Religion Program
Our Religion program is based on the Diocesan curriculum, The Seed is the Word of God. From our very youngest brothers and sisters through Grade 8, our students grow in knowledge of the Creed, the Sacraments, Catholic moral and social teaching, and prayer. We use Sadlier’s We Believe series, and reinforce Church teachings about marriage and human sexuality through Benzinger’s Family Life program.
Students prepare to receive Holy Communion, Reconciliation, and Confirmation, and receive those Sacraments with their parish. We celebrate Mass together on First Fridays and holy days of obligation. Students receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation several times a year. Everyone is expected to participate in Sunday worship in their own parish.
Service projects are an important part of our development as followers of Jesus. Some of these projects, such as our food drive, toy drive, and Mite Box collection, are participated in by everyone. Our recently confirmed students and those preparing for Confirmation perform additional acts of service in the Corona community and the larger community. Most recently, they joined with the students in the OLS Parish Faith Formation program to plant trees at Jamaica Bay.
Throughout the year, students celebrate specific things they have learned with class days of recollection. We pray the Rosary together as a school community during October and May. Classes take turns leading prayer services during Advent and Lent, and at other appropriate times during the year. The Confirmation class, First Communion class, and graduating Eighth Graders enjoy a retreat day. Of course, every day begins and ends in prayer.
Early Childhood Program
PreK-3 – K
Our early childhood classes are taught by caring, energetic, well-qualified teachers, supported by bilingual aides. Every day, they pray and learn to grow closer to Jesus, Mary, and the Church. Although it often looks as if they are “just playing,” the learning never stops. Construction materials and puzzles develop problem-solving skills and lay the foundation for mathematical thinking and a “maker” mindset. Dramatic play reinforces what they learn about God, as well as developing social studies concepts, interpersonal skills, and vocabulary. The children enjoy a wide variety of literature, observe and create visual art, sing, dance, act, and play instruments. They learn about the world about them, and about their place in it. Use of information systems, beginning to code, dictating and writing stories, and participating in physical education all help to “round out” the educational experience.
Grades 1-4
In these foundational grades, our students continue to grow in the Faith, and to develop the skills and habits they will need to become lifelong learners. They read increasingly rigorous fiction and nonfiction, and learn to write about what they are learning. They learn the writing process: brainstorming, planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.
As mathematicians, they develop problem solving skills and persistence, mathematical reasoning and the ability to express this thought process, the ability to model and use mathematical tools, attention to precision, and the habit of looking for pattern and structure. They learn to count, compare, describe, classify, identify and form patterns, add and subtract, identify shapes and grow to work with area and perimeter, understand and use place value, represent and interpret data, identify and work with fractions and decimals, multiply and divide. And, of course, they learn their addition and multiplication facts (“times tables”).
Social Studies teach our students about families, now and long ago; communities here and in around the world, and NYS history and government.
In Science, students learn about the earth’s movements, weather, the water cycle, time and distance, conservation, soil, the moon, tides, buoyancy, magnetism, conductivity, energy, forces, similarities and differences among living things, parts of plants and their function, life cycles, adaptation, endangerment and extinction, populations, environments, and interdependence.
Students also participate in ongoing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) activities, which also include literacy and the arts. This deepens their understanding of the content areas, encourages problem-solving and the ability to test an idea and redesign what doesn’t work, and helps to prepare students for the challenges of the future.
Grades 5-8
In our middle-school grades, students prepare for a life of Christian service and learn to know Jesus more deeply. They develop organizational and planning skills, become increasingly responsible for their own work and as members of a Catholic learning community.
They read increasingly complex texts, participate in research across the content areas, write for a variety of purposes and learn to support their statements with facts and examples. They increase their academic and general vocabulary, and learn to evaluate what they read and hear. They create visual images that support their oral reports and written work, and leave us able to write essays, poetry, narratives, and arguments. They participate in debates that enhance their understanding of the curriculum and develop their writing, speaking, and listening abilities.
At this age, students deepen their understanding of numerical relationships (ratio and proportion), become proficient at working with rational numbers, expressions, functions and equations, make use of statistics and probability, and develop an understanding of symmetry, congruence, geometric properties, and irrational numbers.
Their work in Social Studies deepens their ability to gather, interpret, and use evidence, strengthens their chronological and geographical reasoning, teaches them to place events in their specific context, clarifies their understanding of the related impact of geography, economics, and history, and encourages them to see the impact of human beings on each other and on the planet, developing a sense of mutual responsibility and good stewardship.
They encounter these big ideas through examining the Western and Eastern hemispheres, past and present, and through a careful study of the United States from the time of the indigenous peoples through the 21st century. As they grow, they examine these important facts and concepts through the lens of our Catholic faith.
Science in the middle-school years helps students to understand their world, to look at problems or questions as scientists: developing hypotheses and designing, carrying out experiments, and evaluating what they have learned. They study physical and chemical properties of matter, biomes, reproduction and genetics, making healthy choices, food webs, ways that living things survive/thrive, interdependence, the impact of technology, geology, relative motion and perspective, interactions among air, water, and land, and plate tectonics. They become very comfortable with probes, scales, microscopes, and the other tools of the sciences.
Music
Our music program is led by a very skilled teacher. Students learn about tempo, rhythm, dynamics, timbre and instruments, pitch, sound and silence as parts of composition, melody and harmony, voice and breath control, musical notation, and the many cultural influences on music. They sing, move, and learn to play rhythm instruments when they are little, and then the recorder.
Our students are fortunate to participate in Carnegie Hall’s education programs. Younger students are part of the Musical Explorers program. They build basic music skills in the classroom’ learn songs from different cultures, reflect on their own communities, and develop singing and listening skills. They have a wonderful time at two concerts during the year at Carnegie Hall, where professionals make connections among music, social studies, and literacy. Older students learn about the orchestra, develop their skill at the recorder, and play with the orchestra in Carnegie Hall as part of the Link Up program.
Students have a chance to show off their singing, dancing, and collaborating knowledge at our Christmas Festival and Spring Extravaganza.
Artist in Residence
A very exciting feature of life at OLSCA is the Artist in Residence program in collaboration with Stages on the Sound, a theater group. Actor-teachers from Stages on the Sound work with students in Grade 4, who learn to create collaboratively-produced stop-motion videos. Sixth-graders work on script-writing, and eighth-graders work with and finally perform in Shakespearean works, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. Actors from Stages on the Sound come to school and perform a short work in which they demonstrate how much fun Shakespeare can be, and the middle school students go to a live performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays.
Technology
Information technologies are infused into the entire curriculum. Students do Internet research and prepare and present videos and other presentations. They participate in curriculum-related webinars and Google Hangouts. SMART Boards and their interactive programs are available in every room, and students can work along with the students at the SMART Board by using our subscription to Nearpod on our tablets.
Students begin to learn coding in PreK, and develop their skills as they program our robots (Sunburst’s Wonder Works Dot and Dash for grades PreK – 5, and the Lego robots for 6 – 8) and use programming language to create videos and games. This not only teaches them the coding skills, but reinforces logical thinking, self-assessment, and persistence.
In addition to the SMART Boards, we have laptops, Chrome Books, and tablets available for use by every student, and a computer lab equipped with desktops and printers.
Students in Grades 5 – 8 use Google Classroom every day. They become increasingly proficient at using these technologies for learning and creating rather than just playing games or texting. They also participate in the iSafe curriculum, which helps them to be wise about online behavior, and work on information literacy as well.