Penn Explorer – Jumping A

Goal

This course will focus on language arts abilities such as reading, writing, listening, and speaking, with an emphasis on evidence-based analysis. Fifth-grade students will be exposed to a wide range of genres and media formats in order to increase their comprehension of literature and informative texts. Communication skills will be developed through oral and written expression and embedded vocabulary acquisition and use. This course will allow students to develop strategies and skills needed to be successful in all academic areas.

Object

Students at 10 years old

Course outline

Curriculum

This course follows the Common Core State Standards for the fifth-grade English program, taught in the United States.

Teaching staff

Penn Academy has a team of passionate and commited teachers who who are always eager to assist the young Vietnamese generation on their development journey. The native and Vietnamese teachers at Penn Academy all have teaching degrees that meet international standards and have many years of experience working with, and teaching English to children.

Form of learning

In addition to its lessons at the center, Penn Academy will run online classes through the Penn E-Learning system. The system has a user-friendly interface and numerous advanced features that allow students to easily communicate with teachers, use free online storage, and save lessons, among other functions.

Teaching model

The teaching and learning strategies provide teachers with models for developing learning materials for their students, which can be adapted and used in other contexts and curriculum areas.

Vocabulary building: This strategy focuses a portion of each classroom session on building a better vocabulary. Teachers invite students to point out unfamiliar words, cover meanings in class, and use interactive vocabulary-building exercises related to the class’s reading material.

Writer’s workshop: The writing workshop model allows students to learn about and take part in all aspects of the writing process; such as drafting, revision, editing, and publishing.

Peer response and editing: A valuable teaching strategy. Students are given the opportunity to analyze others’ writing and see the results their classmates got from a writing assignment. In addition, teachers observe how different students learn and what strategies are the most effective.

Cooperative learning: Cooperative learning tasks students with discussing a piece of literature in small groups. By allowing the students to engage in meaningful discussion, they begin to learn to analyze literature and engage in an educational process that they can take full ownership of. Students have found this to be a more engaging strategy than most traditional methods.

Student-chosen texts: Allowing students to choose their own reading materials is a strategy that literacy specialists recommend as a way to develop lifelong readers. Students select material from an age and reading level appropriate book library. Following a time of solo reading, students form book club-style groups and discuss what they’ve read, followed by reflection. When successfully applied, students dive deeply into the meaning of the text, develop critical thinking, and engage in debate with their classmates about the text they selected.