RD American SchoolA New Era of Education

Orton-Gillingham is the gold-standard approach to structured literacy: reading taught through systematic phonics, one sound at a time. Leanne’s specialty is the first and hardest hurdle, the moment a child goes from guessing at words to actually reading them. For a slower starter, everything turns on that moment. Clear it early, and the confidence carries into every subject that follows.

Grades 4 and 5 are where a child starts carrying more of the load alone: longer assignments, harder math, more decisions of their own. Allison has taught this exact age for ten years, and she runs a classroom where the standard is high and the help arrives before a child has to ask for it. Math curriculum design is her own field of work, so when your child meets the wall that fractions and long division put in front of every fourth grader, she can already see which step came loose.

As RDAS’s Math Coordinator and Lead Teacher, Stephanie teaches math and built the framework the whole school teaches it by. She builds sharp number sense and the patience to think a problem all the way through, so a child stops fearing math and starts using it to read the world. That way of reasoning takes years to build, and it becomes the strongest thing your child carries forward.

Art is the first language a child speaks to understand the world. At an age when words fall short, Aparna reads the feeling on the page and gives a child the courage to say exactly what’s inside. She knows Chinese brush painting and Western drawing alike, and moves children freely between them until they find a style of their own. Every class leaves a child with a little more skill and a little more nerve. A child walks out holding a piece they’re proud of, and a reason to make the next one.

Wendy builds the Chinese curriculum level by level, so a native speaker stays stretched in the same room where a beginner feels safe to try. A child two years ahead and a child just starting both get a lesson pitched exactly to them. Your child is met where they are, whether Chinese is home to them or brand new. Wendy is the teacher who makes RDAS’s bilingual promise something a child actually lives.

Michelle teaches music the way children actually learn it. She lets them invent their own marks for sound before they ever meet a musical staff, and improvise freely, so music arrives first as something they make, then something they can name. Her lessons pull different grades, and even teachers, into a single project, held together by the plain joy of making music side by side.

Before teaching, Zul coached youth triathletes through swimming, cycling, and running, three sports where a child’s only opponent is the time they posted last month. He brought that yardstick into the classroom: a child in his class is measured against the child they were in September, and they can watch the gap close. Water competence runs through what he teaches, which counts for a great deal in a city built around water. Fourteen years in, he is still a student himself.