City School offers a unique approach to education that combines the best teachings available in education from yesterday and today, including complementary approaches developed in Charlotte Mason and classical schools, the Core Knowledge foundation, and current research.

Children as Individuals

CITY SCHOOL begins the education process by assessing the student’s individual strengths and weaknesses academically, socially, and spiritually. Then the teachers, parents, and student develop goals in these areas. Students are viewed as persons capable of interacting with all the knowledge available to them in nature, Scripture, literature and the arts. City School provides the guidance, materials and disciplined atmosphere necessary for children to joyfully grow in their understanding of the world around them.

The Integrated Curriculum

An integrated curriculum, where facts are taught in context, is essential for critical thinking and long term memory retention. When knowledge is taught anecdotally, it is like a skeleton without connective tissue. Facts become disordered and interrelations are lost, resulting in a passive student “blowing with every wind of doctrine.” An integrated curriculum tacitly recognizes that all knowledge proceeds from one source, the God of the universe, and that all knowledge is coherently related.

Our curriculum emphasizes humanities, mathematics, and science. Humanities, a broad discipline, includes reading, writing, languages, literature, history, geography, poetry and Scripture recitation, music and art, but subjects are taught as an integrated whole with the Truth as the center. We teach children to think about every aspect of life from the perspective that all events follow a sovereign plan, and not to treat spiritual matters as a separate part of life.

Memorization and Recitation

Exercising the memory makes our minds more agile, so CITY SCHOOL uses memorization techniques including writing, oral repetition, gesturing and playacting, and singing. Memorization will help children process language more efficiently and give them an ear for the “poetry” in many academic disciplines. Through recitation students put memorization into practice and learn to be confident speakers.

Narration

A child will listen better and remember longer when “telling back” is a part of the reading process. Before a story is read, children are invited to pay close attention. They are responsible for narrating events in their own words after the reading. As children grow older (around 4th grade), written narratives can supplement oral narration. Narration develops a student’s speaking skills, improving their concentration and ability to summarize and paraphrase.

Imitation in Writing, Drawing and Painting

If great works are worth studying at all, they are worth studying carefully. Imitation enhances a child’s observational powers and gives a foundation for individual expression. Written imitation includes studying a passage of great literature and attempting a verbatim recapture. On a more sophisticated level, the writer can put the passage into his own words or imitate the style of the passage. The same method applies to drawing and painting. To copy a masterpiece is to better understand it. Example: Children can study fine-art postcards for several minutes, turn them over, and attempt to draw the portraits or landscapes from memory. Embellishments can be added later.

Nature Walks

We go on nature walks for many reasons, including the following: Children need fresh air. The Creator of the universe seems paradoxically more intimate and more awesome in the great outdoors. Our science curriculum is nature based. Nature slows us down, increases our powers of observation and increases our wonder.

We live in a time of accelerating information, sound bites, and 3-4 second images on television. It takes time for children to learn to sit still and “consider the lilies” or “go to the ant.” Careful observation is a skill we nurture in children during their time at City School.

Socratic Method or Dialogue

Socratic dialogue is a question-and-answer “flow” between the teacher and students. The idea here is to get students to rely on their internal resources for answers—to take inventory of what they know—before providing them with new or “deeper” knowledge. Playing the “devil’s advocate” with students can help them to defend, and better understand, what they believe and develop the discourse of why they believe it.

Art

CITY SCHOOL teachers plan art projects and activities to coincide with the students’ humanities curriculum whenever possible. The classroom teacher also supplements the humanities curriculum with materials from the visual arts and picture studies, drawing on the best of the classics to illustrate a topic under discussion in the classroom.

Music

CITY SCHOOL provides music instruction largely in the area of choral singing and basic theory. The music teacher seeks to expose the children to a wide variety of music styles, incorporating or supplementing the humanities curriculum whenever appropriate.

Drama

CITY SCHOOL provides drama instruction to all students. Drama, as a theater art, is a tool for expression rooted in the need for children to portray their creativity on the stage in order to inform, persuade, and instruct. City School students learn to view, critique, create, and perform through drama.

Foreign Language

CITY SCHOOL offers Spanish to all students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. The foreign language program seeks to expose the children to another language in the early elementary years.

Physical Education

The physical education program at CITY SCHOOL is designed to heighten the child’s awareness of and desire for physical fitness. Students will engage in activities such as basketball, soccer, volleyball, gymnastics, and kickball. These activities will:
- encourage development of good sportsmanship
- help the student learn to function in a group activity
- put winning and losing in perspective
- improve physical fitness
- develop character in a practical environment

Diverse Learning Environment

All children learn in unique ways because we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”. Thus, we acknowledge each child’s unique gifts and personality, believing that this is part of the intelligent, purposeful design with which our Creator endowed all humanity. Students with diverse learning styles and academic abilities are welcome at City School.