If you Google goals for a kindergartner, you are bound to come across a few key objectives: letter recognition, learning site words, learning that reading goes from left to right.
This is Google doing its job: giving us the middle, the most likely result you would receive. Google will not give you the extraordinary because that is not what it is meant to do.
However, tucked deep into the results is an astonishingly refreshing link to a video on Facebook. It is of kindergartners’ reading with a keen understanding of character development to the founder of an accelerated and enrichment-based school, Self Development Academy.
It is exhilarating to watch. Every child reads like a child actor, but Dr. Anjum Majeed is watching something else, she is testing them to see if their superb reading skills truly translates into comprehension — can they make predictions, can they extrapolate to the real world?
To watch this video of Self Development Academy kindergartners reading to Dr. Majeed, go to https://tinyurl.com/y5alco6r.
Self Development Academy is steeped in theory, but also in practice. Loads of it. And with some stellar results. The school celebrates its 20th anniversary next year, but every anniversary the school has been given the gift of ranking at the very top in Arizona and even the nation — ranked No. 3 in 2018 (Niche.com 2018).
As well, Arizona named Self Development Academy Charter School of the Year a few years back for its commitment to not only kindergartners, but also higher grades.
How many of us have been neck deep in a child’s long, run-on sentence story that will not end? Which parent would not want their child to be able to tell a vivid, gripping, and most importantly, succinct story that happened to them earlier?
Never satisfied with just being at the top, the school has innovated again, offering a one of a kind, creative writing program. Kindergartners learn the art of storytelling, understanding the power of myths to retell, using visual arts to represent narratives, designing characters from scratch, building themes to construct a full story, and learning exhilarating creative non-fiction.
Yet, Self Development Academy is nothing if not balanced. For every Math or Science award they receive, they break new grounds on the academic level in the literature courses they teach.
So, it comes as no surprise that they have balanced their creative writing program with a logic and critical thinking program. Their focus is on whole brain thinking, whole brain learning, and full self-development.
Their Logic program answers a common problem: how do you transfer the precise reasoning that accompanies learning different types of math into everyday thinking? So, they extracted that analytical, piercing process that allows us to understand difficult geometry or calculus problems.
They have somehow taken that ability, isolated it, and developed a class that just exercises that portion of the brain — the critical thinking and reasoning portion. It is thinking distilled, filtered, and consumed, like fresh spring water.
Self Development Academy’s kindergarten program works because, for parents, it is everything that their child needs. It is a rigorous program done right — high expectations mixed with creativity in a nurturing environment. Their new creative writing and logic programs makes you wonder what great stories the kindergartners will tell their parents and teachers at the end of year!
Self Development Academy is now enrolling for the school year 2019-2020. Limited space is available. To find out more about Self Development Academy, please call (480) 641-2640.