• Curriculum Overview
• After School
• Events and Celebrations
• Service Learning and Partnerships
• Special Assemblies
• Mini Courses

Literacy at SRV is serious, purposeful and joyful work. We use state and national standards as well as our progressive pedagogy to inform our teaching practices and guide our curricular decisions. Our goal is to help children live rich literate lives. To do this we offer a balanced literacy program that includes 5 main components:

1. reading
2. writing
3. spelling/word work
4. listening
5. speaking

We believe that reading and writing are social activities and that children learn to read and write best within a richly and rigorously interactive community of learners. While we encourage our students to interact with others, we also give them framework for working and thinking alone.

We believe that reading and writing is best taught from whole to part. We engage children in the meaning of words first, and then work our way to the parts and the skills that help them develop as strategic readers and writers.

All children benefit from direct instruction and regular practice in specific skills and concepts. Some children require more of this kind of work than others.

Our progressive pedagogy demands that we see the significance and intelligence of what children are doing and almost doing. At the heart of this rich stance is careful and thoughtful observation of our students. We look for patterns, strategies, and miscues as opportunities to inform our teaching. We use this information to differentiate our instruction in order to provide our unique set of learners with different mixes of instruction methodologies.

The five components of our balanced literacy instruction are strategically and directly taught in each classroom through a variety of structures:

• Reading aloud across disciplines
• Mini-lessons – workshop approach
• Guided reading/writing lessons/groups
• Independent reading/writing groups
• Phonics, spelling and word work, fluency, comprehension, vocabulary-building
• Strategy lessons
• Coaching and conferring with readers/writers
• Teaching readers within an organized/ leveled classroom library
• Assessment driven instruction
• Curriculum of talk- morning meetings, hosting assembly, sharing ideas, presenting questions, etc.
• Handwriting Without Tears