Our approach

A culture of work

We aim to foster a joyous learning environment, one where students truly love learning, learn to pursue their interests, and come to appreciate themselves.

A core aspect of this environment is that students learn to tackle the challenges that come with real learning, to persist in a way that enables them to learn about what they love, and that their appreciation for themselves is not based on empty praise but is really earned. A core outcome of our elementary classrooms, in other words, is that students develop a work ethic.

Education and inner discipline

The ability to do hard work, when elevated to an ethic, represents a profound achievement of character. It means that one is ambitious and can challenge oneself; that one is capable of being persistent and organized; that one is purposeful with one’s time and self-aware about one's energy and motivations.

Particular academic disciplines contribute to this outcome by offering work that is both engaging and worthy. But systematically developing this sort of inner discipline within each student comes primarily from a structural approach to our elementary classrooms.

Montessori's great insight was that, by blending without compromise engaging, worthy content on the one hand, with respect for a student’s autonomous activity on the other, that children learn to master themselves. By engaging with the world with enthusiasm and intelligence, they come to embed deeply into their character the essential features of that engagement: purposefulness, persistence, and an appreciation for noble, productive activity.

Our elementary programs fully embrace this high-structure, high-autonomy approach. At the elementary level, students have tremendous responsibility for their work, and learn to hold themselves accountable with specific tools and techniques. The result is a classroom in which each student is busy achieving a high level of ambition and self-mastery, even as they pursue—indeed, through their pursuit of their schoolwork.

Our approach to work ethic

Our Montessori elementary classrooms afford students significant autonomy over their work. Gone is the day dominated by students moving en masse, from class to class, scheduled in short blocks of time. Gone is the role of the teacher in micromanaging student's work and responsibilities.

The Montessori classroom is instead organized primarily around a three-hour work cycle, a block of protected time in the morning. During the work cycle, the teachers circulate and give lessons and other assistance to individuals or small groups of students.

Our guides circulate through the classroom, constantly giving individualized and small-group lessons.

The majority of students, who are not in lessons, are responsible for directing their own work. They organize themselves, follow up on lessons received previously, extending their understanding and mastering their skills.

Students independently following up on their lessons in different classroom areas.

This is no small feat. The child that can do this, who can successfully and productively manage her time, is manifesting in her behavior the deep elements of ambition, persistence, organization, and self-mastery discussed earlier.

More specific elements of the Montessori elementary approach to the culture of work include:

Our classroom culture

The above represents a vision of a classroom culture that is an achievement. It is achieved by specific classroom tools and teacher practices that, over time, create and sustain an ethic of work at the level of both individual students and the entire classroom.

Some of these tools:

The result of these practices is work ethic — and not the joyless work ethic of a puritan, but the energetic work ethic of an inspired artist or an ambitious entrepreneur. Students learn to a sense of efficacy through persistence and organization, and they learn that persistence and organization are critically efficacious tools for amplifying their pursuits and ambitions.

The purpose of Mathematics education

Mathematics is a uniquely powerful discipline, one that enables us to comprehend and manipulate quantities of all sorts. Advanced mathematics is indispensable for certain very lucrative careers that it makes possible. Even in everyday life, fairly advanced mathematics — of the sort that, until recently in history, was learned by a tiny minority — is highly useful. From calculating measurements for a DIY project to working out how many weeks' pocket money is needed to buy a new video game, math is versatile and important.

However, the study of mathematics offers gifts far beyond numeracy and calculation. It allows children to develop and exercise their reasoning mind. It teaches students how to evaluate situations, mentally test hypotheses, employ problem-solving strategies, derive conclusions, and articulate them clearly. As has been recognized since the time of the Ancient Greeks, math serves as the best model for, and the best practice for, core aspects of human reasoning. These are critical skills that students will need in their future workplaces, in their personal lives, indeed in every aspect of navigating a world increasingly characterized by demanding, rapid change.

And so the key outcomes of math education in our elementary programs are two-fold:

Our students, in mathematics, gain:

Students who study math, in short, gain the ability to better form and deploy complex knowledge — in general. Whether its solving a difficult engineering problem or solving a thorny personal problem, one needs to be able to: identify and separate different operative factors, organize these factors, bring different elements of knowledge to bear on the problem in a systematic way, and pressure-test one’s thinking for mistakes, problems, and weaknesses. These are the skills that our elementary programs impart when teaching mathematics.

Our Mathematics pedagogy

Our approach to math in the elementary years is guided by principles of intelligibility through hands-on learning, precision through thoughtful curricular materials, and mastery through engagement and practice.

Hands-on learning

Our math curriculum begins with hands-on materials that foster an intuition of quantity, place value, and geometry. By manipulating these scientifically designed examples of abstract ideas, students build a library of experiences that develop into mental models of mathematical principles. A set of developmentally and mathematically refined hands-on Montessori learning materials, along with unique learning materials developed by our pedagogy team, forms the backbone of the math curriculum.

Students use hands-on, social materials to master inequalities of algebraic expressions.

Each learning material not only concretizes but isolates an aspect of mathematics. The cleanliness and objectivity of math is manifest in the learning materials, and reinforced in the more abstract presentations. Definitions are clear and concise, statements are correct and precise, and problems are solved by laying bare every step. The precision and isolation in the materials allows students to practice one skill or concept at a time, repeated as often as needed for mastery.

A developmental sequence for Math

Our program is carefully sequenced to follow each student’s development. As the result of a thoughtfully ordered curriculum, the approach is intelligible to the student at each step. Our general pedagogy demands grounding knowledge in the child’s own experience, progressing from concretes that are directly accessible to the student, up to more abstract knowledge, with each stage providing the foundation for the next.

Math is no exception. Each material, lesson, and activity builds on the strong foundation of the previous ones, and seeds are continuously laid to facilitate integrations years later. The binomial cube, for example, presented as a puzzle for Montessori preschool students, leads to a geometric-algebraic integration of binomial expansions.

Mastery-based learning

The students do work that enables them to fully master the mathematical content.

Math lessons are most often presented to individuals or pairs of students. When students need more time or support in a particular area, they have as many lessons and as much time as they need; for students who grasp an area quickly, there is the opportunity to swiftly move ahead. And so, children progress at their own pace, consolidating a deep conceptual understanding of mathematical ideas while creating a solid foundation for future, more complex studies.

The materials, again, are designed to be thoroughly engaging so that repetition, a requirement of mastery, is not punishing but enjoyable. The material grounds more abstract mathematical work, such as word problems, facilitating the ability of students to apply it to the real world. The materials and approach allow them to think in a way that is both fully conceptual and also visual, intuitive, sometimes even literally physical. Students can thus explore and practice the math they are learning to the point where it represents real understanding that can be independently and creatively applied.

Math in our classrooms

The basic implementation of mathematics follows a sequence of teacher presentations and student activities in accordance with the guidelines above: engaging, hands-on, manipulation-based learning, with precise mathematical content that is crystallized into concepts, done at a pace that is challenging and in an order that is accessible. In addition, key units are punctuated by group discussions, guided by the teacher in a way that clarifies and unifies the knowledge of the students.

The highest-level goals of mathematics education in our elementary program are the cognitive ones listed above. The specific mathematical content that represents the realization of those goals in elementary are:

The topics covered in lower elementary are:

The content covered in upper elementary is:

The purpose of History education

The human world into which our children are born is bewilderingly complex. It boasts countless and often conflicting institutions, ever-evolving technologies, and contradictory norms and practices. This is a world that most adults struggle to understand — partially in virtue of the approach to history and civics in most schools, which doesn’t typically provide a helpful framework for thinking about the dynamic human world.

But even elementary-aged children want and need to start to make sense this cacophony, to understand the world they live in, to learn to appreciate it, and, ultimately, to be empowered with the knowledge needed to participate in it, affect it, change it.

The critical key for understanding for a student to understand, appreciate, and change the culture of their world — in all of aspects — is history. Conversely, the key learning outcome of history is the ability to understand, appreciate, and ultimately change their world.

History, in our elementary programs, is not a list of dates, nor is it a collection of topics and themes. It is a unified story of the development of the modern world — the explanation of the world of the student. It is a synoptic, rich timeline of its arts and inventions, its people and institutions, its arc of events, conflicts, and, most of all, ideas.

Students in our elementary history program learn, across the six years of elementary, the unbroken chronology of Western history, from early civilizations through the present.

History in our classrooms

History is infused into our Montessori elementary classrooms. There are three major aspects of the history curriculum:

The Great Lessons are big-picture history lessons that serve as the integrating and framing context for the entire elementary curriculum. They are given every year, in both lower and upper elementary (with older students who have mastered the lessons assisting in their final years).

The lessons are:

Lower elementary students, with a combination of charts, presentations, and other learning materials, start to learn history at the earliest stages. They study a variety of early civilizations and come to understand the full range of fundamental human needs a civilization evolves to serve, from material to political to spiritual.

Building on these foundations and hungry for ever-more abstract and relevant explanations, upper elementary students begin a more systematic study of history. They receive monthly presentations, 24 over the course of three years, that cover key topics and epochs in history in sequence.

The sequence varies somewhat by student grouping and by year, but goes roughly, over three years, from Ancient Egypt through the Renaissance, from the Age of Exploration and colonialism through the end of the American Civil War, and from the Industrial Revolution through the modern era of “Pax Americana.”

Students build a timeline based on these 24 key lessons as they move through the program. Moreover, each of these key, high-level lessons provides the opportunity for extensions—more detailed, sub-timelines that unfold under the heading of the broad timeline. For example, all students learn important basics about Columbus and Magellan in the key lessons on the Age of Exploration — but there is a more detailed sequence of lessons that follows the establishment of the entire Columbian exchange in the 16th and 17th centuries far beyond the initial excursions from Europe, establishing a worldwide, closed circuit — one that included trade between Asia and the Americas, further exacerbating the conflict between global trade and mercantilism, and setting the context for modern globalization. There are even opportunities, for the interested student, to go into controversies over how to understand particular epochs in history.

Not every student will go into this much depth on this particular topic — but all students will go into that much depth on some topics in history, and have a robust sense both of what they know and what there still is to learn.

Because of the focus on intellectual history, presentations are often followed by rich discussions, with students engaging in a mixture of historical fact-finding and philosophical debate. Writing is a critical part of solidifying understanding in history, and history is often grist for our writing curriculum.

These three elements add up: students enter middle school with an incredible rich, solid understanding of where their world came from. They have:

The purpose of an education in the language arts

Literacy is one of life’s most important achievements, and it is best honed primarily during the elementary years. Reading and writing are critically important — as key means for accessing the entire world of human culture, self-expression in an enduring way in almost any context, and the practical work of performing virtually any complex job or task.

And, more fundamentally, reading and writing are tools of thought. It is by learning to read and write well that we learn how to, for example:

In our elementary program, students learn to read and write — to analyze and understand written works and to express themselves — and they do so in a way that is consonant with learning how to think.

Our Language Arts pedagogy

To those ends, our elementary program approaches literacy in a systematic way, integrated across the whole curriculum.

Elementary students are motivated by their newfound capacity for intellectual work, to know causes and reasons for things, to understand and imagine things beyond their immediate experience, and to do all of this with their peers via the medium of language. What students read and write about is thus the entirety of their learning — their academic work in science, literature, history, and even math, their outside-of-school field trips, their goings out, and more.

Moreover, students learn these things with a variety of tools. See below for the specific curriculum we provide our students — which include systematic instruction in grammar, reading skills, reading comprehension, spelling, vocabulary, and all elements of the writing process.

At the most general level, our approach to reading is guided by:

Likewise, our approach to writing is guided by:

Because literacy is so important, substantial reading and writing occur every day in the classroom. Our elementary classrooms foster a culture of literacy, where students write frequently, read each other’s works, receive continuous individualized guidance and feedback from teachers on their writing, and challenge themselves and each other to take risks, reading difficult works, and articulating their most complex thoughts and feelings in writing.

Beyond the integrated, motivated approach described above, our elementary programs teach literacy systematically, area by area:

Grammar

It has been said that the study of grammar is to language what the study of anatomy is to science. We all readily learn to speak in sentences; essentially, all humans can all “do” grammar. But to understand how grammar works is a greater challenge, requiring us to understand the function of words, word groups that make up sentences, and the structure of sentences themselves.

A robust understanding of grammar enables children to express themselves through the written word with sophistication and clarity. When children learn about grammatical concepts, this knowledge can be integrated into the writing process—particularly the revising and editing stages—helping students to see the relevance of grammar to their own writing. The study of grammar also aids reading comprehension, enabling students to analyze the complex thoughts of others and to make sense of them.

The goal of our grammar curriculum is threefold:

Grammar is initially presented as a multisensory, hands-on approach through Montessori learning materials such as the Grammar Box, Sentence Analysis and Verb Tense materials. Once children are presented with the materials and the essential knowledge required for each particular grammar activity, they can explore the grammatical concept by matching, moving, and manipulating words and symbols to create patterns and sentences. This provides an open ended and often playful exploration of graand mmar, that prompts children to think critically about language:

In the upper elementary environment, children transition from working with the hands-on Sentence Analysis materials to sentence diagramming on paper. Sentence diagramming is a formal, visual-pictorial representation of the grammatical structure of a sentence. Sentence diagramming allows children to move beyond the confines of the Sentence Analysis material, and allows them to parse every element of sentences of unlimited length and complexity.

Vocabulary and Word Study

Specific words are the instruments by which we do our thinking, and through which we understand the thoughts of others. Having an extensive vocabulary allows one to better understand the world around us — to follow someone’s thinking, to read between the lines, to question what others have to say, to find the word that denotes precisely and connotes most eloquently what one wants to express.

And, critically, a rich vocabulary comes into play in the classroom in reading comprehension. Readers cannot comprehend the meaning of a given text without knowing what most of the words mean. A large vocabulary opens students up to a wider range of reading materials across all areas of the curriculum.

Students acquire vocabulary indirectly through exposure to a language-rich prepared environment, reading good literature, and conversing with adults and peers. The Montessori Word Study curriculum is a more direct approach to vocabulary, with lower elementary students examining, classifying and manipulating the properties of words: suffixes, prefixes, root words, compound words, antonyms, synonyms, homonyms, alphabetical sequence of words, rhyme, word families and so on.

In the upper elementary, students study Greek and Latin roots. More than half of the words in the English language have Latin or Greek roots, and this is especially true in content areas such as science and technology. This work helps children become more conscious of words and their origins, giving them keys which they may use to unlock the meanings of many words in their language. Emphasis is also placed on etymology across all areas of the curriculum, drawing children's awareness to the fact that words have a history, and that both the form and meaning of these words can change over time.

Reading

To become good readers, children must develop phonemic awareness (an understanding of the sounds that make up spoken language), phonics skills (an understanding of the sounds that letters/letter combinations make), the ability to read fluently and accurately, and the ability to comprehend what is read.

Some children enter the elementary classroom with phonemic awareness and phonic skills firmly in place. Others enter ready to learn phonograms and more advanced phonics with multi-syllabic words. Timely, individualized, explicit reading instruction is essential to ensuring children can access all subject areas of the prepared environment, and work collaboratively with their peers.

Our approach to reading instruction is based on the following principles:

Beyond the basic mechanics, more abstract reading comprehension skills are imperative across every area of the classroom. Without comprehension, words have no meaning and reading is simply sounding out the words on a page from left to right.

Good readers use a variety of strategies to construct meaning from what they read, such as:

When children struggle to comprehend meaning from text, explicit strategies can be taught, modeled and practiced:

One way we help students develop and practice these skills is through Literature Circles. Literature Circles pose targeted discussion questions requiring students to share their perceptions and ideas with their peers, consistently requiring textual support for their responses. They help student become close, insightful readers.

Preparing key word outlines to summarize nonfiction text is another way children can develop and practice reading comprehension skills within an authentic context. Children read nonfiction text“often from history or science”and are required to essentialize the information in their own words, before writing a report or presenting that information in some format to their peers.

As with reading mechanics, reading comprehension is formatively assessed by the teacher on an ongoing basis.

Teacher Read Aloud and Free Reading

Reading aloud to children plays an especially critical role in developing children's vocabulary, their knowledge of the natural world, and their appreciation for the power of the imagination.

Reading aloud introduces the language of books, which differs from the informal language heard in daily conversations and in the media. Literary language is more descriptive and uses more formal grammatical structures. The value of reading chapter books to elementary children therefore exposes children to a linguistic and cognitive complexity not typically found in speech.

Reading aloud introduces books and types of literature—historical fiction, poetry, short stories, biographies—that children might not discover on their own. History, science, and geography come alive through our elementary read-aloud selections, from Ancient Greece (Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad by Rosemary Sutcliffe) to Medieval Times (Canterbury Tales, by Geraldine McLaughlin) to Shakespearean England (Cue for Treason, by Geoffrey Trease). Reluctant readers observe the joy their teacher and peers receive from reading and discussing literature, and can be motivated to pick up a book on their own.

“Free reading” complements Read Aloud and Literature Circles. Time is put aside during the weekly schedule for students to read books or other material of their own choosing, purely for pleasure. Providing a well-resourced, age appropriate classroom library is key. Free reading contrasts with traditional reading programs that may require a student to choose a book from a list of titles, read for a certain amount of time each night, keep a reading log, obtain a parent signature to “vouch” for their reading, or provide rewards for reading a certain number of books.

The Study of Literature

We offer students a program for the systematic study of literature that bears heavily on all aspects of reading comprehension and writing.

Writing

We emphasize writing as an essential way to develop, organize, clarify, and communicate thoughts and ideas. As students attempt to write clearly and coherently about increasingly complex ideas, their writing serves to propel their intellectual growth.

Children come to understand that writing is a process, not just a product, and that by using specific writing techniques, and following the writing process—prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing—they can produce consistency high quality writing.

(Not every piece of writing the child produces needs to, or indeed should be subject to this process. Much writing in the elementary classroom is everyday writing, such as work journals, taking notes for a science experiment, and so on. Particularly in Lower Elementary, our teachers are cognizant of the balance between holding children accountable for using learnt knowledge and skills in their writing, and creating a culture of joyful self-expression, free of the pressure of constant correction and feedback.)

Writing is omnipresent in our elementary classrooms. Our approach to writing instruction is based on the following principles:

Spelling

Despite the inherent challenges in English writing instruction, the written English language does conform to predictable patterns, and more importantly, those patterns can be taught directly to students. Spelling instruction of reliable patterns enable students to analyze and categorize words, and to spell a high percentage of words without memorization.

Our approach to spelling instruction is based on the following principles:

One notable tool is the personal dictionary, of which our Montessori classrooms make great use. When a student comes to the teacher for the spelling of a word, or asks the teacher to check the spelling of a word, it is written in the child's own personal dictionary. These are an excellent tool for emerging writers: the words are important, often being high frequency words, and they are part of the child's individual writing vocabulary. Personal dictionaries create independence for young writers around the writing process, reinforce spelling memorization of high frequency words, introduce the concept of alphabetical order, and are the precursor of dictionary use.

Handwriting and keyboarding

There are two main goals when we teach elementary students handwriting:

In this early stage of elementary, our programs focus on reinforcing correct pencil grip and letter formation. (The early years of schooling are especially critical for handwriting instruction; once children have formed counterproductive habits in handwriting, such as poor pencil grip or inefficient letter formation, those habits can be difficult to change.)

To ensure legibility and fluency for those for children needing additional support or remediation, it is imperative to implement individualized handwriting instruction and daily handwriting practice based on the following principles:

Perfecting handwriting is important work for the lower elementary child. Keyboarding skills are introduced in the upper elementary environment. The foundational keyboarding skills students need to acquire are touch typing (with an emphasis on correct technique and good form, rather than speed) and word processing, with a view to typing up final drafts of work for publication. After students have mastered key placement, and are working on fluency and speed, the goal is for students to touch type with sufficient accuracy and automaticity to be able to record their thoughts.

The purpose of Science education

A basic function of human cognition is to understand why. Why does the sun trace an arc across the sky? How come pine cones fall off trees? Why do I get sweaty when I run? Curiosity about the world around us is at the very heart of human invention and creativity.

The sciences are the disciplines that enable a student to simultaneously sate and fuel that curiosity. For everything from the weather to furniture, from plants to stars, from wheels to light bulbs, students can ask what things are made of, how all their parts work together, what makes them move and how.

Our approach to science education enables students to ask and answer questions in a way that is empowering. It instills a sense of intrigue and enables students to develop understanding and then form further questions based both on the knowledge they already have and the insight they wish to gain in the future.

The core goal of science education is to allow students to tap into science, both its content and its methods, in a deep way. Elementary students can and should:

The natural sciences are tangible, major drivers of human knowledge and progress because they successfully use the former to generate the latter: they allow us uptake evidence and use it to gain causal knowledge of the world around us.

All academic content areas involve learning about a domain via evidential thinking—even literature. But science is uniquely formalized and powerful in a way that lays that basic pattern of thinking bare. In a similar way as to how math strengthens the foundations of mental functioning in all areas, so does science with a particular eye towards inference from observational evidence. The scientific method is invaluable, even to non-scientists.

Students also need to learn the content of key areas in science, the areas that offer a basic understanding of the experienced natural world. Besides the fact that they are tightly coupled—there is no real way to master the scientific method without learning a range of scientific content—there is also the fact that it’s important for everyone to feel at home in the natural world.

Our Science pedagogy

Our approach to science reflects the above priorities: to give students a framework of scientific understanding, and to do so in a way that fosters their internalizing the powerful cognitive tool that is the scientific method.

The child's direct experience of the natural world, namely, observation and hands-on exploration, forms the basis of the Guidepost elementary science program.

Teachers look for authentic opportunities to draw children’s awareness to natural phenomena – gardening and other outdoor work is the perfect time to highlight simple classification of leaf shapes; a classroom weather station is the perfect motivation to chart changes in temperature and precipitation; a recently reported earthquake may drive research into plate tectonics.

The Scientific Method at Guidepost

Our approach to the scientific method emphasizes rigorous discovery learning. Too often the scientific method is taught as a checklist: hypothesis, experiment, analysis, conclusion. Not only is this oversimplified, it is also disconnected from the elementary child’s experience.

In our classrooms, students master the early stages of scientific inquiry. Noticing things, observing, being confused and curious, asking questions—these are things that come naturally to elementary children, and are at the core of an elementary science education. Nurturing curiosity, being observant, knowing how to take one’s observations as evidence, are all general scientific skills that are relevant to all of life, and that many people never master. They are mastered by taking the time to break apart a seed and explore its inner workings, to stare at the night sky and to notice a thousand details, to be confused about magnets and to ask a thousand questions.

Our students practice:

Terms, definitions, and explanations are also critically important; our students also learn how to conceptualize data, make logical inferences, interpret experiments, and codify their understanding with technical vocabulary. But come at the end of a long process of empirical engagement—not at the beginning. For these things crystallize answers to mysteries, the mysteries must first be discovered and the questions first asked.

The content areas are chosen to be amenable to learning the above method, and to really make comprehensible a major swath of the child’s experience of the world.

Botany as a Science gateway

Botany is a major focus because plants accessible and interesting to even young children in a way that is potentially deeply scientific. They are highly amenable to all types of observation: everyday exploration, microscopic observation, and dissection. All stages of their lifecycle are visible and open to investigation. They are also susceptible to limited manipulation and engineering (e.g. gardening, physical manipulation). And, on top of that, they offer an opportunity to study in a focused way the universal elements of biology—nutrition, reproduction, and growth—that are relevant to all other organisms whether or not they locomote, feel, etc. Relevant, too, is that plants are ubiquitous. They are something a student can be sensitized to and observe constantly in their life, resulting in tremendous outside-the-classroom transference of efficacy and curiosity.

Science in our classrooms

Science is the classroom is activity- and experience-based, driving students to learn to ask and answer questions in a scientific way. Science presentations and activities are pursued by each student least once a week, with ample opportunities for extensions.

Teachers use many demonstrations to appeal to children's natural curiosity and imagination. These exciting demonstrations invariably precipitate the question, “How did you do that?,” challenging children to repeat the demonstrations themselves to discover the how and why. Children go on to independently perform many more experiments across all branches of science.

A meticulously prepared science area with an extensive supply of scientific equipment and materials, allows children to explore any topic of high interest to them (for example, the density of various liquids) and to experiment with variables (e.g. does applying more heat to a liquid alter its viscosity?), thus becoming young scientists.

Content is taught through demonstrations, experiments, stories, charts, and books. The curriculum moves through content units in a specific sequence (with lots of variations and offshoots provided for individual interest), providing a targeted foundation of scientific knowledge. In lower elementary:

In upper elementary:

Students thus enter middle school with a solid understanding of content that is highly relevant to both their future academic needs and to understanding the world in which they live. They have real knowledge of their own body (via a sequence of biology that culminates with human anatomy and cell biology), knowledge of electricity and the ubiquitous technology that enables it to power our lives, and knowledge of the basic mechanics that drive our planet’s dynamics (weather, geological change).

More importantly, they know how to think about these diverse domains. They know how the scientific method is similar and different across biology, astronomy, and energy physics. When one day they want or need to understand more about how a computer works, about climate controversies, or about a family member’s illness, they’ll be able to learn to do so—with curiosity and rigor.

The purpose of an education in the Fine Arts

In our literature program, students are inspired and enabled to learn skills like moral reasoning, empathy, and even virtue. They do so via the concrete learning material of a work of great literature, which they learn to read closely and treat as evidence for thinking about the deepest aspects of human nature.

Art appreciation teaches a related skill: that of learning to apply these concepts to the world of perceptual experience. Students don't just learn how to reflect on moral meaning and spiritually significant aspects of life—they learn to see it, to “read” it into the world around them as they experience it with their very eyes.

The two fundamental skills imparted in our art appreciation curriculum are:

Our approach to Art appreciation

Most approaches to arts education, as with typical approaches to literature, are relatively technical. They offer students historical context to help make sense of a painting or sculpture. Ultimately, they often try to teach students something about the technique of the art, such as principles of composition, of materials, or of schools of aesthetics that may have informed the artist.

Our approach to art appreciation minimizes these appeals art history, technique, and aesthetic schools. Instead it teaches students to approach the fine arts in the same way that they can approach books and movies: by directly experiencing the excitement and poignancy of the content of the artwork.

Similar to observation in the sciences, the process of “reading” a painting starts with direct observation, and involves suggesting more abstract possibilities followed by testing those “hypothesis” with evidence from the painting. The microcosm of the scientific method used in “reading” comes in the form of solving the mystery of what is happening in the story.

Likewise, similar to literature, visual art has characters and a story. However, while the role of a student reading a novel is to grasp the meaning of the words and imagine the world created, the role of a student reading a painting is the reverse: to grasp the meaning of the images and provide the words—their words—to the world they encounter. There is a clear story in the artwork, but they need to be the “author” to fully read and experience the story.

Students learn a series of techniques—such as attending to and imitating a depicted character’s pose, or following a character’s gaze to see where they are looking, or coming up with a title for a painting, or putting a thought bubble or dialog bubble to a character—that enable them to slowly, observationally piece together what is happening in a work of art. They come to notice that a boy’s posture indicates that he is intrigued, that the curve of his hand means he is nervous, that his facial expression means that he excited—and that this is very different from the other boy he is sitting next to. They learn to observe and analyze the human element in the finest details of a scene, experiencing its meaning by putting words to its story.

Finally, the student comes to appreciate the full meaning of a painting or a sculpture, and personally connects with it. Finding a personal connection to the theme gives students a real understanding of the work and, more importantly, an understanding of how the insight of the theme fits into their own life. Connecting the artwork’s theme to the same kind of moments in literature (and sometimes history) is extremely valuable in the student's understanding of the abstract idea, but a personal connection is what completes the powerfully emotional experience for the student.

This process of self-reflection—of seeing how the abstract meaning contributes insight to one's own life—is also essential to the subject of literature. The difference between art and literature, in this respect, is that the meaning of a novel takes the duration of the work to experience and may take weeks to come to fruition, while that of an artwork can be grasped in one class period.

The fine arts in our classrooms

Art appreciation lessons are given in small groups at least once per month. The format of the lesson is:

Artworks are selected with age-appropriate themes in mind. Here is a short list of examples:

A sample of works included in the curriculum include:

The purpose of an education in Literature

Almost all school teach at least some literature to elementary students. Yet we see that children—and adults—are reading less and less. Why don’t students learn to gain pleasure and value from great books, plays, and poems?

The answer lies in understanding the purpose of learning literature. Most programs don't have a clear conception of the purpose for reading literature, and default to technical or standardized-test-based learning outcomes: learning about symbolism or narrative point of view, or learning the bare rudiments of reading comprehension.

On our view, the goal of all education is to foster in a student the ability to live a full life. A guided journey through great literature affords our students the opportunity to develop some of the deepest foundations of such a life: the capacity for empathy and moral reasoning, deep inspiration, and profound self-understanding. There is little more important for a child—or an adult—than knowing how to be affected by and reflect upon great literature.

In math, we scaffold student learning with carefully designed, concrete learning materials. By interacting with particulars that a child can both literally and cognitively grasp, they come to more easily understand abstract quantitative relationships. With the checkerboard, younger elementary students can see the decimal system at work as they master multiplication. With the binomial cube, they learn to visualize the mechanics of the algebra of binomial expansion.

Literature is the equivalent of math materials for the subject of human beings. A great work of literature offers a concrete experience—colorful characters, charged dilemmas, wrenching decisions, and dramatic consequences—that scaffolds a child's ability to understand themselves and others. In seeing Anne Sullivan struggle to teach Helen Keller language in Gibson's The Miracle Worker, they understand patience, empathy, persistence, how connectedness to others and the world foster dignity and self-governance, and much more.

Literature, approached correctly—taught as a series of enthralling mysteries about human beings—is a learning material that allows them to build their own character and practice moral reasoning. In our elementary programs, students learn to understand how to draw an abstract theme out of the choices and events of a story—and how to relate it to their own lives and development.

The two key outcomes of our literature program are:

Our Literature pedagogy

To achieve these outcomes, our elementary programs helps students learn from a specific selection of great literature. Our program uses works of literature that are:

Alongside discussion, there are frequent opportunities for writing. Assignments range from short responses that are closely coupled with and foster discussion, to longer works that go through multiple drafts and represent a more enduring and synoptic understanding of the work.

Literature in our classrooms

Students cover the equivalent of approximately six novel-length works of literature per year. Each work is covered for four to five weeks.

The units begin with some motivation context about the work to be read, move on to the discussion-based approach outlined above, and conclude with post-reading discussions and culminating activities (integrated into our writing program) that solidify understanding and extend learning.

A sample of Lower Elementary works:

A sample of Upper Elementary works: