Los Angeles Unified School District
About Us
Emelita Street Elementary School was founded in 1953 and is an LAUSD public school serving students in grades TK-5 including students with special needs. We are a great little neighborhood school with wonderful kids and enthusiastic parents. We are located in Encino and have been a beloved neighborhood school for decades. Our diverse population has between 18-21 different languages spoken by our students and their families. Therefore, children come to us with many unique experiences, interests and learning styles.
For the last several years we have had a STEAM focus designing and implementing integrated units on our own. Then we found this opportunity to learn through a structured and defined approach to teaching STEM. We started with the National Institute of STEM Education (NISE) a little over a year ago. Eight teachers signed up to receive their Teacher STEM Certification. As a school we decided to complete the Campus Certification as well to add to the instructional program in every classroom. We learned and are applying the 15 STEM Teacher Actions to varying degrees in every classroom. These are evidence-based, instructional strategies that support the students' understanding of content standards while also addressing 21st century skills through collaboration, real-world connections, student contributions, identifying engineering problems and design processes and the development and support of explanations. We know that the workforce of tomorrow must be able to solve problems through collaboration and design, creating and revising through relevant content.
Mission
Emelita provides its diverse learning community with opportunities to be empowered to build self-confidence, academic achievement, social emotional development, and the joy for learning. Students will be able to master the California Common Core State Standards through an integrated STEAM approach. Students will experience and utilize process and inquiry across the curriculums of science, technology, engineering, art and math and master problem solving skills to create a path of life-long learning for a global society.
Through collaboration, our school community promotes students’ individual differences by nurturing self-confidence and through respect for others while producing engaging, innovative 21st century learners.
Vision
At Emelita our vision is to provide our students with an academically challenging program by utilizing an integrated STEAM approach. Students will achieve their greatest potential through creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration to succeed in an ever changing digital information world.