Academics
New Life Christian School recognizes children as people made in God’s image who are intended to learn about and make use of the world. Our goal is to lay a foundation of academic learning to enable our students to thrive into adulthood. We strive to prepare our students to enter 1st grade anywhere upon completion of our program.
We believe students need knowledge and skills to succeed. We help our students develop their fine-motor skills such as cutting, gluing, drawing, and writing. They will also learn skills such as working with groups, taking turns, and listening to directions. Basic social and work skills are developed throughout our program in a variety of ways including crafts, unstructured play, and classroom routines.
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Academically, our 3’s will learn to write their first names along with 50% of the alphabet and the numbers 1-10. They will work on colors, shapes, and more!
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Our 4’s class, meeting three days weekly, will learn to write their first and last names, recognize and write the entire alphabet, and will recognize and write their numbers 1-20 along with much more.
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The daily PreK class will prepare students for kindergarten according to the standards set by Oregon and described in Oregon’s Early Learning and Kindergarten Guidelines. Our program exceeds these guidelines and, with the help of parents at home, will allow children to transition successfully to kindergarten.
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Our daily kindergarten class prepares students for 1st grade. We exceed Oregon standards for what is to be accomplished in a kindergarten as outline in Oregon’s Early Learning and Kindergarten Guidelines. Our 5’s class uses kindergarten curriculum from Son Life which teaches reading, writing, history, geography, science, and math.
Our three preschool classes all work from a theme-based curriculum. Examples of our weekly themes include: Nature – Historical People – Creation – Christmas – Around the World – Much More!
Beginning in the 2024/25 school year, we will emphasize eight categories of virtue at NLCS. Following the long tradition of Christian teaching on virtue, we will emphasize humility, love, faith, hope, fortitude, prudence, justice, and self-control. These virtues bring together clusters of character traits which we will teach and model in age-appropriate ways. Fortitude, for example, brings together perseverance, courage, patience, and endurance. Humility brings together compassion, sympathy, service, and peacemaking. We will read stories which emphasize these various traits, praise them in students, talk about them during lessons, and model them as teachers. Preschool students may not be able to pronounce “prudence,” but they can take steps toward becoming wise, discerning, and thoughtful people!