Elementary School
L’Ecole offers a French and English elementary program. Our native English and French teachers lead our students in both languages throughout their day.
The elementary school curriculum is 75% in French and 25% in English.
Our goal is to foster proficiency in French and English in most subjects. The curriculum brings together the rigor of the French “Education Nationale” curriculum and the dynamism of the American – NC curriculum.
The programs ensure the acquisition of fundamental knowledge and skills.
They outline and specify the objectives defined by the Common Core ( French and American). This is structured around five areas:
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languages for thinking and communicating
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methods and tools for learning
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training of the person and the citizen
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natural systems and technical systems
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representations of the world and human activity
The CP ( 1st grade), CE1 ( 2nd grade) and CE2 ( 3rd grade)classes constitute Cycle 2 of Primary school, i.e. the cycle of fundamental learning.
Find the more detailed program below:
French
In maternelle ( preschool), students developed skills for the use of oral language and learned to speak together, they listened to texts and learned to understand them, discovered the function of writing and began to produce it. The acquisition of vocabulary, phonological awareness and the discovery of the alphabetic principle, attention to the regularities of the language and initial training in the essential gestures of writing gave them benchmarks to continue learning in French.
Teaching French consolidates students' skills to communicate and live in society, structures each person's relationship to the world and contributes to self-construction; it facilitates entry into all teachings and their languages. The integration of CE2 ( 3rd grade)into cycle 2 must ensure solid basic reading and writing skills for all students.
Skills worked:
-Understand and express oneself orally
-Read
-Write
-Understand how language works
What the program consists in:
An initial mastery of oral language allows students to be active in verbal exchanges, to express themselves, to listen while seeking to understand the contributions of peers, the messages or texts heard, to react by formulating a point of view or a proposition, by acquiescing or contesting. The teacher's attention to the quality and effectiveness of students' oral language and verbal interactions remains sustained at all times during the cycle. Its role as guarantor of the effectiveness of exchanges by regulating them remains important throughout the cycle, with students needing guidance to learn to debate.
Reading and writing are two closely linked activities whose effectiveness is consolidated by well-articulated practice. Their acquisition takes place throughout schooling, in interaction with other learning topics. All in all, cycle 2 constitutes a determining period.
At the end of the three years which make up this cycle, students must have acquired an initial autonomy in reading varied texts, adapted to their age. Practicing reading these texts leads them to broaden the scope of their knowledge, to increase references and models for writing, to multiply objects of curiosity or interest, to refine their thinking.
In the study of the language (grammar, spelling, lexicon), students gradually learn to practice observations, to enter into organized reflections on the functioning of the language in order to begin to acquire the fundamental notions of learning which continues until the end of middle school. The essential objectives of language study during cycle 2 are linked to reading and writing. The knowledge acquired makes it possible to deal with understanding problems and spelling problems. The texts to be read and the writing projects can serve as supports for recalling acquired knowledge or for observing language facts (orthographic, lexical, morphosyntactic, syntactic) not yet worked on.
Modern languages
ENGLISH
Cycle 2 constitutes the starting point for learning modern languages for all students. This cycle helps to lay the foundations for the initial development of students' plurilingual skills. Our English teacher works in tandem with the French teachers to develop a multifaceted approach to learning the English language.
She teaches English using the Common Core of North Carolina, but also mathematics and some social studies.
Skills worked on:
-Understanding, speaking, writing
The common base of knowledge, skills and culture offers a particularly rich entry into the field “Representations of the world and human activity”, which allows students to begin, from cycle 2, to observe and approach the facts cultural and to develop their sensitivity to difference and cultural diversity.
Entry into the foreign or regional language occurs naturally by speaking about oneself and one's world, real and imaginary. Three themes are thus proposed around the child, the class, the child's universe: everyday environment and imaginary world, which allow the students to be confronted with various genres and communication situations, based on what they know.
Arts
Teaching visual arts particularly develops students' potential for invention, within open situations promoting autonomy, initiative and critical perspective. It is constructed from the elements of artistic language: shape, space, light, color, material, gesture, support, tool, time. They explores varied fields, both in practice and in references: drawing, painting, collage, modeling, sculpture, assemblage, photography, video, digital creation... The encounter with works of art is privileged there, which allows students to engage in a sensitive and curious approach, enriching their potential for unique expression and judgment. This allows them to learn to accept other perspectives and visions of the world through the arts.
In cycle 2, this teaching consolidates the artistic awareness initiated in kindergarten and provides students with knowledge and means which will allow them, from cycle 3, to explore personal expression, to recognize the singularity of others and to access a shared artistic culture.
Skills worked on:
-Experiment, produce, create
-Implement an artistic project
-Express oneself, analyze your practice and that of your peers; establish a relationship with the visions and practices of artists, open up to otherness
-Find one’s way in areas related to the visual arts, be sensitive to questions of art
In the program:
These skills are developed and worked on based on three major questions close to the concerns of the students, aiming to gradually invest in art:
-trepresentation of the world
-expression of emotions
-narration and testimony through images
Musical education
Musical education develops two major areas of skills structuring the student's entire training course until the end of cycle 4: perception and production. Taking into account the sensitivity and pleasure of making music as well as listening to it, musical education provides the cultural and technical knowledge necessary for the development of listening and expression skills.
The voice plays a central role in musical practices in the classroom. Being the most immediate vector for making music, it is particularly appropriate for production and performance work in a collective setting in a school environment. Likewise, the mobilization of the body in musical gesture contributes to physical and psychological balance.
At the end of cycle 2, students have a set of experiences, know-how and cultural benchmarks which will be the basis of the musical and artistic training continued in cycle 3.
Skills worked on:
-Singing
-Listening, comparing
-Exploring and imagining
-Exchanging, sharing
Physical education and sport
Physical and sports education develops access to a rich field of practices, with strong cultural and social involvement, important in the development of the individual's personal and collective life. Throughout schooling, physical and sports education aims to shape a lucid, autonomous, physically and socially educated citizen, who has learnt to live in a community. It encourages children and adolescents to care about their health and well-being. It ensures the inclusion, in the class, of students with special educational needs or disabilities. Physical and sports education introduces them to the pleasure of practicing sports.
Skills worked on:
Physical and sports education responds to the training challenges of the common core by allowing all students, girls and boys together and equally, to build five skills worked on continuously during the different cycles:
-Develop their motor skills and learn to express themselves using their body
-Appropriate, through physical and sporting practice, methods and tools
-Understand rules, assume roles and responsibilities
-Learn to maintain their health through regular physical activity
-Appropriate a sporting and artistic physical culture
In the program:
To develop these general skills, physical and sports education offers all students, from primary school to middle-school, a training course made up of four complementary learning fields:
-Produce optimal performance, measurable by a given deadline
-Adapt their movements to varied environments
-Express themselves in front of others through an artistic and/or acrobatic performance
-Lead and control a collective or interindividual activity.
Moral and civic education
Moral and civic education aims at the acquisition of a moral and civic culture and a critical spirit which aims to develop the dispositions enabling students to gradually become aware of their responsibilities in their personal and social lives. This teaching articulates values, knowledge and practices.
Moral and civic education also aims for a free and enlightened appropriation by students of the values which are the foundation a republic and democracy: the base of common values includes dignity, freedom, equality - particularly between girls and boys - , solidarity, secularism, the spirit of justice, respect and the absence of any form of discrimination, that is to say the constitutional values of a Republic, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In the program:
The program highlights the elements of a moral and civic culture which takes into account four dimensions:
-sensitivity and acquiring a moral conscience through work on the expression, identification, putting into words and discussion of emotions and feelings
-the rule of law: acquiring the meaning of the rules of living together
-Judgment which allows us to understand and discuss the moral choices encountered by each person during their life
-Commitment which allows the putting into practice of these teaching by insisting on the spirit of autonomy, cooperation and responsibility towards others
Questioning the world
From preschool onwards, students explore and observe the world around them; in cycle 2, they will learn to question it more precisely, through an initial scientific and thoughtful approach. The general objectives of “Questioning the world” are therefore: on the one hand to enable students to acquire the knowledge necessary to describe and understand the world around them and develop their ability to reason; on the other hand to contribute to their training as citizens. The learning, repeated and deepened during successive cycles, will then continue throughout schooling by calling on increasingly elaborate, abstract and complex ideas.
-Skills worked:
-Practicing scientific approaches
-Imagining, analizing
-Appropriating tools and methods
-Mobilize digital tools
-Adopt ethical and responsible behavior
-Position oneself in space and time
In the program:
-Questioning the living, and inanimate worlds
-What is matter
-How to recognize the living world?
-Technical objects and tools. What are they? What needs do they meet? How do they work?
-Questioning space and time
-Locate oneself in space
-Locate oneself time
-Explore the world's organizations
Mathematics
In cycle 2, problem solving is at the center of students' mathematical activity, developing their abilities to research, reason and communicate. The problems make it possible to approach new concepts, to consolidate acquisitions, to provoke questions.
Skills worked:
-looking for answers
-modeling
-representing
-reasoning
-calculating
-communicating.
In the program:
-Numbers and calculations
-Sizes and measurements
-Space and geometry
Students consolidate their understanding of whole numbers, already encountered in cycle 1. They study different ways of designating numbers, in particular their writing in figures, their oral names, compositions-decompositions based on numerical properties (double , half of, etc.), as well as decompositions into number units (units, tens, etc.).
The four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) are studied using problems which help to give them meaning, in particular problems relating to quantities or their measurements. Daily practice of mental arithmetic reinforces mastery of numbers and operations.
In connection with the work carried out in “Questioning the world”, students encounter quantities that they learn to measure, they construct essential knowledge of space and tackle the study of some geometric relationships and some objects (solids and figures). planes) by being confronted with problems in which this knowledge is at stake.
To find out more about the program you can follow the links below:
Primary school timetables and programs