Each day St. Michael’s ushers in a world of incredible possibilities for our Lower School students. Through small class sizes and an emphasis on personal care for the individual student, our Lower School program helps establish the roots and foundational competencies for lifelong learning.
I was so grateful for the community provided by St. Michael’s. I knew our children were in an academically challenging yet caring and nurturing environment. The faculty wanted each child to succeed and achieve their goals.”
Our Teachers
St. Michael’s Lower School is committed to upholding high academic expectations. Our best asset, aside from our students, is our highly educated, caring and professional team of educators. Our teachers truly know each of their students and maintain those relationships as students grow. This gives kids a sense of belonging and promotes success by identifying areas of growth and supporting their individual strengths.
A Dynamic Lower School Program
Teachers and students are able to forge authentic, lasting relationships in this supportive environment that ultimately maximize student potential. Grade-level classroom teachers oversee curriculum, instruction, and assessment for language arts, mathematics, social studies, and life skills. This Lower School ‘core’ curriculum in grades TK-4 is enriched through the study of specials classes—including music and art, science and STEM, physical education, and Spanish language.
Lower School Students
Average Class Size
Student to Teacher Ratio
Median Years Teacher Tenure
Transitional Kindergarten
Transitional Kindergarten at St. Michael’s School represents the first year of a two-year Kindergarten experience. The program serves our youngest learners on campus, children who do not yet meet the age requirement to begin Kindergarten (five years old by or before September 1) as well as children who are age-eligible for Kindergarten but who may benefit from extra time and support for school readiness.
Strong Development and Foundational Academics
The primary goals of TK are to promote strong social-emotional development, oral language development, and foundational academics. Multiple opportunities for purposeful play are an important part of the daily routine. Students have supervised free time inside and outside of the classroom. Student-initiated work is balanced with teacher-directed learning experiences that are shorter in length and infused with integrated learning and movement.
Early Literacy Skills
Early literacy skills will be introduced through exposure to Heggerty Literacy curriculum. Students will also receive enrichment activities through our specials curriculum, including physical education, art, music, science and STEM, and Spanish. Children will also spend time once a week participating in chapel and Mass with the St. Michael’s Lower School students to encourage and build a sense of community and belonging.
Kindergarten
Our abiding goal for Kindergarten is to create a safe, supportive environment where each student feels engaged and encouraged to reach their full potential. We emphasize and focus on building independence, developing social skills, and increasing stamina through a full-day program (i.e., seven hours) of fun and engaging learning experiences.
The Academic Day
The academic day includes reading, math, writing, and various explorations in history and geography. We use National Geographic for our K language arts curriculum, supplemented by resources from the University of Florida Literacy Institute and others. The Savvas math curriculum provides a number of engaging, hands-on lessons for our K students.
Weekly Specials Classes
In addition to classroom work, students enjoy weekly specials classes in Spanish, music, physical education, art, and science and STEM. Our K students strengthen their interpersonal development and social skills through interactions with each other, and through supervised interactions with their eighth-grade buddies and weekly game days with third graders. Our K students also visit the neighborhood library, go on field trips, and take part in musical performances.
First Grade
First grade at St. Michael’s School emphasize a significant shift for students to a more rigorous academic program. Daily routines feature plenty of project-based learning, collaboration with peers, and opportunities to play outside. Our first-grade program also focuses on social-emotional learning and building community.
Language Arts
In Language Arts, there is an intentional focus on the use of reading strategies and comprehension skills to help build independent readers. Phonics plays an integral part of our day. We use the UFLI Foundations program which is a carefully developed scope and sequence designed to ensure that students systematically acquire each skill needed and learn to apply each skill with automaticity and confidence. The students gain mastery over their penmanship through the Handwriting without Tears program and learn about the writing process, the use of proper grammar, and writing conventions in daily lessons. They practice their skills writing about our anchor texts and whole-group read-aloud books as well as expanding their narrative, expository, and opinion topics.
Mathematics
In Math, first graders learn through direct lessons that enable students to think flexibly and fluently about numbers. The use of math manipulatives, hands-on activities, group projects, centers, and drills are the foundations they use to develop their mathematical aptitude. In addition to their specials class for science—learning basic scientific processes of observation, measurement, prediction, experimentation, and recording / sharing data— they also participate in the Aerospace Connections in Education (ACE) program supported by Davis Monthan Air Force Base CAP Cadets and Senior Officers. This program supports STEM initiatives, teaches the students about aviation principals and enriches the school curriculum.
History and Citizenship
Our first graders experience a well-balanced blend of history and citizenship education as they learn about traditions and how to become a participating member of society. Students expand their self-awareness and social skills and build self-confidence as they study family, communities, and different cultural traditions around them.
Second Grade
From “learning to read” to “reading to learn”
Second grade at St. Michael’s emphasizes working more comprehensively with literacy and writing to help students develop greater independence with their reading and writing skills. At this stage, students transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Guided reading is a fun way for students to practice reading together in small groups. During these sessions, teachers help students understand the story better. This builds confidence and encourages them to explore new ideas. They learn to write different kinds of texts, like informative pieces that give facts, personal narratives that share their stories, and persuasive pieces that convince others of their ideas. Each type of writing helps students express their thoughts in unique ways. Though most second graders are not expected to master spelling, they are expected to master short-vowel, long-vowel, r-controlled, and consonant-blend patterns correctly.
Mathematics
In second-grade math, we work in small- and whole-group settings using various manipulatives to aid further understanding of skills. Students explore various methods of solving addition and subtraction problems and begin to understand multiplication and division concepts. They explore place value, fractions, money value, rounding to the nearest ten and hundred, measurement, telling time, and recognizing geometric shapes and their attributes. Every math lesson includes active learning to keep students engaged. They practice their skills with team activities and math games that reinforce their learning. Problem-solving is a big focus, and students learn to think through math problems step by step. They also work on reasoning skills, which help them explain how they got their answers.
Social Studies
In social studies, we explore people and places in both the city and the countryside. Students learn about their community and how to read maps. They discover the differences between living in a city with tall buildings and a country with open fields which helps students better understand the world around them.
Public Speaking
Public speaking is another exciting part of second grade. Each week, students have the chance to present a topic of their choice during their “Teaching Time.” They practice important skills like making eye contact and projecting their voices. This helps students feel more confident when sharing their ideas with others.
Third Grade
Build social-emotional awareness in balance with academics
The third-grade program at St. Michael’s nurtures our students’ curiosity and diverse backgrounds through curated lessons that meet the children where they are ready to learn. Service projects, field trips, enrichment classes, and lessons to help build social-emotional awareness are in balance with academics.
Language Arts
Our third-grade Language Arts curriculum, published by National Geographic Reach for Reading, provides science- and social studies-themed units of investigation. Students read selections from a variety of genres, including nonfiction, realistic fiction, traditional literature, etc. Reading comprehension develops reading to learn and ability to identify and analyze story elements: theme, characters, plot, setting. Students also identify main ideas and details in nonfiction selections. Third graders will know the meanings of common prefixes and suffixes and write a variety of opinion, narrative, and expository texts. Zaner Bloser cursive handwriting teaches students to be able to write all lowercase cursive letters and capital cursive letters.
Social Studies
Through the use of maps, expository text, and narrative readings, our social studies curriculum helps students gain an understanding of the factors that shape a community’s development—its geographic features, natural resources, historical events, cultural groups, transportation, etc. Among other in-depth learning units, third graders learn about how the city of Tucson was established and grew.
Mathematics
Our math curriculum for third grade helps to build an understanding and fluency of multiplication and division facts through 100. Students learn to gather and represent data with bar graphs, line plots, and pictographs. They use place value to add and subtract numbers and build understanding of fractions as parts of a whole and as numbers on a number line. Students understand and find the area and perimeter of shapes and describe and classify 2-dimensional shapes.
Fourth Grade
Robust Academics. Authentic Learning.
Fourth grade at St. Michael’s offers students a robust academic program rooted in authentic learning experiences that help strengthen their readiness for Upper School in fifth grade. The fourth-grade curriculum balances core classes in reading, writing, math, and social studies, alongside specials classes in art, music, science and STEM, Spanish, and physical education.
Mathematics
We help develop a deeper understanding of mathematics through our TERC math curriculum. This interactive, problem-based curriculum engages students in investigations about factors, multiplicative comparisons, division, representing measurement data, geometry, fractions, and decimals.
Reading and Writing
Students are immersed in reading and writing daily through read-alouds, small group discussions, and writing journals. A variety of genres are studied through our Reach for Reading program, allowing students to read, write, and engage in meaningful discussions about texts. Students learn about the writing process and become independent writers through brainstorming, drafting, editing, revising, and peer feedback.
A successful student-teacher-parent partnership
The student-teacher-parent partnership is crucial to the success of each student; family events, therefore, are a fundamental part of the fourth-grade program. Parents are invited throughout the year to participate in field trips and family days on campus with their children. Service learning, leadership development, and public speaking are equally important components of fourth grade at St. Michael’s and are integrated through a variety of experiences inside and outside the classroom.
Music
Our dynamic and engaging music curriculum for Lower School (Grade TK-4) is designed to inspire young learners through an exploration of music using the Orff-Schulwerk approach and Kodály methodology, enriched with hand signs for an immersive and joyful learning experience.
Each year, our Lower School students showcase their learning and celebrate the holiday season with a joyous concert that features traditional and contemporary holiday music. And in the spring, our year-end concert gives students the opportunity to perform pieces they have learned throughout the year, encapsulating the growth in their musical journey.
Our Music Program is committed to nurturing creativity, building musical skills, and fostering a love for music that will last a lifetime.
Science and STEM
STEM program at St. Michaels School provides the foundations for the key science literacies needed for success in STEM. Our curriculum allows students to experience a variety of pedagogical approaches designed to create, develop, and strengthen the neural pathways necessary for scientific literacy.
Students explore various STEM topics in each grade to broadly include biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, and environmental sciences.
Art
Our Lower School art curriculum encourages creativity, develops artistic skills, and introduces students to various art forms, materials, and techniques. Our abiding philosophy for art instruction in the younger grades rests on the belief that art is about the process, not the product. At the same time, we maintain high expectations for our students, encouraging and guiding them to be themselves and to create their best interpretation of an assigned project.
Physical Education
The Lower School physical-education program at St. Michael’s is integral to the holistic development of students, supporting their physical, emotional, social, and cognitive growth. Through fun and engaging classes multiple times a week, students participate in activities that promote coordination, strength, flexibility, and overall physical literacy— while fostering teamwork, leadership, and resilience.
Spanish
At St. Michael’s our Spanish enrichment in Lower School is designed for students to learn the Spanish Language knowledge in a happy and inviting environment. Students are introduced to the Spanish language by using a number of resources and instructional methods, including music, conversation, reading, writing, and vocabulary-building. Students also engage with Spanish culture and language through crafts, hands-on activities, games, collaborative group activities, and verbal translation.
The earliest grades, TK-2, focus on speaking and listening for comprehension skills. In third and fourth grades, more grammatical and linguistic structures are introduced that focus on communication, writing, and reading skills. Classroom activities include note-taking, projects, oral presentations, skits, videos, and partner work. Students review past Spanish language instructions such as numbers, vowels , alphabet colors, days of the week, months of the year and greetings.
Lower School Division Director
At St. Michael’s Lower School, we warmly welcome you into a community that cherishes each child and values the unique journey they embark upon. Our program is thoughtfully crafted to nurture personal growth, foster leadership skills, and instill a deep commitment to service, all within a supportive and inclusive environment. Here, your child will not only excel academically but also flourish spiritually and socially, learning the importance of compassion and respect for others.
As your family considers the journey ahead at St. Michael’s, we invite you to envision the countless opportunities for growth that await your child. From engaging classroom experiences to enriching extracurricular activities, our Lower School program is designed to cultivate well-rounded individuals who are prepared to lead and serve in their communities.
