The teaching of French plays a decisive role in academic success, both in the development of reading and expression skills and in the acquisition of a literary and artistic culture.

In CM1 and CM2, students have developed the ability to read, understand and interpret documents of various kinds, particularly literary texts. They have enriched their communication and expression skills, both written and oral, in increasingly complex situations, structuring their knowledge and developing their own thinking. They have entered into an explicit and reflective study of language, in the service of comprehension and expression.

At the Junior High School, the teaching of French constitutes an additional and important step in the construction of an autonomous thought based on a correct and precise use of the French language, the development of a critical mind and qualities of judgment which are necessary in Senior High School.

This teaching is organized around skills and knowledge that can be grouped into three main areas

– the development of oral and written language skills in reception and production;

– the deepening of linguistic skills that allow a synthetic understanding of the language system, including orthographic, grammatical and lexical systems as well as elements of language history;

– the development of a common literary and artistic culture, involving a dialogue between literary works from the national heritage, contemporary productions, French-language literature and literature from ancient and foreign languages, and other artistic productions, particularly still and moving images.

The skills worked on in the previous cycle are further developed: finding one’s bearings in time, finding one’s bearings in space, reasoning, obtaining information in the digital world, understanding and analyzing a document, using different languages in history and geography, cooperating and sharing.

During Cycle 4, students gradually understand how the scientific disciplines of history and geography allow them to reflect accurately on the times and spaces of human societies and to understand a wide variety of social phenomena. The programmed teaching themes ensure that students discover the complexity of the historical evolution and geographical organization of human groups.

Themes studied in History:

• Christianity and Islam (6th – 13th centuries, worlds in contact;
• Society, church and political power in the feudal West (11th and 15th centuries);
• Transformations of Europe and opening to the world in the 16th and 17th centuries;
• The 18th century. Expansions, Enlightenment and revolutions;
• Europe and the world in the 19th century;
• Society, culture and politics in 19th century France;
• Europe, a major theater of total wars (1914 – 1945) ;
  The world since 1945 ;
• French men and women in a rethought Republic.

Themes studied in Geography:

• The demographic question and unequal development;
• Limited resources, to be managed and renewed;
• Preventing risks, adapting to global change;
• The urbanization of the world;
• Transnational human mobility;
• Spaces transformed by globalization ;
• Territorial dynamics in contemporary France;
• Why and how to develop the territory?
• France and the European Union.

This program is structured according to the four classic themes:

• numbers and calculations ;
• organization and management of data, functions ;
• quantities and measurements ;
• space and geometry.

In addition, computer science is taught jointly in mathematics and technology.

The implementation of the program must allow for the development of the six major competencies of mathematical activity: research, modeling, representation, reasoning, calculation and communication.

In order to do so, a significant place must be given to problem solving, whether they are internal to mathematics or related to situations from everyday life or other disciplines. The program provides tools for modeling various situations in the form of mathematical problems.

Problem solving requires the use of a body of knowledge and methods. Students must have intellectual reflexes and automatisms such as mental arithmetic, which, by freeing the memory, allow them to focus on the development of an approach.

Training in reasoning and initiation to demonstration are essential objectives of Cycle 4.

Reasoning, which is at the heart of mathematical activity, must be based on a variety of situations (e.g. problems of an arithmetical or geometrical nature, but also the development of a program to be run on a computer or the playing of games in which one must develop a winning strategy, either individually or collectively, or maximise one’s chances) Investigative practices (trial-and-error, conjecture-validation, etc.) are essential and can be based as much on manipulations or paper/pencil research as on the use of digital tools (spreadsheets, geometry software, etc.).

The explanation of the approach used and the writing of a solution contribute to the development of oral and written communication skills.

In addition to French, students at the Junior High School learn two modern languages (LVA = English, LVB = Spanish or eventually, an oriental language).

They acquire oral and written skills that enable them to understand, express, interact, transmit and create. In each language studied, cultural discovery and intercultural relations are major objectives of the cycle.

The teaching of languages from cycle 1 to cycle 4 (from Maternelle to 3ème) is designed to offer continuity in learning that allows students to consolidate what they have learned and to continue building communication skills aimed at a level of autonomy and an increased ability to deal with diverse and even unexpected communication situations. The learning of a second foreign language from the 6th grade will be able to rely on the knowledge and skills already implemented for another foreign language.

In Junior High School, the learning objectives in life and earth sciences are organized around three main themes:

• the planet Earth, the environment and human action ;
• living organisms and their evolution
• the human body and health.

The teaching of Life and Earth Sciences in Junior High School must enable students:

• to access up-to-date scientific knowledge, understand it and use it to conduct appropriate reasoning, by linking data, imagining and identifying causes and effects;
• to apprehend the complexity of reality by using the concrete, by observing, by experimenting, by modelling;
• to distinguish facts from ideas;
• to understand the place of technology, its emergence and its interaction with the sciences;
• to explain the links between human beings and nature;
• to explain the impacts generated by the rhythm, nature (benefits/harm) and the variability of human actions on nature;
• to act by making informed choices, including choices of direction;
• to exercise responsible citizenship, particularly in the areas of health and the environment, in order to build their relationship with the world, with others, with their own body;
• to integrate economic and technological developments, and to assume the social and ethical responsibilities that result from them.

Experimental and observational sciences, which include physics and chemistry, explore nature to discover and explain its laws. The aims of their teaching in Cycle 4 are to enable students :

• to access scientific knowledge rooted in history and updated, understand it and use it to formulate appropriate reasoning
  to grasp, through concrete practice, the complexity of reality by observing, experimenting, measuring and modeling
• to build, from facts, ideas about the world that become progressively more abstract and powerful;
• to understand the place of techniques and engineering sciences, their emergence, their interactions with the sciences;
• to perceive the links between human beings and nature;
• explain the impacts caused by the pace and diversity of human actions on nature;
• to act by making informed choices, including in their choice of direction;
• to live and prepare for responsible citizenship, particularly in the areas of health and the environment

– by building a relationship with the world, with others, with their own body;

– by integrating economic and technological developments, in order to assume the social and ethical responsibilities resulting from them as citizens.

The educational objectives of Cycle 4 in physics and chemistry are organized around four themes:

• Organization and transformations of matter
• Motion and interactions
• Energy and its conversions
• Signals for observation and communication

Technology enables human beings to create objects to meet their needs. The purpose of teaching technology in secondary school is to give all students the keys to understanding the contemporary technical environment and the skills to act. Technology draws on the complex relationships between scientific results, environmental, social and economic constraints and the organization of techniques.

Technology contributes to the personal success of all students through investigation, design, modeling, and realization activities, and through approaches that encourage their involvement in individual, group, and collaborative projects.

In Cycle 4, technology education focuses on the study of technical objects rooted in their social reality and develops along three dimensions

• an engineering-design dimension to understand, imagine and produce objects in a collaborative manner. The project approach allows for the creation of objects based on identified issues, needs and problems, expressed specifications, known conditions and constraints.
• a socio-cultural dimension that allows for discussion of the needs, conditions and implications of the transformation of the environment by technical objects and systems. The activities are centered on the study of the evolution of objects and systems and their conditions of existence in various contexts (cultural, legal, societal in particular).
• a scientific dimension, which calls upon the laws of physics and chemistry and mathematical tools to solve technical problems, analyze and investigate technical solutions, model and simulate the functioning and behavior of technical objects and systems.

The teaching of visual arts offers the means to take an informed and critical look at art.

It covers all artistic fields related to forms: painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, video, new modes of image production… Students explore the plurality of approaches and the diversity of works from four major fields of practice:

• two-dimensional practices ;
• three-dimensional practices
• artistic practices of the still and moving image;
  practices of digital artistic creation.

Skills worked on:

• Experimenting, producing, creating;
• Implementing a project;
• Expressing oneself, analyzing one’s own practice and that of one’s peers; establishing a relationship with that of artists;
• To find one’s bearings in the fields related to the visual arts, to be sensitive to questions of art.

Music education leads students to an autonomous and critical approach to the world of contemporary sound and music. It ensures that the music studied is part of a history and geography marked by cultural references. Taking into account the sensitivity and pleasure of making and listening to music, it provides students with the cultural and technical knowledge necessary to develop their listening and expressive skills.

Skills worked on :

• To carry out musical projects of interpretation or creation;
• Listening, comparing, building a common musical culture;
• Explore, imagine, create and produce;
• Exchange, share, argue and debate.

Throughout the school years, physical education and sports aim to train a lucid, autonomous, physically and socially educated citizen, with a view to living together. It leads children and adolescents to seek well-being and to be concerned about their health. It ensures the inclusion in the classroom of students with special educational needs or disabilities. Physical education and sports introduces the pleasure of sports.

Physical education and sport allows all students, girls and boys together and on an equal footing, especially those who are farthest from physical education and sport, to build five skills that are worked on in continuity throughout the different cycles:

Developing motor skills and learning to express oneself using one’s body;
To appropriate methods and tools through physical activity and sports;
Share rules, assume roles and responsibilities;
Learn to maintain one’s health through regular physical activity;
Learn to maintain one’s health through regular physical activity; – Appropriate a physical sports and artistic culture.

In order to develop these general skills, physical education and sport offers all students, from school to college, a training pathway made up of four complementary learning areas:

Produce an optimal performance, measurable within a given time frame;
Adapting one’s movements to a variety of environments;
To express oneself in front of others through an artistic and/or acrobatic performance;
Conducting and controlling a collective or inter-individual confrontation.

Media and information education is covered by all courses of study.

All the teachers, including the documentalist teachers, collectively ensure that the teaching provided in cycle 4 ensures that each student :

• an initial critical knowledge of the information and documentary environment of the 21st century ;
• a progressive mastery of the information and documentation process;
• access to safe, legal and ethical use of publication and distribution possibilities.

The aim is to give students access to an understanding of the media, networks and informational phenomena in all their dimensions: economic, societal, technical and ethical. Some knowledge of the history of the written word, of the different stages of its distribution and of its media puts its place in contemporary society into perspective.

Students are trained to read media content and forms in a critical and distanced manner. They are encouraged to inform themselves sufficiently, in particular through regular reading of the press in French and in modern languages, as well as to produce and disseminate information themselves.

Competencies worked on :

• To use the media and information in an autonomous way
• To use information in a reasoned way
• To use the media in a responsible way
• Produce, communicate and share information