Learning Support

Educators in Orchard's learning support program offer a comprehensive diagnostic and prescriptive approach to an educationally diverse population at The Orchard School. Identification, assessment, intervention, and consultation services are offered to students, parents, and other teachers.

Elementary School learning support services in language arts are available from preschool through fourth grade, and in math from first through fourth grades. Learning support teachers partner with classroom teachers to teach, support students, and to model and differentiate instruction.

Delivery of services in language arts includes the use of programs, approaches, and methods that help raise students' competency in one or more of the following areas: phoneme awareness, decoding, spelling, oral and written language expression, vocabulary, comprehension, organizing and sequence, auditory/visual motor and spatial processing, and meta-linguistic skills. Math learning support also provides varied approaches and methods to teach quantitative concepts and problem solving, as well as strategies to learn computation and other math applications.

In Middle School, learning support instruction focuses on meeting the needs of students through a combination of remediation and support, design and implementation of accommodations, and modifications of overall curriculum as necessary. Individual and small group instruction ("Boost") primarily provides specific skill instruction in reading, oral and written expression, comprehension, and higher order thinking, as well as guided study time, monitoring, and "coaching "(social and academic.)