Kim BrattainFounder/ CEO, Kim Brattain Media · Award-winning Corporate and Documentary Film Producer

Charlotte Country Day School - Literacy v1 - Sherry Harris| School Promotional Video

21 Apr 2023 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

2:00

The video features a faculty member (Sherry Harris) describing Charlotte Country Day School’s early literacy curriculum from junior kindergarten through fourth grade. It emphasizes a community‑focused approach where students are introduced as readers and writers early on. In junior kindergarten, children develop phonological awareness and learn that letters have meaning. First‑grade students embark on "detective missions" to explore word structure, focusing on vowels and phonics. In second through fourth grades, the program builds on this foundation with increasingly sophisticated comprehension work and writing units that guide students to author both nonfiction and fiction books. Throughout, the speaker underscores the school’s caring community, involving parents, faculty, and students, and highlights thoughtful instruction as a hallmark of the school’s culture.

Chapters

Country Day is a place that students really learn how to become lifelong learners, and we begin as early as junior kindergarten with the students knowing that they are readers, they are writers. They're focusing on being able to take letters and sounds and figure out, oh my gosh, print has meaning.
I like apples.
In first grade, they get to go on a mission and they become detectives, and so they are trying to figure out how words work, and they figure out that there are these vowels in the middle, and what do we do with those? So they go on special missions and they do detective work to figure out more about the actual word work.
I knew it!
We work a lot in those early years on phonological awareness and phonics instruction, and then that carries them to now we really need to also develop that even further and develop the comprehension skills. And so 2nd grade, 3rd, and 4th, a lot of the writing units really focus on them being able to write books, and they write both nonfiction and fiction books. As readers, they're going deeper.
I, England, itch. Oh, good, you remember itchy, itchy, itch. That's our hand seal because that's in our special vows.
This one's bear. Ready? As a student and as a faculty member and as a parent of 2 Country Day grads that started here in kindergarten, that Country Day is a community that cares so much about each and every individual child and each and every member, the parents of that community, the faculty of that community, and it's shown in the thoughtfulness of how we instruct students and how we build community within this space.
Today is going to be a happy day.