Academics

Curriculum

Welcome

As a school dedicated to providing an exceptional elementary education, Tenacre seeks to nurture and challenge students over a broad range of academic subjects.

Every child at Tenace is a full participant, a valued contributor to our vibrant community. In classrooms, on our playing fields, in art, music, and drama, our students are actively engaged in their own education. It is our belief that when every child has multiple opportunities to succeed, every child can and will succeed.

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The Schoolhouse: Tenacre's Earliest Years
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In the Schoolhouse, home to pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade, we strive to nurture and challenge each child, every day by providing our students with opportunities for social, emotional, and academic growth through hands-on learning activities. Our goal is to give children the tools they need to access the world and aid them in developing a strong understanding of self as a member of the global community. We do this by prioritizing social-emotional development while supporting children as they build foundational skills across academic domains. Our focus on building community, engaging in identity exploration, and creating lasting relationships with peers and adults alike creates an environment in which students are empowered to take risks and feel confident in their ability to face challenges. In the Schoolhouse, children embark on an educational journey that is part of an 8-year plan and engenders a lifetime love of learning. We believe that when children love learning from an early age, it defines how they approach learning at every age.
- The Schoolhouse has an overarching mission that encompasses the needs and provides growth opportunities for pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade students
- A carefully planned academic and social-emotional curriculum progresses through all grades at Tenacre, with a particular focus on social-emotional growth in the Schoolhouse.
- The Schoolhouse teachers foster the Schoolhouse sense of community with monthly meetings in which all pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade students gather.
- The Schoolhouse teachers themselves meet regularly to collaborate and make sure their curriculum is connected in important ways.

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Public Speaking: Finding Your Voice
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Learning to speak confidently in front of a group is a life skill that Tenacre nurtures in all of its students. Starting at the earliest age, students gain experience standing up in front of groups and speaking. In pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, students serve as class leaders at morning meetings. Opportunities for these types of experiences are built into the daily experience for students in all grades. Throughout their years as a Tenacre student, students learn to find their voices as they participate in class plays and take the lead in grade-level classroom presentations and all-school assemblies. By the time students are in sixth grade, they have substantial experience speaking in front of groups. Sixth graders continue to hone their skills, presenting at Admission events and leading tours during Open Houses, volunteering for solos during the December Celebration holiday performance, taking the lead in making all-school announcements at assemblies and lunch, and participating in lead roles for the spring musical.

Class plays also represent an important role in helping students feel comfortable finding their voices. Tenacre’s philosophy is that all children have an active role in class plays, which allows them additional experience in expressing themselves on stage and in front of an audience. For more information, please visit our Class Plays webpage.

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Individualized Instruction: Small, Flexible Academic Groups
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Tenacre’s small group model offers immense educational benefits. The low student-to-teacher ratio allows every student to participate more fully; more participation leads to increased student understanding and confidence; and teachers can differentiate their instruction to meet the group’s needs.
Tenacre is committed to providing students with a strong foundation of skills, especially in math and reading, which are often referred to as the building blocks of an elementary school education. Tenacre creates small, flexible groups for instruction in both disciplines. Many schools have small groups, but Tenacre’s team teaching model, with the addition of the reading or math coordinator, allows a full-time teacher to teach and work closely with each small group. At Tenacre, students grow into joyful learners, ready to take the next step in their lives and education with confidence and purpose.

Benefits
- The opportunity to receive and give immediate feedback
- More hands-on tasks to build student understanding and confidence
- Teachers are able to motivate and build confidence through personal interactions
- Students build communication skills through increased participation
- Pacing can be adjusted to the groups’ needs
- Instruction is differentiated and targeted
Group Configuration
For reading, Grades 1 and 2 have four teachers (about 6 students per group), and Grades 3 and 4 have three teachers (about 8-9 students per group). In math, Grades 1-6 have three groups per class, with approximately seven to nine students per group.

Group Membership
Groups are constructed and adjusted based on assessment data and teacher observation of daily work. Students are grouped according to their knowledge and skills at a particular point in time and the skill set they need to acquire to demonstrate grade level proficiency. For example, second grade students solidifying decoding skills would be grouped together so the teacher could target the phonetic elements they need to review, while at the same time working on comprehension goals shared by all groups. In math, during a third grade unit on place value with numbers in the 1000s, students who are still working to build conceptual knowledge would be grouped together and focus on using concrete materials to support their work, while another group, still working on place value, would be applying their solidified knowledge to solve abstract word problems.

Faculty Professional Development

This was a banner year for the GwinnLandry Summer Grants, with ten approved grants involving 25 faculty and some participating in more than one grant. Summer Grants continue to be one of the most powerful forms of professional development. These homegrown projects harness teacher creativity and ingenuity to design curriculum, solve problems, and work collaboratively. Since the project ideas stem from school experience, they have direct relevance to day-to-day work and result in tangible gains for students. Summer grants can also provide an opportunity for in-depth curriculum review and revision. Grants that involve curriculum review and revision are overseen by the Reading and Math Coordinators and the Assistant Head of School. Below please see a summary of this year’s grants.

Note: Grant proposals are submitted in the spring and must be approved by the Head of School and Assistant Head of School. Administrators participating in summer grant work do not receive stipends.

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Creating a Professional Development Portal

Faculty Participants: Jenzi Reed and Lou Anne Collins

A variety of documents are used to chart professional development, instructional development, and evaluation. The purpose of this grant was to review all of the documents and house them in one easy-to-access portal rather than in separate folders on Google Drive. Step one involved meeting with Ounce IT consultants, Susan Morgan and Tom Corbin to review commercial products and homegrown alternatives. After weighing options, it was decided that creating a Faculty Professional Development Google Classroom would be a user-friendly, no-cost solution. Jenzi and Lou Anne revised and consolidated the documents in each of the aforementioned categories, which were migrated to the new Classroom. Housing all of the forms/templates in the classroom will streamline access and distribution. Teachers have begun using the Classroom this fall and will be asked to offer feedback on the ease and efficiency throughout the year. Using the same model, Jenzi created a Google Mentor Classroom, where all staff participating in the Mentor/Mentee program can access materials.
Creating a Spanish Website

Faculty Participant: Merce Garcia

Spanish teacher Merce Garcia used her summer grant to begin an ambitious project of creating a Spanish website where each grade can go to practice vocabulary and grammar structures in a fun way beyond the classroom. The website design is a Pirate Ship titled "Spanish Explorer.” When the student clicks on the pirate representing their grade, the pirate's cabin opens. Each of the objects around the cabin leads to games in a vocabulary unit or into grammar concepts. The website allows students to have the agency to learn more and advance their learning of the language by practicing outside the classroom.
Creating User-friendly Library Space and Displays

Faculty Participant: Sam Kane

Librarian Sam Kane worked throughout the summer to create a library space that encourages engagement and exploration. Focusing on flexibility and “dynamic shelving,” Sam added new student-friendly tables that can be moved and reconfigured for projects. Removing the fixed tables opened up the space for better access to books and increased areas for collaborative projects. The new dynamic shelving approach includes more outward-facing books and displays to engage student interest. Sam also created a series of book bins, which will rotate topics and genres. Another new feature is programming stations, where students can choose from a variety of activities, including monthly required reading and research stations.
Earth Week: Beyond a One-Day Celebration

Faculty Participants: Leah Staffier and Sam Kane

Science teacher Leah Staffier and Librarian Sam Kane created a series of activities and a list of resources that can be used in both library and science classes and by interested homeroom teachers. The week-long focus will heighten awareness of sustainability issues throughout the school. The lessons/ activities will have all-campus action steps to foster personal and group stewardship. Leah and Sam will kick off the week with an assembly, and students will create a display made from recycled materials collected throughout the school. Each day of the week will focus on a different theme, for example, pollution police and plant producers.
Focus on Phonics

Faculty Participants: Christina Grace, Lou Anne Collins, Megan Delaney, Tatiana Cochis, Margo Portnoy, Megan Swift, Kate O’Toole, Susan Doering, Lauren Howard, Sabrina Santinello, Casey Connelly, Erin Wong, Liz Amory, Jenzi Reed, Rachel Sullivan, Denise Daoud

All teachers of lower school reading participated in a two-day phonics refresher led by Orton-Gillingham-trained instructors Mary Finnegan, MS, CAGS, ICALP, CC-SLP, and Lynda Muldoon, M.Ed, ICALP. Mary and Lynda reviewed phonetic principles and best practices and shared hands-on activities. The refresher established common language and a framework for the second part of the grant, which was to review our current program and instruction. After study and discussion, we decided to adopt the Fundations program for phonics instruction, which will be rolled out in grades K and 1 for the 2023-24 school year. Parents were informed about the new program at Back-to-School Nights. PK will continue to use Lively Letters a multisensory program, with a strong speech component that we have found to be extremely effective for introducing letter sounds.
Gr. 2 Social Studies Update

Faculty Participants: Kate O’Toole and Susan Doering

Second-grade teachers Kate O’Toole and Susan Doering began the process of updating their social studies curriculum, which is part of a schoolwide review. The kindergarten and first-grade curriculums have been updated thus far. The goal of the updates is to ensure that all strands of elementary social studies (geography, history, culture, civics, and economics) are covered in appropriate depth. Step one of this process involved referencing the MA State Standards and the National Council for Social Studies standards, researching commercial programs, and reading K and 1 maps. Areas for revisions were identified and work will continue throughout the school year.
Math Scope & Sequence Refresh
Faculty Participants: Regina Barrett & Tom Doering

Math Coordinator Regina Barrett and Math Instructor Tom Doering fine-tuned and re-wrote portions of the math scope and sequence in grades 1-3. With new teachers in several grades and curriculum reviews on hold during COVID, it was important to have an up-to-date scope and sequence to guide instruction. The goal of the refined scope & sequence is to help teachers deliver a cohesive math curriculum that highlights the most important concepts and allows time for more projects, games, and hands-on activities.
The following topics were reviewed:
- Current units and timelines
- The match between scope & sequence skills and report checklists
- Telling time units were moved up to the first half of the year in grades 1-3.
- Pacing calendars were created and shared with homeroom teams, and learning & enrichment specialists during opening meetings week.
Revising the Grade 4 Writing Curriculum

Faculty Participants: Leigh Nesky and Lauren DeLisle

The fourth-grade teachers revised the scope and sequence of the writing curriculum with a focus on building writing skills through the writing process rather than teaching the skills through writing projects. Their research included a review of professional resources and the 3rd and 5th-grade maps to ensure alignment. For each writing unit, they outlined the goals, objectives, essential questions, content, and skills. They also considered technology integration and added mini-lessons, learning activities, and assessments.

The vision statement they crafted reflects the goals of the writing program. The vision for literacy work, specifically writing, is for children to become lifelong writers who display agency and independence in their endeavors. We aim to show students how to use writing to improve themselves and their communities. In addition to creative writing, the fourth-grade units begin to familiarize students with the genres they will regularly encounter throughout school—thesis-driven persuasive essays, literary essays, and research writing. Each unit begins where the students are and then provides a progression of instruction that brings students step by step toward increasing proficiency. Unit goals reflect each phase of the writing process and include planning, drafting, revising, and editing skills. The writing curriculum sequence also considers interdisciplinary connections and is aligned with Tenacre units in social studies and other subjects.
Reworking Curriculum Maps
Faculty Participants: Katie Dubenetsky and Rebecca Goddard

As a new teaching team, third-grade teachers Katie Dubenetsky and Rebecca Goddard have worked to revise units of study. Instead of simply updating maps as required, they used their summer grant to conduct a complete review of the existing maps, which included revisions and the creation of new maps in several subjects. While working on new maps together, Katie & Rebecca were able to reflect on their existing curriculum and make important updates.
Some specific work on the maps that reflect classroom instruction include:
- Creating a Social Thinking Curriculum Map
- Re-mapping language arts so the map was more complete and easy to follow; dividing up the scope and sequence by individual skills and adding resources and assessments to each.
- Adding a year-long math facts unit to the math map
- Dividing reading maps by units based on lessons and novels; linking all new teaching materials in Google Drive for every novel unit.
Yoga for Young Children

Faculty Participant: Melissa Roper

In addition to technology teaching, Certified Fitness and Wellness Instructor Melissa Roper will teach the once-a-week yoga classes for kindergarten and pre-kindergarteners (beginning in January) this year. To prepare for this new teaching assignment, Melissa researched best practices and met with instructors of youth programs. The result of this work is a dynamic introduction to Yoga and mindfulness for young students. Melissa aims to make lessons playful and fun while improving students’ balance, strength, and focus. The benefits of Yoga instruction are well documented. More than just a game: Yoga for Young Children/ harvard.edu