Introduction to Environmental Sciences

All students at Dekalb Academy of Technology and Environment learn about the natural world in their classrooms, but our highly trained faculty and staff enrich the curriculum with frequent trips into the outdoors.  Each excursion into the environment is focused on enhancing and providing depth to classroom lessons. Our goal is to guide our students to become responsible stewards of the environment and to develop and appreciation for the natural world.

I hope that this has been helpful in summarizing what we have to offer next year. Remember, this is a limited review of the programs and procedures under way. During the beginning of school, you will have an opportunity to explore many new programs and highlights of the academy. We look forward to seeing all of you the next school year. Our aim is to ensure that your standards as well as our standards are achieved with excellence, commitment, and pride!

FOSS Science Program

The FOSS program is correlated to human cognitive development. The activities are matched to the way students think at different times in their lives. The research that guides the FOSS developers indicates that humans proceed systematically through predictable, describable years, and that students learn science best from direct experiences in which they describe, sort, and organize observations about objects and organisms. Upper elementary students construct more advanced concepts by classifying, testing, experimenting, and determining cause and effect relationships among objects, organisms, and systems.

FOSS investigations are carefully crafted to guarantee that the cognitive demands placed on students are appropriate for their cognitive abilities. Developmental appropriateness and in-depth exposure to the subject matter with multiple experiences give FOSS its “horizontal curriculum” character (numerous activities that provide a great variety of experiences at a cognitive level) as opposed to a “vertical curriculum” design (activities that attempt to take students to inappropriately complex and abstract levels of understanding). A horizontal curriculum provides challenges for all students and results in a much deeper understanding of the subject.