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Academics & Enrichment

Academics & Enrichment

We are a community of educators, scholars, parents and staff working together to inspire high academic achievement among all students, serve their needs, challenge their minds, and enrich their lives, laying a foundation for success and participation in a democratic society.

Language Arts
At Oak Knoll, students are engaging in Writing Workshop in every classroom with the Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP) curriculum. The entire staff has received coaching with staff developers from Teacher's College at Columbia University in teaching this workshop model. Students K-5 develop their skills as writers across the Narrative, Opinion and Informational genres. To ensure fairness and consistency across all classrooms, our teachers regularly collaborate to calibrate their writing scoring. 

In reading, every teacher spends time fostering the love of reading. We recognize that it is of the utmost importance to provide students books of interest at their independent reading level, along with time to read every day. We are incredibly fortunate to have a gifted librarian who excels at matching the perfect books to individual kids' interests and needs.

We teach the explicit skills for phonemic awareness, phonics, and decoding skills to address the needs of the emergent reader; as part of this daily focus, our K-3 teachers explicitly teach the Heggerty Bridge to Reading program with the K-2 focus on phonemic awareness. Students move from learning to read in our K-3 program to reading to learn in grades 3, 4 and 5. Students K-5 must be able to read narrative and expository text fluently and accurately. They must recognize increasingly complex words, analyze idioms, analogies, and metaphors to infer literal and figurative meaning.

Oak Knoll provides a powerful early intervention program for students at risk of failure in reading. We have reading teachers to provide one-on-one and small group remedial instruction for students who are identified by their teachers as needing extra support beyond the support provided by the teachers in the classroom.


Mathematics

Mathematics is a subject of beauty and elegance, exciting in its logic and coherence. It trains the mind to be analytic - providing a foundation for intelligent and precise thinking (Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools, 1999).

Our math curriculum intentionally articulated to build year after year, ensuring a seamless progression of skills as students advance through the grades. We have adopted the Math Expressions curriculum for our K-5 classes. Math Expressions is common core aligned, and gives students an opportunity to make sense of math through drawings, conceptual language, and real-world examples. Students have opportunities to explore and discuss their thinking around mathematical problem-solving. To support this learning students may have added practice at home to work on developing and practicing skills in an age-appropriate way.

Looking ahead, we are currently engaged in a math adoption process with the district office and look forward to introducing a new curriculum for the 2027-2028 school year.

Often you will find our mathematicians engaged in hands-on early numeracy in K-2 and complex problem-solving in all grades. As part of this foundational work, our students engage in Counting Collections from TK through grade 2. This hands-on practice allows them to actively develop counting and cardinality, one-to-one correspondence, and early number sense through groupings and multiplication concepts.

Our students and teachers work together to understand how numbers relate to each other and the real world. We know that building a strong foundation for number sense, deep understanding, and fluency with number facts-rather than rushing to the next step-is directly correlated with higher student proficiency in mathematics in the long run.

Specialist Support
A number of specialists provide programs and/or remedial instruction to support students at Oak Knoll:

  • English Language Development Specialist - If English is a second language, students are assessed to determine their English comprehension levels and fluency. For those children who have language needs, the English Language Development Specialists and the classroom teacher develop an intensive language development program.
  • Speech and Language Pathologist - The Speech and Language Pathologist provides instruction for students who present articulation or language development delays.
  • Psychologist- The school psychologist works with our general education and special education team to support students, teachers, and families to support students' learning in the classroom, as well as providing testing and accommodations.
  • Counselor - The school counselor leads our social-emotional learning, and is responsible for our school theme and related service projects. She teaches every class monthly, leads student groups, and supports teachers with the implementation of Oak Knoll's Restorative Practices.