St. Louis King of France Catholic School seeks to provide opportunities for all students through the use of various methodologies, programs, activities, interventions, and assessments.
Teachers utilize the most current and effective trends in teaching strategies. Due to the increasing diversity of students in the classroom today, the shift in education has moved from how teachers should teach to how students can learn. The trend in recent years is toward a heterogeneous grouping of students with a curriculum including activities that promote learning through a multi-disciplinary approach. SLKF strives to keep classroom sizes small so that teachers are able to present information to students in ways that best suit their learning needs. SLKF teachers may teach the same lesson in smaller groups of auditory learners, visual learners, etc. Differentiated instruction is a key component of SLKF’s curriculum.
Teacher practices at SLKF strongly support student-initiated learning. Students have many opportunities to complete independent projects in a variety of courses at all grade levels. These include mock elections during political campaigns, authoring/illustrating/publishing their own book, participating in SLKF’s unique Louisiana Project, family trees, oral histories, recipe booklets, reports, poems, prayers, personal journals, essays, posters, banners, games, models, Mardi Gras floats, independent work on science projects and inventions for exhibit, as well as lab experiments using the discovery method. Peer editing is widely used in creative writing assignments and student publications. Students become involved in decisions regarding their learning experiences by choosing topics for research papers, creative writings, some reading assignments, and scheduling of tests. This allows for individualism and decision-making training.
Cooperative learning techniques are employed in Pre-Kindergarten through seventh grade. Students work in small heterogeneous groups, empowering them to perform a group task. This type of learning is evident in the classroom during activities that include problem-solving, story analysis, creative writing, oral presentations, plays, experimentation, hands-on science lab activities, art projects, and the use of the library and internet to gather information for assignments.
Each school year, sixth-grade students attend the Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, and the seventh-grade students are given an opportunity to enjoy a 5 day trip to Washington, D.C. These trips are intended to engage students in real-life experiences of what they learned in the classroom. SLKF strives to teach students in the classroom while ensuring they can apply that knowledge in the real world.