About+LMA

=__General__= Lake Michigan Academy is a private, not-for-profit school for students with learning differences in grades 1 through 12. We provide an alternative for students who are unable to learn best in a traditional school environment. With the cooperation and assistance of families, professionals and other concerned individuals, quality education can be provided for all children, regardless of their learning differences.

For more, you can visit our website [|www.wmldf.org].

Teachers plan curricula for multi-age classes that is as hands-on as possible to provide students with alternative pathways for retaining information. This includes incorporating multi-sensory techniques, technology, projects and cultural immersion. We find that language is vital to successful development and have incorporated multiple receptive and expressive language experiences throughout our curricula to provide much needed repetition and experience.

We have also incorporated specific project topics into our core classes to support this language development and to provide all students with skills they will need as life-long learners. For example, all students will work with Dramatic Reading, Film and Research through their English class. Math classes will all incorporate at least one project with a paper during the school year. History classes will incorporate immersion in culture through using historical documents as text, Book Club, Short Stories and/or Songs, and Academic Club (for grades 1-8). Science classes work with forming and testing hypotheses, creating their own experiments, connecting the topics they are studying with current developments in science and connections with science-fiction.

In addition to content instruction in core classes, we provide classes in Visual Arts, Performing Arts, People Skills and Community Building and offer remedial instruction and support for language (reading, writing, speaking and listening) and math. Methods and programs utilized for this support include Handwriting Without Tears, S.P.I.R.E., Orton-Gillingham based methods, //7 Keys to Comprehension//, Project Read, Bal-A-Vis-X, Key Math, Touch Math, Solve It!, Montessori based techniques, //Reasoning and Reading// and others.

Teachers, staff,and parents work collaboratively to best support the development of our students as part of a community and as individuals. Our students exhibit a variety of behaviors which is addressed and supported through our People Skills curriculum, contact with our counselor, community mentors, frequent positive student-teacher interaction, individualized support plans and, when necessary, Responsible Thinking Process.

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