Middle School

Classes 6 through 8

What are the needs of today’s adolescents? How can students be better prepared for high school? How can we change the way we meet students so that they experience more of a difference in our approach and expectations between Classes 1-5 and Classes 6-8?

These are some of the questions that our faculty has been exploring recently. While the evolution of a "Middle School" concept is not yet complete, we acknowledge that there is a need for teachers who are specially trained to work with adolescents.

The beautiful setting of the Nelson Waldorf School leads us naturally to focus on outdoor education as a major component of the curriculum through these upper elementary grades. Find out more details by clicking on each class heading below.

• Class 6: Roman and Medieval history; astronomy; Central and South American geography; geology; physics (sound and light); beginning algebra; geometry and geometric drawing; business math (interest percentage), ratio and proportion.
• Class 7: The Age of Discovery; Renaissance history; creative writing; African geography; physics (electricity and magnetism); inorganic chemistry; human physiology (health and nutrition); algebra; geometry; business math (profit/loss).
• Class 8: Modern history; world geography; Industrial Revolution, French and American Revolutions, world geography; physiology (human skeleton); physics; algebra; geometry; organic chemistry; meteorology; epic and dramatic poetry.

Middle School Enrichment Programs

The school has recently introduced experiential-education initiatives, which are designed to bring about more hands-on and project-based learning to the students while also offering them an element of elective or choice that they are ready for in these grades. Read more about these programs here.

Physical Movement/Education

Classes 6 through 8 receive Movement Education as an essential component of their curriculum. Our goals and objectives are to develop:

• an understanding and a healthy approach to movement and exercise;
• an increased social awareness and responsibility (the ability to work and play with a group);
• an understanding of, as well as specific skills in relationship to, sport and games;
• a sense of growing strength, flexibility, and endurance through movement activities;
• the ability to listen to and follow instructions; and
• a movement program in harmony with physical development, bringing appropriate activities for each stage of development.

Recreation activities may include pentathlon training, circuit training, running, archery, skipping, cooperative games, skiing, and swimming. Supervised activities take place outdoors and in the gym at lunch break.

Eurythmy

Eurythmy as a subject is part of the Waldorf School curriculum from kindergarten through twelfth grade. It is an art of movement that has existed for almost ninety years. Eurythmy is not based on age-long experience, like music or painting; these arts are entirely integrated in our culture and for centuries they have become an everyday phenomenon. Eurythmy is still fully in development and has consequently remained a specific Waldorf School subject. Eurythmy requires that we become inwardly mobile. When we hear sounds, we are taken along into continuous change, from high to low, from soft to loud. We are also carried along on the course of a melody, in changes of melody and melodic moods, and in the subtleties of spoken language. In eurythmy, these changes and their related inner movements are made manifest by movements of the body. This is done both individually and in groups. The body becomes an instrument, making visible what otherwise is only audible, i.e., music/speech.

French as a Second Language

French is taught twice a week. In the middle grades children learn conversational French through practice reading, short plays, and writing small skits, which they enjoy performing for their peers. In Class 8, students deepen their learning with more formal applications of language and writing. As well, the study of French culture is introduced, where students look at places in the world that French is spoken and at how and why languages enrich our life. French culture is studied in numerous creative ways, with the hope that the students will travel and use their French in the future.

I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to an extreme old age.

Henry David Thoreau