Our students have the chance to expand their horizons far past the walls of the classroom by participating in our exploratory programs. Each class aims to help a student realize the team player, foreign language learner, artist, or musician inside of him or her. Proficiency in the subject area, itself, is not simply the end goal. In every exploratory class, teachers aim to help students adapt to meet challenges and build character.
Physical Education
The main goal for our physical education program is to engage the students in physical activity while they learn to compete, work together and have fun. At the primary and elementary levels, students focus on building locomotor skills, teamwork and principles of sportsmanship. In middle school, there is a greater emphasis on fitness and skill development in team sports.
Art
Our art program puts theory into practice by engaging students in color theory, art and design and independently led projects. All grades develop their own modular sketch books. This helps them to talk about their art and improve their creative process. Students at the primary level work on fundamental procedures through project-based learning. Elementary students find that the procedural parameters once needed drop away. They are given freedom to develop a unique style of their own. At the highest artistic level, middle school students develop the capacity to speak rationally about their art and explain their decisions to favor one technique or set of colors over another.
Music
Our music program aims not only to expose students to music in class, but how music connects to other subject areas like literature and math, as well as the outside world in business, marketing and cultural expression. Primary students listen to stories and plays, while making musical connections to the song of rhyme and rhythm. At the elementary level, students learn a musical instrument and the foundations of music theory. Middle school students progress to project-based learning as they study world music and how music lends itself to marketing and consumer decision-making.
Spanish
Every Spanish class is geared toward the same goal- creating cultural awareness of the many Spanish-speaking countries and people at home in our world as well as preparing students to read and write Spanish in high school. Primary and lower elementary learners focus on vocabulary building as they discover, practice and use the words for animals, foods, places and more. Upper elementary classes are aimed towards understanding basic verbs, creating sentences, reading paragraphs and making translations. Middle school students participate in TPRS Books, a storytelling program using interactive books and oral stories containing the most commonly-used words and phrases in Spanish.
