Our expectation is that all students at East Palo Alto Charter School will be prepared to attend college through our rigorous curriculum and high expectations. EPACS is a standards based school; we are completely focused on teaching all of the California State Standards at each grade level.
In terms of curriculum, we use Harcourt Math and the Aspire Math Instructional Guidelines to teach mathematics in K-5. The Aspire IG’s include, but are not limited to teaching a math mini lesson, pulling groups for guided math while the students are working in math centers, practicing math facts, problem solving and student led solutions. In grades 6-8, we use College Preparatory Math curriculum and we focus on the explicit, direct teaching of the math standards for the middle school grade levels.
We are a Reading First School in K-3, which means that we have a grant that provides our school with a full time reading coach to support the teachers and their instructional practice in reading language arts. We use Open Court curriculum in K-5; in grades 4 and 5 we start to integrate independent reading, novels and social studies to prepare the students for middle school humanities.
Our middle school humanities program is novel based. The students are expected to read at least six novels per year as a class some of which are aligned with their social studies standards. Each student is also expected to read an additional book independently each day during SSR and for 30 minutes as part of homework and write a summary. The students take an Accelerated Reader Quiz after finishing each book in order to receive credit for their independent reading. The students also learn vocabulary through daily word work, practice writing conventions through minilessons and publish pieces of writing between 500-700 words in length on a weekly or biweekly basis. The students also study Social Studies through the History Alive curriculum.
In K-5 we collaborate with Environmental Volunteers and Collective Roots Garden Project to teach standards based science lessons. We also use Foss Kits to teach science and plan science units that are aligned and integrated with English Language Arts. In middle school, the science classes are lab based. The teachers develop labs based on the standards and the students are expected to conduct experiments, work in groups and write up lab reports. Also, all students in grades 4-8 are required to participate in our annual science fair in June.