Curriculum

Recently the Grosse Pointe Public School System adopted a new Technology Curriculum for every grade level from Kindergarten through high school. The elementary students will be instructed in several basic areas of technology, including technology awareness (the role of computers in society), technology systems, Desktop Publishing, Graphics, Word Processing, Databases, Multimedia and Keyboarding.

An overview of the Computer Education Curriculum by grade-level is listed below.

Kindergarten	Students explore the role of technology in their lives and society; learn proper technical terms for basic parts of the computer; care of hard and software; learn to use the mouse proficiently. They begin entering simple text and graphics and start using basic draw/paint tools
First Grade	Students look at potential uses of technology in their lives; identify and properly use input devices like mouse, keyboard and microphone; use click, double-click and "drag": work changing font, color and size, punctuation and capitalization create borders and print: simple file management i.e. open, close, save
Second Grade	Students examine how computers create a "global community"; identify and properly use output devices like monitor, printer, speaker; components and functions of PC like floppy disk, hard drive, CD-ROM; manage and modify text and graphics for aesthetics
Third Grade	Students look at role of technology in their community; use organizational tools for inquiry; use various applications; manage graphics and format text; plan, design and communicate a simple multimedia project using graphics and sound; learn simple file management and formatting pages; keyboarding(7 wpm with 80% accuracy)
Fourth Grade	Students discuss technology related environmental issues; use technology to manage inquiry; describe simple computer processing cycle; understand the organization and purpose of database; create and modify original graphics; simple multimedia project with sound and animation; create and format simple spreadsheets and graphs; use spell check and thesaurus effectively; keyboarding(14 wpm with 85% accuracy); access and retrieve online information
Fifth Grade	Understand the role of technology in accelerating the pace of change in our lives; group contribution and retrieval of data; identify understand storage devices; manage files on a disk; demonstrate multitasking; simple multimedia project; create and format spreadsheets; create bibliography: use correct keyboarding techniques (20 wpm with 90% accuracy); perform an effective online information search