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Lower Schools
ORGANIZATION OF SCHOOLS AND GRADES:
Our 15-acre campus is a prepared learning environment organized into three small schools, Esperanza Montessori Academy, K - 3rd grade; Reyes Maria Ruiz (RMR) Academy, grades 4-6; and NFL YET Academy, Grades 9-12. Each has its own identity, organization and theme in order to improve instruction.
We also have organized the schools into teams that correspond to the labeling test years of third, fifth, eighth, and tenth grade. These teams will utilize the data results from these test years to place students into correct cohorts, so teachers can create an Individual Learning Plan for each student, and adjust their teaching strategies.
Each team is also organized to correspond to the “Trivium” curriculum levels: Grammar - Kindergarten through the fifth grade; Logic – sixth to eighth grades, and Rhetoric I, grades nine and ten, and Rhetoric II, grades eleven and twelve, with Honors available for students who qualify.
The teacher is the facilitator of learning and they are required to structure their classroom by organizing their students into cohorts of excelling, meeting, approaching, or falls far below, based upon an analysis of at least the last three years. The teacher then prepares annual goals and teaching strategies for each of their students and adjusts them each week based upon an internal assessment.
The goal is to have more than seventy-five percent of our third graders pass the Reading AIMS, and have the same percentage of eighth graders pass the Math AIMS, by the end of three years.
Esperanza Montessori Academy School
Team One: K – 1st EMA
Esperanza Montessori Academy has 4 classrooms and 90 students, its primary goal is to guide and nurture the spirit of the child, using the classroom environment as the curriculum. The Montessori educational philosophy is that children are born with a natural love of learning. The teacher guides the instruction of the child by introducing concepts at appropriate times. It has four major areas of concentration: practical life, sensorial (hands on), mathematics, and language. This learning environment develops concentration, independence, problem solving, social interaction, and competency in foundational skills.
Team Two: 1st – 5th Grade Primary
The school has 10 classrooms and 250 students; its primary goal is to educate the whole child by developing character as well as academics. Character teaches leadership and promotes a sense of civic responsibility. The curriculum has as its foundation the “Trivium” philosophy of education. This level (Grammar) would focus on memorization of basic facts, acquisition of language, and history. The four core areas of instruction would be: Math/Science, Language Arts, History/Social Studies, all reinforced with electives in the Classics.
