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When you walk into the K12 Cluster, what can you expect to see?

• Students in same age & mixed age classrooms.
• Student projects that are open ended and welcome family guidance. 
• Students learning to read and write within an integrated curriculum.
• Students accessing differentiated materials to meet unique learning needs. 
• Students receiving services both inside and outside the classroom for special education, english language services and social-emotional health. 
• Students working on small multi-age teams collaborating as they solve problems and work through assignments and/or projects.
• Students attending visual arts, integrated arts, PE and library.
• Students participating in dance, singing and theater during a performance term. 
• Students doing a performance based on their studies for that year. 
• Students working on teams, but learning how to appreciate everyones gifts and negotiate differences when they arrive. 
• Students taking leadership roles on their teams in second grade to support their younger teammates. 
• Students getting asked lots of questions and being given time to talk so their thinking drives the learning.
• Parents volunteering in the classroom, with the performance and on field trips.
• Teachers taking a team approach to working with students and planning. 
• Counselors coming in to do weekly lessons on social-emotional well being and health.
• Big Kids in 345 & 678 coming to visit and learn with the K12 students.

At Odyssey, we function on a 3 year themed curriculum cycle. This is different than a traditional neighborhood school, where all kids study the same topics at each grade level. We do this due to our mixed-age classrooms. This may mean one of your kids may do a specific project in Kindergarten, yet a sibling may do it in Second Grade. While our themes rotate on a three-year cycle, our math classes are grade level specific in most cases. 

Time & Space is the Big Theme and it is broken into three one year segments:

Beginning with a comparative study of Families at Home in their Portland neighborhoods and Families Around the World, students will begin to develop an international perspective. As students gain an understanding of the social rules governing family life, and learn how families interact with their environment, they will increase their knowledge of self. The educational approach will help students develop social interaction skills, participate, and make decisions. 

Next, students will study and compare Communities at Home and Communities Around the World, learning how people organize social, political, and economic institutions to meet basic human needs by focusing on the production and distribution of goods. 

The basic social science concepts of change, location, diversity, justice, power, and trade-offs will be introduced through concrete applications in our comparative studies of Societies in the United States and Societies Around the World. These units will focus on the key features of societies past and present, and will be examined to provide in-depth study of those societies. 

K12 Homework Expectations

We know homework provides students an opporunity to practice skills and share their learning with family. In K12 we assign a small amount of homework, such as reading a book from small group or working on a project. The homework load in K12 is very small as we want to make sure the majority of our students afternoons are filled with time playing outside, being with friends and family and exploring! 

Homework Guidelines? 

• 10 minutes – Kindergarten? 
• 15 minutes – 1st Grade? 
• 20 minutes – 2nd Grade 

k12curriculum.pdf