SPECIALTY PROGRAM INFORMATION
Seaside Charter Schools strives to offer special subject classes that become an integral part of the curriculum. Students meet with the special subject teachers outside of the main lesson several times a week.
Program Highlights
- Handwork: Learning handcrafts plays an important role in the development of fine motor skills, development of the will, and creating intellectual capacity. Handwork offers many opportunities for practicing math skills and reinforcing tracking important in learning to read. All students at Seaside Charter Schools learn to knit, crochet, hand sew, embroider, as well as a variety of other such skills.
- Spanish: All students study Spanish at our school, beginning in Kindergarten. In addition to the practical benefits, study of another language also helps develop the child as a human being. The children gain a sympathetic picture of the culture, geography and history of the countries and people whose language they are studying. They compare and make connections not only in these regards but also with linguistic features. Learning a second language also helps to develop and sharpen listening skills and grammar awareness in the first language.
- Gardening: The sustainable garden program at Seaside Schools is a working, living project that promotes environmental stewardship and allows students to grow their own organic food while exploring nature through inquiry based learning and engaging in hands-on experiences. Students work the soil, build compost, plant, harvest, and prepare food. Repeating this work over years provides insight into the rhythm of nature and seasons.
- Yoga and Movement: Our yoga and movement curriculum develops students’ skill, spatial awareness, balance, and equilibrium. Students learn a full range of cooperative games, ball skills, and team sports as well as spending a 9-week interval specifically spent doing the practice of yoga. Our students can often be seen happily juggling, slack line walking, or playing a lively game of kickball, as they practice both fine and gross motor skills. In addition, the curriculum supports and complements the academic curriculum in age-appropriate ways.
- Music: It is widely known that a student’s experience with music is closely related to broader academic success. Music is an art that inspires teamwork while engaging both the logical and intuitive mind. At our school, music study combines listening, singing, playing, moving, creating, reading and performing. Every day is music day at Seaside Schools, as students will sing and play music on a daily basis through the grades. Students play recorders and other musical instruments such as glockenspiels throughout the grades. Main lessons introduce singing and rhythmic games and subject classes in strings and chorus expand the depth of musical experience and understanding.
- Woodworking: In Waldorf schools, Woodworking class is a part of the “Outer path” of education, which relates to sense observation and movement, and includes Drawing, Painting, Handwork, Woodwork, Modeling (clay, wax), Music. Woodwork requires a dedication to observing the results of your efforts. Using this basic principle, woodwork class builds physical and mental strength through overcoming challenges with design, effort, and persistence. At Seaside we strive to offer woodworking from grades 4-8. Through these classes, we teach students pleasure in bodily labor, and respect for it, habits of independence, order, accuracy, attention and industry, increase of physical strength, development of the power of observation in the eye, execution in the hand, and an appreciation for beauty.
