Curriculum
Many parents over the years have been both pleased and amazed at how much their children have learned in their years at Winchester School. In this CURRICULUM section, I am telling you both what we teach and often how we teach various subjects. Since parents have shown great interest in the what and the how of our curriculum, I hope I will not put you to sleep by the length and the detail of the curriculum section. Read as much or as little as you choose! But by reading about all that we teach and seeing how rich the curriculum is, you will learn very quickly why children become very accomplished in academics at Winchester School.
i. Language Arts
Schools that prioritize the teaching of reading and writing are truly giving the greatest gift possible to their children.
If there is any single “academic heart” of Winchester School, it is the language arts program. We want children to understand and to believe that learning to read and to write is one of life’s great journeys. For future academic success and for a lifetime of pleasure, fluent reading and comprehension and good writing skills are essential. Schools that prioritize reading and writing are truly giving the greatest gift possible to their children.
Pre-kindergarten
At Winchester, we begin that journey with our three-year-old children. You must give young children in school a lot of wholesome and fun “wiggle room”, but at the same time they have an amazing ability to focus, to understand, and to enjoy somewhat theoretical academic matters. We begin by saying that each letter in the alphabet makes a sound – its own sound – just the way an animal makes its own sound. “Tell me, does a cow ever say “meow”? 
Or does a cat say “bow-wow”? (Much protesting and laughing!) “So we first have to learn what each letter says when it “talks”. Later, we start putting letters together to make words – 2 letters, 5, 8, 12, maybe even 20! Finally, words go together to make a sentence, and a whole bunch of sentences go together to make all the stories that you love so much. At first, Mommy and Daddy and your teachers read those stories to you, but after while you can read them ALL BY YOURSELF!”
We use the Phonovisual phonics method, developed by the founders of The Primary Day School in Bethesda, a school that turns out excellent readers and writers at an early age. The 3-year-old children “learn” the consonant chart (they say, “I can do the chart!”) “Doing it” means they learn the name of each consonant, the sound it makes, and the key word which begins with that consonant. They learn to trace over dotted lower case and capital letters as well as their own first name. They also sometimes trace over the key words of the consonant chart. Parents can follow the progress of their child and can reinforce the language arts work at home by the weekly homework folders that come home.
Learning to listen for a sound at the beginning and ending of a word is very important. To think of a word on their own with a certain beginning consonant is a stretch for 3-year-olds, but as they mature they are able to. A 3-year-old boy who was playing with Legos at the end of classtime one day looked up from the floor and said, “Mrs. Rhim, “Lego” starts with “l” and so does my “leg”! Obviously, the “l” lesson that day had carried over into playtime! Every teacher’s dream!
Having many library books in the three-year-old classroom for the children to look at and reading a variety of stories to them – classic, contemporary, ethnic, fables, fairy tales, poetry – is a vital part of the language arts program.
The four-year-old children continue beyond the work they had in the three-year-old program with more advanced phonetic work with the consonant chart, but they have now been prepared to take the next important step in phonetics, writing, and preparation for reading. After a thorough review and more in-depth work with the consonants, the short sounds of several vowels are introduced. With the short “a” (as in “apple”), we show the children how to combine the vowel with beginning and ending consonants to make a 3 or 4-letter word. By late January they begin to read a small book with short “a” words and continue reading small books containing other short vowel phonetic words. Tracing over dotted letters in the 3-year-old program has now evolved in the 4-year-old program into free-hand writing of all the alphabet letters, both capital and lower case. Words go together to make sentences, and we show the children this by beginning to write very simple 2, 3, and 4-word sentences.
Kindergarten
The Kindergarten language arts program is the culmination of two years of work in phonetics, writing, and beginning reading in the Pre-K. And the children fly! In two years there has been the obvious and significant brain development that occurs when 3-year-olds become 5-year-olds. That mental and physical development plus the language arts groundwork laid carefully and systematically in the Pre-K program now pay off. 
The children are already reading, and they now progress through a series of increasingly more advanced books containing advanced phonetics: consonant blends (br, sm, cl, st, etc.); double vowels (ai, ea, oo, ie, etc.); silent letters (ough, knee, the final silent “e” in “like”, “plate”, “note”, “cute”, etc.) Kindergartners love to spout phonetic rules, or any type of rule, for that matter, and their ability to apply them and “sound out” new words as they meet them is by now very good. But all English words are not phonetic, and we must teach children the difference between “sound words” and “sight words”, a distinction which leads quite naturally into spelling practice.
By kindergarten, the children understand the progression from individual sounds to the formation of words, to a complete sentence, and finally a group of sentences. Together, teacher and children learn “to write” a very simple story or a “book report”. Small exercises in writing can now begin. And as the children are able to read ever more complicated stories, checking for the degree of comprehension of what is being read becomes increasingly important.
First Grade and Second Grade
In Pre-K and in Kindergarten, the emphasis in the language arts program is on phonetics or “decoding and encoding” as it is sometimes described. In the middle half of the 4-year-old Pre-K program, the children do start reading in very simple phonetic books. In the Kindergarten, the children read through books of ever-increasing difficulty, both in advanced phonetic principles and in content. In the second semester of the Kindergarten year and especially in the First and Second Grades, comprehension of what has been read, the quality of what they read, and the types of literature the children are exposed to all become increasingly more and more important.
We are following the Core Knowledge curriculum which is rich in quality literature, history, geography, and science books that children from an early age should use as reading material. In addition to reading the fiction as outlined in Core Knowledge, we will use Core Knowledge, Open Court, and National Geographic materials for the non-fiction part of the language arts program, particularly books with science, history, and geography themes. Cooperation between the language arts teacher and the science and social studies teacher will enhance both of those curricular areas.
The first poetry children usually know are the Mother Goose rhymes and small poems with childhood themes written by poets such as Robert Louis Stevenson, A.A. Milne, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Christina Rossetti, Edward Lear, etc. Reading POETRY is, therefore, an important part of the First and Second Grade language arts curriculum. Fiction
which features FAIRY TALES and FOLKTALES from all over the world; AESOP’S FABLES; and American FOLK HEROES and TALL TALES such as Johnny Appleseed, Casey Jones, Paul Bunyon, etc. are read. Stories from the MYTHOLOGY of ancient Greece are introduced in these grades and often become favorites of the children. SAYINGS or PROVERBS from our culture are often used to initiate small compositions which explain the meaning of the proverb. LITERARY TERMS such as limerick, myth, fable, author, illustrator, plot, biography, autobiography, etc. are studied. BIOGRAPHIES of famous people such as scientists, artists, musicians, authors, sports figures, presidents, etc. are read by the children in these grades. More and more the children are becoming very independent readers and developing their own personal tastes in what they like to read, but what they read is carefully thought out and orchestrated by wise, educated teachers and parents. And all of this independent reading by the child never supplants the continuing reading to children by their teachers and parents. In school (and at home, too!) reading “chapter books”, a chapter at a time, brings great pleasure to child and adult alike. These are hours your child will never forget, nor will you!
COMPOSITION at this level involves the beginning work in GRAMMAR (what is a sentence? how is it different from a non-sentence? what do we mean by the “subject” of the sentence? and by the “predicate” or “verb”?) and the study of the many RULES OF GOOD WRITING. VOCABULARY study is increasingly important in these grades; and SPELLING, of course, continues to be learned.
We very much like the Core Knowledge curriculum in language arts and in all the other academic areas because of its wonderful richness and completeness and its unmistakable classical nature.