At Alma Fuerte, our approach to learning and accessing curriculum includes:
Personalized Approach – Alma Fuerte takes your child’s strengths, needs, and interests into consideration. Then teachers provide the support they need to truly master a subject at the highest standards.
Collaborative Learning – With small class sizes and different approaches to learning (like project-based learning, multiple modalities, learning styles), children are encouraged to work closely together to solve problems.
Self-Directed Learning Opportunities – Alma Fuerte values your child’s interests and opinions, encouraging deeper thought. We are helping to prepare them to have the skills and attitude necessary to be successful once they leave school.
Personal Growth – Alma Fuerte emphasizes social emotional learning (SEL). SEL teaches students to understand and manage their emotions, establish and maintain positive relationships, feel and show empathy, set and achieve goals, and make responsible decisions. We have recently become a grief education school.
Language Arts
Fontas and Pinnell + Reader's Writer's Workshop
The primary focus of the Alma Fuerte language arts program is to help students use the reading process effectively. Students will be able to select and use pre-reading strategies that are appropriate to the text such as discussion, making predictions, brainstorming, generating questions, and previewing in order to anticipate content, purpose and organization of a reading selection. Reading will not be passive, but rather an interactive process involving the text itself, the reader, and the context of the reading situation.
The Alma Fuerte Reading Program correlates to all Reading and Language Arts California State Standards and addresses the five areas of reading: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Our reading program is the tool used to provide initial and differentiated instruction and is used to expose and instruct students at his/her level. Continual assessment is conducted to ensure that the child is progressing at his/her own personal rate.
The Alma Fuerte Reading program provides explicit lessons for whole group instruction that includes introduction of skills, modeling, teaching, independent and guided application, and review of skills and concepts. Techniques such as modeling, pre-viewing and predicting, visualizing, summarizing and direct instruction in strategic reading are embedded throughout the program. The Alma Fuerte Reading Program provides guidance to teachers in delivering differentiated instruction for diverse learners within the reading block. The program contains integral instructional sequences coordinated by strand of instruction and are carefully planned to move from cognitively simple skills to more complex skills. Daily lessons for small group-differentiated instruction revolves around using leveled materials to provide numerous practice opportunities for mastery of skills and strategies.
Mathematics
Eureka Math
The Alma Fuerte mathematics curriculum will enable students to:
1. Understand that mathematics is the study of patterns and relationships;
2. Become familiar with some of those patterns and relationships; and
3. Learn to use them in daily life.
In order to implement the mathematics curriculum, the Alma Fuerte Public School has adopted the proven instructional mathematics curricula, Great Minds, EngageNY (Eureka Math). Great Minds was founded in 2007 to define and encourage content-rich, comprehensive education for all school children. The curricula has exemplary instructional materials bringing joyful rigor to learning, sparking and rewarding curiosity and imparting knowledge.
Science
The science program is designed to use a constructive view of learning skills, sequences, and subject knowledge.The science curriculum will include strategies to:
1.Encourage students to make their ideas explicit and present them with events that challenge their ideas.
2. Encourage the process of hypothesizing and generating alternative inspirations of models, enabling the students to explore these alternatives in informal and non-threatening ways, particularly through group discussion, and providing opportunities for students to use their new ideas in a wide range of situations so that they can appreciate their utility.
Social Studies
This curriculum promotes students’ understanding of historical, geographical, and civic knowledge and their application of this knowledge to today’s diverse world culture. In the early grades (kindergarten through second) students learn about the world with which they are most familiar: home, school, the neighborhood, and the broader Altadena community.
The social studies program will provide each student with a broad background in the social sciences. Within each class, the faculty-student exchange will be strongly encouraged. Students will be encouraged to think critically and to form opinions consistent with historical facts. From the earliest events of recorded history, through the development of family life, culture and the arts, to the development of governments and countries driven by geographical exploration, the wars of history and the stories they tell, from yesterday to today, students will have the unique opportunity to pursue their curiosity and respond to the State Standards by participating in the discovery of man and his contributions to the whole of humanity.
Entrepreneurship
Alma Fuerte is committed to creating the next generation of innovators and change-makers through entrepreneurial learning. Through our focus on entrepreneurship and STEAM curriculum we are inspiring a skillset and a way of thinking. This focus on nurturing an entrepreneurial mindset involves identifying needs, brainstorming creative solutions, taking calculated risks, learning from failure and persevering despite setbacks. This curriculum provides opportunities to be resourceful and confident and work well with others to bring ideas to life.
Students will learn the following:
Entrepreneurial Skills
Entrepreneurial mindset
Introduction to business
Product creation
Financial literacy and budgeting
Student Achievement
Creative and critical thinking
Teamwork and collaboration
Leadership skills and public speaking skills
Lateral and higher-order thinking
Postsecondary readiness
21st Century Career Skills: product ideation, marketing research, technology
Sparks interests in attending college
Career ideation
We hope this gives you an idea for the vision of our school. Our team works tirelessly to expose our students to as many opportunities for learning as possible. If you have any questions about our curriculum or approach, please do not hesitate to contact Ms. Keay : laurilie.keay@almafuerteps.org.