Curriculum

At PALCS, we strive to provide the best educational materials available to our students.  To achieve that goal, our teachers are encouraged to review curriculum from many different publishers and select the materials with the finest content that work optimally in our cyber environment. 

The curriculum meets all Pennsylvania state standards and materials are selected from many different publishers: Glencoe, Harcourt, Holt, Houghton Mifflin, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, Pearson/Prentice Hall and Scott Foresman, to name a few.  Students receive physical textbooks, storybooks and novels and, in many cases, access to the identical books online.  Special kits are provided for our art and science courses.  Additionally, our courses utilize the fullest extent of supplemental educational resources available on the Internet.

Our curriculum materials serve as the foundation at PALCS, but the greatest strength of this curriculum resides with the teachers who work with this material - they develop their own unique courses, deliver instruction, make and grade assignments and interact with students on a daily basis.  After reading our course description manual, you may wish to meet the teachers.  

2007-2008 Course Description Catalogs:

Kindergarten - Grade 6

Though not listed in the catalog, students in grades 4-6 are required to complete a technology elective and have the option of selecting a foreign language.

Grades 7 - 12

Graduation requirements are listed with High School courses.

These files are Adobe PDF documents and will take a few minutes to download on a dial-up connection.  Get Adobe Reader here.

Note: Please be advised that some of our courses are only able to accommodate a limited number of students. As these courses reach capacity, it is possible that you may not get your first course selection choice. In the event a course is closed, you will be offered a similar course.

2008-2009 Course Description Catalogs:

Kindergarten - Grade 6

Grade 7 - Grade 8

Grade 9 - Grade 12

Supplemental student enrichment materials, used in many PALCS classes:

Beyond Books – This resource will be available for teachers to integrate into their lessons, enriching the content and providing a wealth of Internet links to supplement lessons. http://www.beyondbooks.com

Brainpop.com – Brainpop is a web resource offering short animated films that are simple and easy to understand on elementary mathematics, health, social studies, language arts, science, and technology. Films are often accompanied by quizzes and project ideas. Students will have unlimited daily access. http://www.brainpop.com

Compass Learning Odyssey – standards based, online resource, to be used by teachers to enrich and enliven lessons. http://www.compasslearning.com (watch demo or click on Curriculum to see still samples)

NetLibrary - a free online library of more than 3,800 digital books.

PassKey – A McGraw Hill program designed to reinforce curriculum, raise standardized test scores, and help with remediation for students in all grades, in the subject areas of reading, writing, math, science and social studies.

United Streaming – Site provides multimedia, video clips, still photos and images that teachers will use in lessons to reinforce key content areas, all correlated to state standards.