1.5 - Skills

The skills of learning, namely, reading, writing, speaking, listening, calculating, problem-solving, and exercising critical judgment, are best taught through the content of a body of organized knowledge.

 

The development of literacy will be one of the primary aims and focuses of effort in the School. This will include a great deal of reading from a variety of both fiction and non-fiction primary literature. Particularly in the early grades, the School will emphasize reading and more reading. In the early grades, students will receive explicit, systematic phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. Children will be provided deliberate, coherent, direct instruction in letter-sound correspondences. Practices which teach children to rely on word-memorization (the look-say method) and guessing (through illustration and/or context) will be avoided.

 

Mature literacy develops as students become acquainted with a broad and rich body of knowledge and become familiar with many well-written, diverse, and meaningful works of literature. The literature suggested by the Core Knowledge Sequence, as well as other literature that will be introduced, is chosen not only for its place in the core body of knowledge, its multi-cultural representation, and its rich use of language but also because it provides access to deeper meaning of universal human problems, particularly those which preoccupy children's minds.

 

The School will acknowledge the central role of language in thought and action. The School's students will be taught to write and speak through example and sensible practice. Grammar, logic, and real spelling learned from real literature will be part of these skills.

 

The School will teach the Thinking Framework not as a stand-alone course, but rather as instruction integrated within the content. Students often receive knowledge disconnected from features that make it understandable and meaningful. For instance, in math it is common to learn concepts without knowing their purposes. When you study history, you frequently find scant attention paid to the evidence underlying an historical fact or interpretation. Students may come to know something about history, but not much about historical thinking. Science instruction routinely pays insufficient attention to examples and images that make the concepts under study concrete and impart an intuitive grasp of them. Contemporary research shows that instruction offered in one context often does not transfer to other contexts. The School will use a Thinking Framework to teach the Core Knowledge curriculum.

 

Additionally, the School will teach the more specific critical thinking skills unique to each discipline, called "Habits of Mind." The Habits of Mind to be taught for scientific literacy are found in Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Exhibit II). The Habits of Mind for historical literacy are found in the book by the same title, which is a report of the Bradley Commission on History (Exhibit XIII). The Habits of Mind for math literacy are identified in "Children's Mathematical Development" (Exhibit XIV).

 

The development of skills requires time, thought and active engagement of the visual and verbal imagination. The School will encourage students replace non-instructional television watching, which is passive and discourages creative play, with the myriad of activities which will foster the development of imagination and skills. Because television viewing is diametrically opposed to reading, may stifle cognitive development and imagination, trivializes information, undermines values, distorts cause and effect, and is unable to portray thought, the School will discourage excessive (greater than 10 hours/week) of viewing.