St. Stephen's Lower Elementary

St. Stephen’s Episcopal School Houston is a Montessori-based early childhood to middle years school based in the heart of Montrose. VideoEnvy has been the school’s video production partner for the past several years.

Transcript:

[MUSIC PLAYING] Ready, 'sghetti?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

OK. Lower elementary is first through third grade. That can mean kids ages 6 to 9, although there have been times when we've had 5-year-olds and 10-year-olds. So it really is a spectrum.

We say that in lower elementary you start as learning to read, and you leave reading to learn. So one of the things that I think is the coolest is the way that we parse our grammar. We have these symbols for each part of speech. And it's kind of like really fun Mad Libs. Nice work.

So the students relate identifying parts of speech to these symbols that they learn. When they read a sentence, so they can, we say "symbolize it" because we think that when you identify parts of speech and you're aware of that, that helps you with your writing skills, too.

For first-graders, we have little boxes that have nouns, articles, adjectives. And then they do little works with that.

That's beautiful.

I think it helps because they realize that each word has a function, has a purpose. And then by knowing that function and purpose, they become fantastic writers. And they realize that just by moving these sentences around, moving these words around, you can take something really simple and make it really complex or interesting. By the time that they're leaving us, we're taking those parts of speech, and we're learning how to sentence diagram.

A compound word.

Rhee.

Can you say "compound word"?

Compound word.

Awesome. Word study is another big part of what we do. So we learn everything from alphabetizing, compound words, plurals, possessives. And then it gets a little more fancy, and we start working on suffixes and prefixes and how those changed spelling patterns, and really get into etymology of words, too. We teach individual lessons to introduce a concept. And then once the concept has been introduced, the child begins to work through that concept.

I like a lot of stuff about St. Stephen's. I like that we get to do a lot of more fun stuff than just sitting in a plastic chair doing the same thing at the same time.

One of the benefits we have in Montessori is that you have the multi-age grouping. So this benefit helps with intrinsic motivation. When the young children come into this classroom, you already have older children who are already reading.

We used to have this teacher here who is also a college professor. And she said, gosh, the kids here can manage their work better than my college students can. And I wish they had learned this way.

It's a guide. It's like an outline. So these are the works that you need to complete within the week. This is what your week looks like. These are how many times we expect you to complete that work.

And that could be different for each kid, right? A first-grader's expectation is going to be different than a third-grader. And even third-graders could have different expectations.

I like it very much because the teachers let you do what you want sometimes. And they don't, like, say, you already finished all your work, so now you can't do any more work. So you can do as much work as you want as long as you have more time.

I would describe the learning atmosphere at St. Stephen's as joyful.

Yeah.

I so often see kids excited to be here and excited about lessons. How many kids go to school and hate it? And they love being here. They want to be here.

[CHUCKLES] [AUDIO LOGO]