Lower School

List of 3 items.

• Piety

  Loving, respecting, and honoring God and parents is the grounding of a formative education: an education in love. It provides the firm footing for children to grow in virtue and to have the humility to learn from others.
  
  “Piety” is an old word, but a word well worth reviving. Piety recognizes that there are realities that we ought to respond to in love and respect. In Proverbs, we learn “that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and, in the Ten Commandments, we learn to “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.”  In the Lower School, we seek to partner with parents and churches as we guide children to a life of piety, loving God and their neighbor.

• The Liberal Arts

  Arts are skills that become second nature through imitation and practice, and in the Lower School, we focus on the Liberal Arts of math and language, which includes the love of story. 

  
  Mathematical skills are developed through Singapore math strategies that use concrete and pictorial models, such as bar models and number bonds, to introduce concepts and to provide children with the ability to unlock word problems.

  
  In the verbal arts, our primary focus is on reading - students learn to read with understanding, to interpret what they have read, and to connect it to other learning; this is the art of grammar. But logic and rhetoric are also developed, as students practice making compelling arguments (logic) and practice speaking and writing persuasively (rhetoric).

  
  Throughout our curriculum, we constantly reinforce a love of story: history, Bible, and literature all appeal to the human love of, and need for, narration. We delight in stories and grow spiritually, morally, and intellectually through hearing and re-telling them.

• Gymnastic and Musical Education

  Humans have bodies and souls, and classical education aims for something greater than than filling minds with information. Two ways in which we approach this are through gymnastic education (training the body) and musical education (tuning the heart).

  
  Gymnastic education is a deliberate use of the body in the process of education. Through physical education, play at recess, intentionally active classrooms, and training in self-control, we want to help students grow healthy bodies and have the strength and energy to engage in learning.

  
  Musical education is more than learning notes, instruments, or singing - musical education poetically trains the heart to engage reality joyfully and with wonder. This mode of education seeks to expand students' moral imagination as they delight in the possibilities of God’s creation. Taught through imitation and in combination with rich stories, musical education builds children’s ability to imagine that there is goodness, truth, and beauty, and that they can seek this for themselves.