Lower School

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Click here to learn more about our PYP Program.

Students chose a foreign language to study following this schedule:

• Kindergarten or Grade 1 – choice of French or Chinese each year
• Grades 2, 3, 4, and 5 choice of French, Spanish, Japanese or Chinese to study through High School.

Promoting student agency, all fifth graders partake in Exhibition as a final unit. During this time, student teams research their own passion topics by writing their own central idea and lines of inquiry and scheduling their own speakers and field trips. Collectively, the teams utilize all Approaches to Learning (communication, research, social, thinking and self-management skills) to address their chosen unit concept, that has global significance and local relevance, through taking action. Some topics of the past: consumption, homelessness, women’s rights, natural resources, culture, alternative health.

Making new friends, learning the routines of the classroom and playground, deciding which centers to discover each day, and making so many choices.

That is just the first week of Kindergarten! Kindergarteners learn about Hawaii and the greater world through units of inquiry on choices and consequences, forms of expression, natural resources and scientific explorations. Kindergartners enjoy hands-on learning opportunities through many excursions off campus.

A huge focus in first grade is reading, from phonetic recall to comprehension, the students are immersed! They use their reading to explore units of inquiry based on relationships, shelters, expression through movement, cycles, food systems and taking action in the world.

Students begin the year by working on their classroom community and budding healthy relationships and then dive into ocean’s ecosystem, and grow their understanding of structures in the world, expressions of visual arts, healthy soils, and explorers through their units of inquiry. They become confident writers as they work on ideas, conventions and organization!

Third graders learn what it means to be a citizen, how the geography and resources of our land affect where and why we settle in areas, and how to innovate a machine to make work easier. They also choose their favorite type of speech to share with an audience and present them to each other. By the end of the economics unit, third grade students are able to make business decisions and know what “opportunity cost, scarcity, supply, demand” mean.

The Fourth graders spend time on the island of Hawaii exploring the vast fields of lava, indigenous plants, history, and folklore of the Hawaiian people. This culminating three-day trip brings to life many of the concepts that the students have studied all year long: geology, migration, biodiversity, space, beliefs and values.

Fifth graders are scientists who grow their understanding of physics through a unit on Chemistry in the Kitchen. They grow as historians by creating their own government and constitution. By researching symbolism and expressions during times of conflict, students create their own symbolic representation of dispute. This rigorous year culminates with Exhibition, an opportunity for the fifth graders design their own unit of inquiry in a collaborative team, scheduling their own field trips and presenting their findings at the end of the year.