Small classes allow for individualized instruction in each of the subject areas. In their classroom, students study mathematics, language arts and social studies and leave the class in small groups for specialist-taught instruction in science, visual arts, performing arts, Spanish and physical education.
SOCIAL STUDIES provide the thematic link for the curricular areas and provide a context for learning. As children move across disciplines to connect and articulate a nuanced understanding of a culture, time, place, and people, their brains work at the highest levels of analysis, synthesis and creativity.
The kindergarteners and first graders take such themes as Art and Artists, Children Around the World, or the Story of Math, and consider them from historical and current points of view, but also from a math, science, language arts, visual art, and music perspective. Second and third graders immerse themselves in the Medieval World and realize its history, geography, and government, but also its music, castle and cathedral architecture, monsters, heroes, and legends as gleaned from literature and art. In fourth and fifth grade, the life of America’s past brings students close to pre-Colonial and Colonial Stamford, including its Native American heritage and the use and design of watermills on the Mianus River. Simultaneously they read period dramas depicting Colonial life, sew a sampler or design a quilt, research clothing and food of the era and prepare a traditional Colonial feast. All elementary students’ work is enhanced by field trips to such places as the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, the Long Island Sound, and more. Small classes allow for individualized instruction in each of the subject areas. In their classroom, students study mathematics, language arts and social studies and leave the class in small groups for specialist-taught instruction in science, visual arts, performing arts, Spanish and physical education. Social studies themes connect the academic areas to provide a context for learning.
LANGUAGE ARTS begin and end with a love of words and expression.
Whether it is kindergarteners working with rhymes and the fanciful language of a poem, second graders writing their own Arthurian legend after reading the real thing, or fifth graders leading their own book group discussion about the Revolutionary War novel they read, our students learn to use, enjoy and value the words written and spoken by themselves and others.Each classroom at Long Ridge has its own wide range of books at different reading levels. Teachers read selected literature to their classes daily. Children meet and read individually with their teachers, who carefully monitor each child’s reading progress. Students write daily to express their ideas, while acquiring grammar, punctuation and spelling skills.
A library curriculum that teaches the care and vitality of books and of collections of books while encouraging students’ self-directed reading amplifies our engagement with words. Our library collection offers over 7000 volumes for children of all ages. Classes have designated library time once a week.
MATHEMATICS become a second language when Long Ridge teachers combine innovative techniques with traditional teaching methods to ensure that each child has a firm understanding of measurement, computation and geometric and logical relationships. Students work with a wide variety of materials to develop concepts and skills from spatial relations and patterns, to numeric expression and combination, and finally to pre-algebra equations and symbolic reasoning.
Each Long Ridge student forms an understanding of the world that is captured and constructed in numbers, shapes, and patterns, coming to see math not as rote or rule-bound work, but as a form of expression.