The Ellington curriculum develops children's knowledge and skills physically, socially, emotionally, and intellectually, while helping children to become independent learners.

Each child is viewed as a unique person with an individual pattern and pace of growth. Different levels of ability, development, and learning styles are expected, accepted, and used to design curriculum and instruction.

Curriculum areas are frequently combined to show relationships among different subjects. For example, language arts and math activities are combined with science and social studies as students find solutions to a challenging problem.

Language Arts

Reading

Goal: Continue to develop students' reading strategies.

Approach: Houghton Mifflin Literature Experience program (1991) presents a variety of quality literature experiences, incorporating reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. To facilitate learning and accommodate individual differences of children, students may engage in sustained silent reading, independent reading of self-selected books, buddy reading, whole group reading, cross-age reading experiences, book reports, book related projects, and presentations.

Skills: Previewing and predicting, comprehension strategies, cause and effect relationships, identifying parts of a story, summarizing, identifying main ideas and details,non-fiction reading strategies, and character development.

Themes: Fantasy Close to Home (fantasies)

 They Walked the Earth (non-fiction)

 Laura Ingalls Wilder (author and historical fiction)

 The Mystery Hour (mysteries)

 Dear Diary (realistic fiction)

 The Dreamers (biographies)

 

Writing

Goal: Communicate effectively through writing in various genres and for various purposes, including narrative, expository (i.e. reports, directions), descriptive, demand writing, poetry, letters, persuasive writing.

Approach: The program helps students develop a piece of writing through a process: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.

Skills: Developing introductions, topic sentences, paragraphs, and conclusions; elaborating, organizing; capitalizing, punctuation parts speech, sentence structure.

Spelling

The students use a structured spelling program that focuses on a core group of words each week that is to be mastered and applied.

Handwriting

Upper and lower case cursive letters are reviewed and mastery of these letters is expected. The Zaner-Bloser

handwriting program is used.

Mathematics

Goal: To be competent mathematical problem solvers who compute, learn to communicate, and reason mathematically using basic math skills.

Approach: Students move through a developmental process when learning math concepts. Starting with manipulatives and pictures in the early grades, they become increasingly able to use mathematical symbols and solve problems abstractly in the upper grades.

Skills: Use language to communicate mathematical ideas and processes, solve problems using several strategies and sources of data, employ estimation strategies, explore and consolidate place value, fractions, and decimals, and begin learning about ratio, proportion and percent. Division and continued work on multiplication are included as well as study in the areas of probability, statistics, graphing and measurement. The Trailblazers mathematics program is used.

Social Studies

Goal: Promote student knowledge of regions of the United States, Connecticut, current events.

Approach: Hands-on activities, field trips, non-fiction readings (i.e. textbooks, newspapers, library books, periodicals, drama.

Units: Landforms, major resources and important historical facts about Connecticut and the states that comprise the regions of the U.S. Geography topics are integrated throughout, including longitude and latitude, characteristics of landforms and waterways, and climate as a defining feature.

Skills: Gathering and organizing information, study skills (i.e. note taking, outlining), and reading.

Science/Health

Goal: Promote discovery learning and scientific reasoning skills.

Approach: Experiments, hands-on projects, technology and media, non-fiction readings and independent research.

Units: The food chain, color and light, electrical circuits, fossils and dinosaurs, muscles, bones and the digestive system of the human body, Here's Looking at You 2000 health units, and others.

Skills: Observing, collecting data, organizing materials, comparing and analyzing data, and communicating findings.

Physical Education

The physical education program engages students in carefully planned and sequenced activities. Students experience of joy of movement, develop a variety of motor skills, and learn aspects of anatomy and physiology.

Art

The program develops an appreciation of art and life-long interest in learning more about art. Content is based on Art Appreciation, Art History, Art Criticism, and Art Creation.

Music

This program develops an appreciation for various types of music, and teaches listening and performing skills as well as singing techniques.

Technology

Use of technology is an integrated part of most areas of the curriculum.

Homework

The homework guideline for Grade Four is 45 minutes nightly. However, students vary in terms of the actual time it may take to complete homework. Typically, homework includes reinforcement of class lessons, study for tests, and long-term assignments such as research projects and book reports.

Connecticut Mastery Tests

Fourth grade students take the Connecticut Mastery Tests (CMT) during the first month of school. The CMT's measure skill acquisition in language arts and mathematics.

 Updated on 1 May 2002.