|
Middle School - Annual Trip
|
The middle school takes a weeklong trip each year to study science or social studies, and may go to Keystone Science Camp, Crow Canyon to study ancient Native American archeology and culture, or Estes Park to learn about habitats. These great experiences are combined with educational, team development, and fun.
In seventh and eighth grades, a two-year science curriculum is presented, which provide challenge for each student. In physical science, classical studies of motion, gravity, electronics and optics are presented. In life science, the children take a tour of life from the cell into organisms and on the view of ecology. This comprehensive program discusses cell reproduction, heredity, evolution, and classification of living things. Many other topics are explored during the year.
Archaeology is just one of the areas social studies uncovers for us. It is interesting for our children to conceptualize how an archaeologist uncovers pieces from the past then interprets meaning to give us information about time, space, environment, culture, and relationships. We work on both basic skills and higher level thinking skills. Synthesizing and analyzing an ancient culture and how conditions and events relate into our own culture is one focus for social science. You might see our children learning about China, Japan, or Early Empires. Many different skills are incorporated into these units. Middle school social studies includes ancient western civilization, U.S. history, and European and western civilization.
|
Kindergarten
|
In Kindergarten, emergent reading skills continue to flourish with the use of three complimentary systems in order to meet the needs of your child. We work on sound blending, decoding skills, word families, phrase development and sight vocabulary. Reading skills are reinforced with delightful stories, activities, games, and music.
During Language Arts , your child might be practicing and refining manuscript skills, writing a first story, or learning poetry to enhance listening, speaking, and communication. Children receive their first spelling list during this year. They love presenting the annual play for parents.
The combined math programs focus on building relationships between and among numbers. Our children study geometry, ordinal numbers, size and capacity, time, addition and subtraction skills capacity and size as well as many other mathematical concepts. They learn how to solve problems, create graphs, write numerals, and solve real life math problems.
The children learn about our community, other cultures and customs in social studies . We also have the opportunity to study the early beginnings of our own country, and we do many special projects that support learning. Science brings many experiments and opportunities that excite children about our world and creatures and plants who share it with us. This is one of the areas where we learn about the scientific approach when dealing with problems, and experience real life science in our natural ecology. |
About Beacon
|
The best gift you can give your child is an education ensuring future success and happiness.
The best gift you can give your child is an education that is joyful, fun, and exciting, ensuring future success and happiness. When you walk into BCDS, you will notice the difference! There is pervasive warmth that you will feel. Children are actively engaged in small, intimate groups and classes. Excitement is in the air. There is a sense of calm encouragement with lively discussions, intense observation of science experiments, learning games filled with laughter, and children's smiles beaming with success . The best gift you can give your child is early education that is joyful, fun, and exciting, ensuring future success and happiness.
Beacon Country Day School is committed to the development of the “total child”. Our children are each individuals, with a variety of abilities and skills, as well as learning styles. With the Beacon experience, academic excellence, self-concept, emotional, physical, and social growth blossom. Students gain an understanding of the world and the people around us. Our experienced faculty recognizes the value of incorporating child's interests and small learning groups to maximize learning and meet individual needs.
Teacher/Student Ratio
Small learning groups allow each teacher to meet individual needs while encouraging each student to recognize his own worth. The opportunity for development of self-esteem, academic achievement, creativity, and the joy of learning takes place in classrooms where the average class size is 15-18. The teacher/ student ratio is 1: 8. |
First Grade
|
First grade is an adventure full of explorations and discoveries. Reading and language arts programs cement our children's ability to interpret the written word. Comprehension is emphasized along with basic sight vocabulary and decoding skills. Children identify the beginning, middle, and end of stories, identify the main idea, and even choose titles. Creative writing and listening skills become more fine-tuned. The children use spelling and handwriting skills to create sentences and stories.
Children regularly work on problem solving exercises including story problems during math . This in intertwined with strengthening addition, subtraction and double-digit computation skills. There are units on place value, money and geometry. Enrichment activities and games make practicing math fun!
In social studies , holiday customs of countries and cultures around the world are studied. We also learn about our own country and study Native American Cultures. Enrichment activities include baking, gingerbread house construction, and pumpkin painting.
Children continue to be engaged by science . A variety of materials, experiments and methods are incorporated to study topics, like the human body, plants, and the Five Senses. |
Second Grade
|
In reading , children select books for pleasure as well as information, and continue growth in phonics and decoding skills. Learning how to meet the demands of schoolwork and modern life through reading, writing, listening, speaking, thinking and language study continues.
In language arts , our children learn about proper nouns, pronouns, and nouns in the singular and plural forms. You will see your child write his or her first book report while learning about summarization. Our spelling program supports the learning experiences in social studies and science. We build dictionary skills, proofreading skills and writing mechanic skills during this busy year. Cursive handwriting is introduced and practiced.
Social studies provide the opportunity to learn about the land, erosion, first Americans, settling the land, citizenship, and protecting our resources. Instruction in map skills is introduced. Children learn about the interdependence between trees, soil, and animals while studying different ecosystems in science.
The second grade science program focuses on learning about the earth. Children explore the structure of the earth, the changes in the earth's crust and different types of rocks. They learn how people, plants, and animals change the earth's crust along with the forces of wind, water, earthquakes, and volcanoes.
|
3rd Grade
|
Third grade is a transition year in which students show tremendous growth in many ways. In language areas , cursive writing skills are taught and refined. Spelling instruction continues and additional linguistic development is added. Creative writing encourages children to write stories, poetry, and edit products. Writing is further extended to book reports, research reports and projects, and initial analysis of literature.
Reading instruction emphasizes comprehension, analysis skills, drawing inferences, reaching conclusions and using reading for information gathering and research. English includes compound subjects, complete predicates, nouns, pronouns, present and past tense verbs, adjectives, adverbs, sentence fragments, commas and quotations marks. Compositional skills including expository writing skills in personal narratives, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, and instructions are part of this all-encompassing curriculum.
The math program facilitates multiplication and division while continuing to develop fractions. Games are used to motivate the children to learn multiplication tables, and manipulatives make fractions fun and easy to understand.
During Social Studies , history on settlement and expansion, roles in early U.S. societies and the settlers is presented. Primary resources and artifacts are explored. Geography includes the interactions of humans with their environment and reasons for migration. Economic concepts are introduced with the barter system, use of money, and the history of business as well as economic cycles and technology. Cultural concepts include contributions to local history, the groups in regions and their cultural systems including settlers, cowboys, and Native Americans, as well as ethics and belief systems.
General science concepts are presented. Concepts of adaptation show how plants and animals survive and adapt to their environments, which teaching about classification, growth, groups, and animal behavior, ecology, and food chains. The nature of matter and energy and work are introduced. Information on electricity, magnetism, light, and sound are studied. Earth science includes landforms and oceans. Weather units focus on measuring weather conditions, and space studies teach movement in the solar system. Concepts dealing with the human body include digestion, circulation, the brain and sense organs. |
4th Grade
|
Increasing comprehension and improving silent and oral reading are among the many skills. We study novels, both collectively and on an individual basis. Our children practice using dictionaries and develop good writing and punctuation skills, including the proper use and knowledge of commas, apostrophes, and paragraphs.
Our language arts skills also include understanding the four types of sentences and how to use them correctly. Children experiment with different types of writing and learn how to apply the genre. The steps to writing well are learned through a writing process. Our spelling lessons shed some light on many of the spelling generalizations, which encourage correct spelling in our children's written language. Cursive handwriting skills are practiced everyday.
The math program continues to help our children understand and comprehend math concepts. We work on comparing and ordering numbers, rounding skills and estimating sums and differences. The properties of addition and subtraction, time and money are reviewed, and work continues on multiplication and division. Activities have been designed to provide enrichment and practical application of mathematics for your child. Problem solving and thinking skills are continually reinforced. You might even see us playing the stock market game. Now that's real life!
Colorado History is one of the many topics our children explore during this year. We make our own relief map and do many projects that relate to Colorado and its rich history. Understanding about our own state helps us understand about the many struggles people went through while taming the west. We delve into learning about laws and responsibilities and our role in these important life skills.
Hands-on experimentation solidifies many science concepts. This year we focus on observation skills, which enable us to classify objects into certain and specific categories. You might see us learning about vertebrates and invertebrates.
|
5th Grade
|
Different genres are explored in reading , both through class and individual novel selections. Comprehension skills and literary skills include learning about the author's point of view, conflict, plot, and character analysis. In addition, our children write and present independent book reports. We continue to study the English language and its many components. Articles, demonstrative adjectives, comparison and proper adjectives are a few of the skills we study. Our editing skills receive daily attention from a variety of sources such as writing logs.
Writing skills continue to grow as students write different types of poetry, and develop creative and expository writing. We write often. Independent research papers help our student learn how to analyze and synthesize information. Our spelling program supports the other fifth grade academic areas and many challenge words are given.
Division, multiplication, and word problems are a part of our comprehensive math program. As children learn how to analyze word problems, they are better able to solve them. Fractions, decimals, and ratios are explored to find the relationship among and between them. Timed tests are used to improve our children's competence with math facts.
Chemistry, earth, and physical sciences comprise part of our general science curriculum. By using the scientific approach and understanding the testing process for variables, our children learn how to objectively find results and come to reasonable conclusions. Children investigate compounds and learn about matter and its structure.
Social studies lessons include learning about the early beginnings of our country. We focus on the reasons for exploration, the trials of settling in a new frontier, the specific characteristics of the southern, middle, and New England colonies. Along with this, our children learn how our government became what it is, and the influences that we had on other parts of the world. Presentations and group work supplement this rich program.
|
Middle School - 6th, 7th, & 8th Grades
|
A departmentalized approach is incorporated in the Middle School. A math and science teacher moves from class to class, while a language arts teacher provides literature, writing, spelling, vocabulary development and English grammar. Our children spend time reading , discussing, and analyzing different types of literature. Literature offers an opportunity to illustrate many literary elements such as characterization, plot, cause and effect relationship, and point of view. Novels provide insight and understanding of stereotypic characters, irony and inference. We ask our children to transfer this learning into their writing and explore what it took for an author to write in a specific genre. Independent novel reading and book reports are a big part of the reading program in middle school. Our goal is to prepare students for real life applications
Language arts are divided into English grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and writing. Learning about parts of speech is just one of the topics we cover in English. Our lessons are in depth and detailed. For example, we practice understanding the difference kinds of verbs and verb phrases, as well as the perfect and the progressive tenses.
Our writing program facilitates writing in many varied ways. You might find us writing comparison and contrast essays, persuasion, prediction, or basic essays. Our children are refining their writing skills during this year, becoming more alert to specialized techniques used for conveying information. You will see our children using the research process: selecting a topic, gathering sources, taking note, organizing an outline, writing a rough drafts, editing, and rewriting. Our children develop solid skills in expository writing.
Our math program becomes more complex. In middle school, students may take pre-algebra 1, pre-algebra 2, algebra, algebra 2, or geometry according to instructional levels. In pre-algebra 1, students practice and study many fundamental concepts that help prepare them for the future. We work on the four basic operations and their application to real life functions. You will see children working with exponents, powers of ten, decimals, fractions, or ratios.
Pre-algebra 2 stresses simplification, evaluation, finding solutions, and more importantly, delves into the “why” behind the operations. Learning definitions and properties enhances understanding operations. Children learn about rational numbers, equations and inequalities. We study geometry, focusing on the methods of construction and being aware of the importance of being precise.
In algebra , students practice polynomials and problem solving. Our students work with powers and degrees of numbers, terms, and expressions, reviewing the relationship of factor and quotient, and determining the monomial factors of polynomials. This is a comprehensive program.
Our science program is an exciting one. For example, we study earth science and explore the earth's constantly changing surface. Our children discover the various causes and effects weathering and erosion have on our environment. By discovering this, our children appreciate seeing how science relates to our every-day-lives. |
|
|