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In the Upper Elementary division, from third through fifth grade, children encounter new experiences and stimuli that are well matched to their growing abilities to think, use language, and take responsibility.
A Child-Centered Educational Process
The student is at the center of the educational process at the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan.
- All learning originates in the student’s prior experiences, understandings, and questions and proceeds outward, linking up with new, challenging experiences.
- All learning is driven by the student’s natural curiosity, by the need to make meaning out of daily experiences in his or her physical and social environment. Observing what happens, the student reflects on it, asks questions, and seeks to formulate answers.
- All learning culminates in the student’s increasing competence to understand what he or she only vaguely understood before, and to do what he or she could almost, but not quite, do before.
Each student is unique in personality, temperament, learning style, background, and interests. While all children go through the same steps of the learning process, they do not do so in the same way or at the same time. One of the teacher’s tasks is to recognize and provide for each student’s individuality, while at the same time maximizing the opportunities children have for social learning from each other.
Each child is a whole person, with mind, heart, spirit, and hands. To educate the whole person, we strive to devise learning experiences that touch on all of these domains. In addition, because the domains are interrelated, we help students make connections across domains and subject-matter disciplines.
Ready For More Complex Challenges
Upper Elementary students are stimulated by material and tasks that complement their growing abilities. They are now able to reason logically and organize thoughts coherently, to learn large quantities of information by reading about people, objects, and events, and to work and play in teams in keeping with elaborately structured rules. At school, they participate in reading groups and literature circles, undertake long-term research projects in social studies and science, begin to study Mishnah, play team sports, organize and take part in social action projects, learn to read Torah, and complete homework daily.
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