VAIS Curriculum

Developed for the young learner with no prior exposure to Chinese, Step Up by Level Learning is our language arts curriculum. It's a comprehensive program designed to foster deep, lasting language proficiency in Mandarin. Our approach is built around four core pillars to support your child’s learning journey:

Build: We build strong foundational language skills in context using a highly systematic structure, ensuring students have a stable base to grow upon.

Learn: Students learn vocabulary naturally in context by reading a wide variety of engaging, diverse, and culturally rich texts.

Retain: To ensure they retain what they learn, our curriculum uses spiraling themes across different levels, providing repeated exposures to vocabulary over time.

Develop: Through this immersive approach, your child will continuously develop their oral language, grammar, reading, and writing skills in meaningful contexts.

VAIS uses Math Expressions as its math curriculum. Combining aspects of the most powerful elements of reform teaching with the best of traditional approaches, Math Expressions uses objects, drawings, conceptual language, and real-world situations to help students build mathematical ideas that make sense to them. Math Expressions balances deep understanding with essential skills and problem solving. Through daily “Math Talk,” Math Expressions builds a community of learners with frequent opportunities to explain their mathematical thinking and thereby develop their understanding. Children are asked to solve problems, explain their solutions, answer questions, and justify their answers. They gain greater understanding and ownership of math concepts as they develop and express their own ideas.

VAIS uses Mystery Science as its science curriculum. Mystery Science is a hands on program aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards. Mystery Science is based on the concept that a child’s questions should guide his or her investigations which will lead to the development of scientific thinking. Each Mystery is aligned to a topic, performance expectations, science and engineering practices, disciplinary core ideas, and crosscutting concepts. Every lesson begins with a Mystery that hooks students, has an unforgettable story and concludes with hands-on activities. The concepts investigated in kindergarten include: Weather Conditions, Instruments & Seasons; Plant and Animal Needs; and Forces, Machines & Engineering.

The English Language Arts program at VAIS follows the Savvas myView curriculum, which provides a thematic, standards-based approach to literacy instruction. Through this curriculum, students build phonemic awareness, phonics knowledge, comprehension strategies, genre understanding, writing skills, and language and convention skills through a scope and sequence. Units rotate between Science and Social Studies themes, allowing students to activate prior knowledge and build schema while making meaningful connections across content areas. Each six-week unit is guided by an essential question and five weekly questions that support deeper thinking and engagement. At the conclusion of each unit, students participate in project-based learning experiences that encourage collaboration and application of learning as they work together to answer the unit’s essential question. Targeted small-group instruction provides students with additional opportunities to practice and strengthen skills needing mastery while teachers provide individualized literacy support to small groups of students. Student progress is monitored through unit assessments as well as district-wide aimsweb+ or STAR assessments administered three times each year. This literacy structure supports student growth, engagement, and the development of strong reading and writing skills.

At VAIS, students are engaged in an environment that promotes global citizenship. Learning an eastern language and culture that is so very different from western American language and culture provides a natural gateway for students to look beyond their community and truly appreciate a global perspective. In addition to our Biliteracy Units and our SAVVAS Literacy curriculum, VAiS uses the TCM Social Studies curriculum to teach the Wisconsin State Standards for Social Studies. The standards address the 6 Social Studies Strands: Inquiry Practices and Processes, Behavioral Sciences, Economics, Geography, History, and Political Science. Teaching the Social Studies content using the inquiry arc gives students an opportunity to investigate questions in order to make sense of an increasingly complex world.

Students at VAIS participate in art, music, and physical education each week.