Lower School

STEAM

Lower School students engage in exciting and creative STEAM learning opportunities throughout the curriculum and within their weekly time in the STEAM Lab (PK-2nd grade) and Exploratorium (3-4th grades).   LS STEAM teachers work with classroom teachers to design projects that tie into science and social studies topics.  Students are creative story tellers with green screen and stop motion videos as they learn video editing skills.  They program Ozobots to travel through maps of the United States as they learn geography, and build their own games with Scratch programming.  These are just a few of the many exciting ways that our Lower School students are learning to build and communicate with technology!

Technology in Learning

Technology is just one of the many tools that our teachers use to design constructive, exciting learning experiences for our Lower School students.  Students have access to iPads for creative projects as well as to access tools that allow teachers to personalize and differentiate instruction for individual students.

Lower School students build portfolios and can make their thinking and learning visible to an audience of their parents and family members through Seesaw.  Students and their families can look back on their growth over the course of the year, and teachers are able to track student growth and provide feedback through student portfolios.

Digital Well-Being

As we introduce technology to our youngest learners, we keep digital well-being in the forefront.  Using age-appropriate language, we lay the foundations for on-going conversations about how to use technology in safe, kind, and healthy ways.  This includes topics such as privacy, cybersecurity, media literacy, and using technology in moderation in constructive ways.

Our iPad layouts and settings in the Lower School are designed to minimize the number of apps and eliminate notifications.  All home screens are organized to give students an early foundation in digital organization.