Curriculum

St. Gregory the Great School is privileged to host a TK program tailoring to 4-year-olds. The holistic advantages of integrating a TK program within an elementary school context extend to enhancing alignment throughout the elementary years, ensuring a seamless transition, and fostering optimal preparation for Kindergarten. This program not only facilitates academic growth but also nurtures a sense of community, wherein students engage and learn within an environment rooted in a robust faith-based foundation.

Our TK curriculum is aligned with Archdiocesan standards, guiding our dedicated staff to facilitate language and physical development, socialization, and cognitive learning.

Emphasis is placed on Catholic Identity, ensuring a well-rounded educational experience.

Our commitment to early childhood education is reflected in the provision of a dedicated playground for children aged 2-5, located within our main yard. This space is designed with developmentally appropriate activities, fostering a safe and engaging environment for our young learners. Additionally, we extend our offerings to include the Great Start summer program, designed just for TK students, providing continued opportunities for growth and enrichment beyond the academic year.

Childhood is a time of amazement and discovery, and we recognize that kids learn best when they’re engaged in hands-on activities. To that end, we’ve created an environment that encourages children to be active, thoughtful, and creative participants in their learning. At St. Gregory the Great School, there’s always something new to learn and do.

At our school, we’re committed to an active learning approach that incorporates project work into all our programs. We encourage our students to step outside their comfort zones, embrace new challenges, and develop new friendships as they gain the foundational academic skills needed to thrive in a global society. We believe that academic success is intertwined with social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development, and we work closely with our students and their families to facilitate healthy exploration.

If you’re curious about what we have to offer, we invite you to visit us and experience the richness of our academic program, the warmth of our community, the enthusiasm of our students, and the dedication of our faculty.

Sixth-grade Language Arts comprises an in-depth study of the six traits of writing: ideas, organization, diction, voice, fluency, and conventions. Utilizing Houghton. Mifflin Harcourt Text Series, resources, text-specific mentor sentences to model and learn from, and a variety of interactive tools, students elevate their comprehension and application of many language elements, including parts of speech, punctuation, word usage, clauses and phrases, sentence types and structures, connotation and denotation, and root words. Students also enhance their summarizing and paraphrasing skills, learn short written response strategies, and develop structured paragraph techniques in preparation for longer compositions. Student compositions include narrative, expository, and persuasive pieces and a poetry chapbook, all completed via a collaborative, step-by-step workshop approach in which students learn and apply the writing process. Students learn to properly select, cite, and present effective research from primary and secondary sources. Finally, students develop and apply many rhetorical techniques to bring to life their stories and confidently deliver speeches to their peers.

Leveraging various platforms and interactive resources, as well as tour Basic Textbook, Middle School students survey a broad range of contemporary, historical, and classical fiction, as well as dramas, poetry and songs, short stories, and film. Novels studied include Wonder, Where the Red Fern Grows, and The Watsons Go to Birmingham, and other novels. Students identify and analyze the use and impact of various literary devices from these texts and media, including plot structures, point of view, theme, characterization, imagery, figurative language, tone, mood, symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony. Additionally, students encounter a full-length nonfiction piece, integrated into other areas of the curriculum, as well as many forms of informational texts. With these, students identify and analyze various writing structures, central and supporting ideas, author purpose and intent, and desired audience. Across all genres, students learn to identify and cite key details and text-based evidence to support their responses to and analyze literature. Students also complete a targeted study of grade-level vocabulary words via the dedicated vocabulary book.