Subject Classes
Expanding Learning Through Year-Round Subject Classes
Specialty subjects are an essential part of our curriculum, giving students opportunities to develop capacities that support the education of the whole child. Taught by dedicated subject teachers, these classes nurture cognitive, social, emotional, and physical growth, while helping students build a well-rounded set of skills that enrich all areas of learning.
While the Main Lesson offers in-depth study through three- to six-week blocks, specialty subjects are woven throughout the entire year. Subject teachers—specialists in their fields—typically work with students across multiple grades, often for several consecutive years. This continuity strengthens student-teacher relationships and provides additional support for each child alongside their Class Teacher.
Spanish
Learning a new language opens students to new ways of thinking and seeing the world in profound ways. Dual language learning from a young age promotes brain development and increases flexibility in thinking. The Spanish language holds an integral place in our local and national culture making Spanish language acquisition highly relevant in today’s society. Additionally, students have the opportunity to gain knowledge and experience of the rich cultural traditions of the many Spanish speaking people around the globe.
Music Education
Music is an integral part of school life for CLWS students. While singing takes place daily in classrooms beginning in early childhood, formal vocal music instruction begins in fifth grade. Students also learn to play the recorder beginning in first grade.
All students begin String Ensemble classes in third grade and learn to play the violin, viola, or cello through both ensemble classes and private lesson instruction (outside the school day). Students in grades 6-8 participate in joint middle school choir and ensemble experiences throughout the year including an optional fall solo concert, and a winter and spring concert. Middle school students also have the option to participate in Chamber Players, an afterschool ensemble program that focuses on enhancing chamber music skills while offering increased performance opportunities within the community.
Making and appreciating music is a universally important human experience that belongs to everyone. Music instruction nourishes the child’s inner and outer sense of rhythm, melody, and harmony, and fosters emotional expression and an appreciation for the beauty of music throughout one’s life.
Fine Arts
Like music, art is an essential part of being human. Students explore the art of wet-on-wet watercolor painting, and modeling with beeswax beginning in kindergarten. This exploration of color and form awakens the child’s artistic sensibilities, and builds hand-eye coordination and small motor skills.
In grades 1-8, students continue to engage in drawing with high quality crayons, colored pencils, charcoal, and pastels as they progress through the grades. Modeling in beeswax and clay are also a part of the integrated Fine Arts curriculum in the grade school. Watercolor painting continues through eighth grade; in middle school, students typically explore acrylic painting, perspective drawing, and clay modeling.
Class Teachers incorporate artistic work into each block of learning including history, geography, mathematics, science and language arts. Students create illustrated lesson books that combine written work and artistic expression as documents of the material learned in each subject. Arts integration and hands-on activities greatly enhance the learning experience, increasing the overall retention of subject material, the continued development of pictorial and spatial thinking and creativity, as well as the pure joy of learning.
Practical Arts
Our students enjoy a unique Practical Arts curriculum. In Handwork (grades 1-8) and Woodworking (grades 4-8), students develop dexterity, focus, and patience as they engage in activities like knitting or sewing, rasping and planing, and as they work through projects that build and grow over the course of the school year. The Practical Arts program is designed to connect children to real work and allows students to develop confidence in their ability to work with their hands. In addition to motor skills and creativity, handwork and woodwork develop our students’ mathematical and problem-solving skills and provide opportunities to accept and learn from mistakes.
Physical Education and Circus Arts
Our Movement and Games Program provides an opportunity to develop body awareness, physical strength, and agility while promoting social learning and cooperation through games, skill building, and activities. The Movement curriculum ranges from activities that focus on developing a strong movement vocabulary, to traditional games, dance, sports, and circus arts education.
Through our unique circus arts curriculum, students build up circus skills that include juggling (balls, clubs, rings, poi, hoops, diabolo), balance / acrobatics (tumbling, unicycling, stilts, rola-bola, jump-rope, mini-trampoline, pyramids), and physical theater (clowning, mime, character development) as they progress through the grades. This culminates in the annual CLWS circus at the end of March involving all 6th–8th grade students.
Media Literacy
Our Media Literacy program for middle school students, called Cyber Civics, follows a three year curriculum. The course cultivates the skills students will need to navigate online communities, conduct effective research, discern truth from misinformation, strike a balance between online and offline life, and be a force of positive change in the digital world. Students learn how these technologies function as well as think abstractly about ethics, truth, and self-control in order to become active creators in the world, in control of their online behavior and not passively influenced by the tides of technological advancement and information overload.
