Teachers Collaborate to Deliver
Core Concepts All Day at Delano
Fourth-grader J’Tyler Jones has a lot of information “That’s one thing that I love about Delano – the
at his fingertips.
way that we collaborate with each other. There’s
not a separation between the support teachers
He can list at length the programs he loves at
and the classroom teachers,” said Ms. Williams.
Delano Optional School in Memphis, the elemen- “We have a very close-knit family here. We suptary school winner of the 2015 SCORE Prize. And port each other 100 percent.”
he can rattle off facts he picked up during his
school’s lunch hour, like state capitals.
This sort of cross-curricular academic collaboration is the standard at Delano. Core academic
“I learned that Montana has a capital named
material is integrated throughout the school day,
Helena,” said J’Tyler. “Our teachers have high
including enrichment classes like art, music, and
expectations of us – learning and having good
technology. Delano’s music teacher helps fourthbehavior.”
and fifth-grade students with fractions by talking
Delano’s lunch periods include a PowerPoint presentation running for students, featuring grade-level and school-wide memorization questions with
facts and skills kids need to master for effective
processing of classroom information. The presentations are put together by the school’s technology
coordinator Sharren Williams. Ms. Williams works
with classroom teachers to determine the content.
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with students about half and quarter notes, challenging kids to add and subtract them. Students
participating in advanced strings and chorus have
academic concepts further reinforced, improving
reading skills like rhyming words, poetry, and
vocabulary. Elementary and intermediate students
working on basic and geometric shapes see these
concepts reinforced during their art blocks. Dela-