourages independent learning as well as group projects, which demonstrate
the value of collaboration. Lower
School programs focus
chiefly on building independence, assuming personal responsibility, and
developing character. Service is of great importance in the Lower School.
Beginning in first grade, each grade level adopts a service project, and the Lower School
at large participates in additional annual service projects. Family involvement
is invaluable in the Lower
School. From the parent
organized carnival to classroom helpers to guest speakers, parents play a vital
role in the life of the Lower
School.
From the Lower School Head Wes Wehunt: Essential Questions
Do I have to?
Why Prep?
Why do you wear cowboy boots?
These are three questions I am asked with routine regularity.
One question comes from prospective parents that our Admissions Director Rosie Herrmann brings by my office during campus tours. One comes from my two children. And one comes from our fashion savvy kindergarten students, in only the way a 5-year old could curiously inquire – without hesitation.
Monday mornings, the first thing out of my children’s mouths when I wake them up is – ‘Do I have to? Really? Typically every Wednesday, Mrs. Herrmann brings a tour by and the Why Prep? question is asked. On Fridays, which are dress-down days for the Lower School faculty, I’ll get the boot question.
I’d like to share with you my three-word response to Why Prep? and use those words as the framework to provide you an insight into some of the exciting programs we will be implementing in our Lower School.
Over the course of its 49 year history, Augusta Prep has earned its reputation for academic excellence. And while it is that focus on academics that initially attracts families to this school, Prep’s distinctiveness lies in the more expansive view we take of educational excellence. Our program is about so much more than academic rigor – it’s about helping your children grow. The faculty at Prep has your children at the most precious time in their lives, and we encourage their growth by focusing our efforts on three specific areas – So, Why Prep?: environment, expectation and experience.
Environment
When looking at the environment we cultivate here for your children, we are attune to not only the physical space where students work and play, but also, and equally as important, the supportive and nurturing culture throughout the space that helps our children feel safe - safe to participate, safe to stretch, and safe to take the appropriate risks required for growth.
Some of the new physical additions are easy to spot – for the past two years we have developed our outdoor space to enhance our playgrounds and provide a central gathering area for classes to use during the day. What you will see this year is the proactive implementation of two programs we are really excited about that are designed to impact the culture of our Lower School.
Starting in September, our school counselors, Jennifer Hudson and Cornelia Isaac, will be visiting our 2nd and 4th grade classrooms once per month to facilitate Steps to Respect, a nationally recognized bully prevention program designed for elementary-aged students that teaches children how to recognize, refuse and report bullying behaviors. The program, which is presented through a series of role playing activities, focuses on the position of the bystander in bullying incidents and helps to offer applicable strategies to those bystanders for positive action. While bullying is not a prevailing issue here at Prep, the benefit of this program is that it will provide us with a shared vocabulary to talk about occurrences when they do come up.
Also starting in September, Mrs. Hudson and Mrs. Isaac will be visiting our 3rd grade classrooms to facilitate a program entitled, Friends. The 10-session Friends program stems from the research of psychologist Phillip Kendall and is designed to help young children deal with anxiety. Interestingly enough, highly intelligent, driven children from homes with highly intelligent, driven parents have a statistically greater chance of experiencing some form of anxiety during their early years of schooling. Through role playing scenarios, similar to Steps to Respect, the activities within this program help our children learn to deal with worrying situations, provide them techniques of positive thinking and builds their emotional resilience.
With both of these programs, your engagement as parents in this process is key.
Expectation
The tradition of academic excellence at Prep is rooted in a structured and appropriately challenging academic program for each of our students – and we continually work to focus on individual challenge and ensure a larger, comprehensive-curricular structure.
Running Records
Last year, Mrs. Maribeth Burns, our Lower School learning specialist instituted a Running Record reading evaluation process for our 1st through 4th grade students. In August, December and May, each of our 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade students worked one-on-one with Mrs. Burns through a series of reading exercises. Our 1st graders participated in this process twice last year, in December and May. Through those reading exercises, we were able to evaluate both fluency and comprehension and keep a record of the reading behaviors each student applied while they were reading. Information gleaned from the running records was then shared with the child’s teacher and collectively, we were able to:
monitor ongoing student progress in reading
find out which particular skills and strategies students were using
focus on specific needs of individual children & target instruction tailored to meet those needs
The running records assessments will continue this year and with the comparative data from last year, we will be looking for systemic trends in growth and opportunities to improve how we teach your children skills and strategies to be fluent readers.
Curriculum Mapping
Under the guidance of our curriculum coordinator, Lucy Adams, last year our Lower School faculty completed an intensive recording of our academic program. For every class taught, our teachers generated curriculum maps – documents that articulated the content, skills and assessments implemented, by month. We have been able to gather and organize a massive amount of information about what we teach, when we teach it, how we teach it and how we assess if our students are learning.
With the labor intensive part of this process behind us, we will be spending this year analyzing our data, looking at the alignment between grade levels, eliminating gaps and redundancies in content and seeking opportunities for integration to coordinate instruction in the arts with academic instruction. Later this year, we will also be creating a curriculum summary for parents that will chart out major academic themes by subject area and grade level so that you will be able to see how the pieces all fit together.
Experience
As I just mentioned, one of the pieces of data we were able to gather last year through our curriculum mapping process was how our teachers presented material to students. In one of her summary reports, Lucy Adams shared with the faculty this slide. This chart shows the breakdown – auditory – they were able to hear it, visual – they were able to see it, and kinesthetic – they were able to touch it. Again, this is a culminating summary of all subject areas, Pre School through grade 4 and you can see how balanced the presentations are. Upon review of this information, the follow-up question for us was, ‘If this is how we present information, what is the breakdown of learning styles of our student population? Basically, we wanted to find out if how we were teaching matched up to how our students were inclined to naturally learn.
To tackle this question, Mrs. Burns and Mrs. Adams teamed up to research learning style assessments for elementary age children. We went looking for some type of evaluation that would help us determine prevailing learning styles – auditory, visual, kinesthetic – for our 6 – 9 year olds. We researched Howard Gardner’s work at Harvard, Mel Levine’s work at Chapel Hill, explored current research at the number one school of education in the country – the Peabody school at Vanderbilt University and couldn’t find what we were looking for. So, Mrs. Burns and Mrs. Adams went one step further by creating an evaluation. We piloted the 20-activity assessment last year, went through some comparative analysis processes, and refined some of the activity questions. This year we are going to put our learning style inventory in play for all our 1st through 4th grade students. Our goal here is to cultivate a sincere joy in learning in our students and by helping them understand how they receive and master new material, we can take some of the mystery out of the learning process for them.
Conclusion
In looking at the entirety of the elementary journey our students travel, we want our 4th grade graduates to enter middle school with the emotional competency to handle stressful situations, a comprehensive set of academic skills, the meta-cognitive insight into how they best learn and the realization that 30 of their biggest fans work here, in this building, and stand behind them every step of the way.
So, Why Prep? Environment, Expectation, Experience
As parents, I encourage you to find ways to engage in your child’s education. There’s a lot going on here and opportunities abound for you to participate on whatever level you feel comfortable – Parent League, booster club, classroom volunteer…talk to your friends and neighbors about our Prep program – there are things happening here you won’t find anywhere else.
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