Each classroom has a telephone with voice mail for easy communication between home and school. The technology is used by the students for projects and discovery, as well as homework, class assignments and communication. Students' work can be viewed in their individual portfolios via the Common. The possibilities are endless. By the end of the Junior Academy, students have learned to apply their arithmetic skills to real-world applications and to conquer problems involving all sorts of numbers, different wordings, or new contexts.
Every student receives reading and writing instruction for ninety minutes everyday.
The Junior Academy writing-language arts curriculum promotes a writer's workshop approach to writing and language arts instruction. As students become more discerning readers, they also develop their own criteria for evaluating written text. Teachers emphasize the revision stage of the writing process, so that students can see how the act of writing clarifies their thinking. In the History program students explore the diverse worlds of antiquity, through the middle ages, into the Age of Exploration and then begin the study U.S. History. In the first year, study focuses on the early civilizations of Sumer, Egypt, China and India, and Classical Greece and Rome.