These last few months, the Science Department has been brewing up the start of labs and experiments as classes learn the fundamentals of their subject matter. As they progress through the foundations, they will begin to move on to opportunities to dive deeper into hypotheses, topics, and lessons. Recently our chemistry classes have been working through labs that go over the fundamentals of experiments and lab work, such as understanding and categorizing the different types of chemical reactions.
Over the course of the next few years, the Ursuline curriculum has been making a shift in classes offered to each class to be more universal. What this means is that freshman-year students will study biology, sophomores will study chemistry, juniors will take physics, and senior year will remain as an elective year. In the 23-24 school year, we are halfway through this transition, and so have both sophomores and juniors taking chemistry classes. Previously the order had been freshman year was physics, sophomore year was biology, and junior year was chemistry.
This change in curriculum order was intentional so that faculty can continue to prepare our students for the challenge of college, by building up the baseline of good study skills, time management skills, and conquering the background knowledge on which to build the next layer of information.