- Hours: Monday – Thursday
- PreK-8th: 8:30a -4:30p
- Hours: Friday
- PreK-8th: 8:30a – 1:00p
- All grade levels will be departmentalized
- Report cards will be sent home every nine weeks
- Progress reports will be sent home every 4.5 weeks
Parental involvement can lead to academic gains for scholars, such as higher grades and test scores, improved social skills and time on task, better attendance and participation, and decreased behavioral problems in the classroom (Tutt, 2021).
The expectation is that teachers and parents will communicate weekly via Classtag or a class newsletter.
RESPONSIBILITY • INTELLECTUAL INVESTMENT • SERVICE • EXCELLENCE
- Responsibility – Highest standards of performance
- Intellectual Investment – Inquiry, personal growth, and achievement
- Service – Change agents and a spirit of selflessness
- Excellence – High-quality and exemplary results
The Essence Prep Learner Profile represents six attributes (V-I-T-A-L-S) that are part of the mission and vision of our campus. We know these attributes will allow our scholars to become leading agents of change within their communities by helping them to discover who they are as individuals.
- Values: EPPS students will be able to internalize the core values of Essence and align them with their personal values so that they can become global citizens.
- Interests: EPPS students will be able to feel safe and excited about exploring their interests and then using those interests to serve others and their community.
- Temperament: EPPS students will be able to discover their temperament and how it has an impact on various situations they encounter. This will allow them to be able to respond to each situation that fits who they are as individuals.
- Activities: EPPS students will engage in a variety of activities that will help them to develop critical thinking and social skills.
- Life Goals: EPPS students will work daily towards goals that they have set for themselves. Each student will work towards that goal with the assistance of an Essence Prep staff member.
- Strengths: EPPS Students will utilize their strengths and talents to discover the world around them. Their strengths will support harnessing a sense of agency in each student so that they are able to take on the world.
Essence Prep Mission
Essence Preparatory Public School, through rigorous academics, intentional character development, and cultivating student knowledge of self, prepares all kindergarten through eighth grade students for high school, college, and beyond as leading agents of change in their communities.
Curriculum resources at Essence Prep were chosen based around our school mission to prepare every kindergartener through eighth grade scholar for high school, college, and beyond as leading agents of change in their communities. Our curriculum is aligned horizontally (across content areas) and vertically (across grade levels) to the TEKS standards.
Scholars need literacy in order to engage with the written word in everyday life and it plays a vital role in transforming scholars into socially engaged citizens. Literacy at Essence Prep will focus on supporting scholars by providing them with ways to learn about and understand the world by working with them on and enhancing their literacy skills to benefit them in the future.
- Reading: Amplify Reading is a K–8 student-driven literacy program that provides both enrichment and remediation for all students, leveraging the power of compelling storytelling to engage students in personalized reading instruction and practice.
- Writing: Creating classroom experiences that develop a love of writing and allow children to express their thinking requires thoughtful, intentional instruction. Amplify provides multiple opportunities for students to practice their writing skills. Teachers facilitate student discussion, provide a model for the respectful exchange of ideas, and help students develop their own voices via the Amplify Writing Framework.
- Making Meaning: Watching students learn to read: magic. Knowing how they get there: science. Amplify CKLA is grounded in the science of reading, bringing those researched insights and proven practices into your classrooms (remote or otherwise).
Mathematics gives students access to important mathematical ideas, knowledge and skills. Numeracy at Essence Prep will focus on connecting their learning with their personal lives. Numeracy has an increasingly important role in enabling and sustaining cultural, social, economic and technological advances.
- Daily opportunities for formative assessment (i.e., Check for Understanding (CFU), Exit Tickets).
- Checklists to track information about the Mathematical Practices and about Benchmarks that can best be assessed via observation (K-5).
- Quick checks in the form of quizzes every 8-10 sessions that familiarize students with a variety of test question formats (1-5).
- Embedded assessments that ask students to show and/or explain their work (1-5).
- Teacher Notes that accompany the embedded assessments, and provide analysis of student work that meets, partially meets, or doesn’t yet meet the benchmark, as well as suggestions for what to do with students in the latter two categories.
- Excellence in mathematics education requires equity—high expectations and strong support for all students.
- A curriculum is more than a collection of activities: it must be coherent, focused on important mathematics, and well-articulated across the grades
- Effective mathematics teaching requires understanding what students know and need to learn and then challenging and supporting them to learn it well.
- Students must learn mathematics with understanding, actively building new knowledge from experience and prior knowledge.
- Assessment should support the learning of important mathematics and furnish useful information to both teachers and students.
- Technology is essential in teaching and learning mathematics; it influences the mathematics that is taught and enhances students’ learning
- Most lessons have some combination of activity-specific intervention, extension, and/or ELL suggestions.
- An Intervention, Practice, and Extension block at the end of the day in which additional lessons and activities will be given to support the learning needs of our scholars
Caring School Community is a comprehensive, research-based social and emotional learning (SEL) program that builds school-wide community, develops students’ social skills and SEL competencies, and enables a transformative stance on discipline.
- Relationships matter
- Comprehensive leadership guidance
- A unique stance on discipline
- Creating calm, orderly learning environments
- Addressing inequitable discipline practices