Elementary Classroom

Elementary students at Brookside Charter start each day with a morning meeting. Our morning meetings help create a culture of safety and trust in every classroom.

During morning meetings, teachers and students participate in community circles, often sharing about their thoughts and feelings for the day. By starting the day with a social-emotional check-in, we ensure that every student is ready to conquer the day ahead. Students and teachers value the time spent community-building as a class and morning meetings are often a favorite time of the day for many students!

At Brookside, we use a Reader’s Workshop Model for reading instruction. The model begins with a mini-lesson in which new content is taught, modeled and practiced with students. After the mini-lesson students are given time to read independently to practice the reading strategy or skill that was taught in the mini-lesson.

One of the key elements to our workshop model is small group work. Reading small groups is a focused work time for students to work directly with the teacher on reading skills and strategies needed for success.

Students use Lexia and Reading Plus, web-based programs, as additional instruction for reading. Lexia focuses on understanding words and structures with words and sentences. Reading Plus focuses on fluent reading, vocabulary and reading comprehension.

We work to incorporate Social Studies topics into our reading instruction because this has proven to increase reading success.

Writing Workshop is a student-centered framework that allows students to write frequently, for extended periods of time, and about topics they choose. There are four parts of the writing workshop that we do daily at Brookside: mini-lesson, writing time, 1:1 conferring conferences with teacher and student, and sharing.

We value writing daily as it is a foundation to higher reading achievement.

At Brookside Charter, we believe students learn math conceptually through the concrete, pictorial, abstract structure. This means learning starts by experiencing math using concrete objects called manipulatives, then transitions to drawing picture representations, and finally being able to understand math in an abstract way.

We use an online program called Zearn that provides students with an opportunity to practice the skills that they learned with their teacher’s lesson that day. We also use a program called XtraMath to practice basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts daily to ensure students are building fact fluency.

Since adopting this curriculum, our students have scored at or above the state average in math on state standardized tests.

STEM is important because our world depends on it. Many things in our world, from health to economics, are backed by Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. STEM education cultivates the problem solver and innovator within our children.

At Brookside Charter, we value developmentally appropriate practice and have play based centers PreK-2nd grade.  We understand that young children learn through play and through hands-on experiences.  Centers incorporate core writing, reading, and math skills through a play-based model.  Children learn how to share, work with others and problem solve within their centers and practice many other skills.