Student Life
A Typical Day
In the morning, Lower School children are greeted by teachers as they walk to their classrooms and get settled for the day, while the Middle School students head to their lockers to gather what they need for their first period class before they go to their homeroom for announcements.
As the day unfolds, our kindergarten (ECC) children—who have finished their calendar and weather activities—are listening to their teacher read a story to them before they gather their P.E. uniforms and go to P.E. class in the gym. The first graders are busy with art creations inspired by the work of Frank Stella, and the second graders are writing journal entries about what they might see on their field trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The third graders, who've just come from singing a two-part harmony in music class, question a visiting park ranger from Point Lobos about the habitats of marine mammals as they touch and hold the samples of furs and bones of local marine life the ranger has brought to the class.
The fourth grade students, who have just finished taking a vocabulary quiz in their Spanish class, have broken up into small literature circle groups and are discussing the latest chapters they have read from the gold rush novel, By the Great Horn Spoon. The fifth graders are busy preparing for their afternoon Multicultural Festival, where they deliver oral presentations about their family history to their parents, the teachers and students in the Lower School.
Meanwhile in the Middle School, students are absorbed in a range of projects and activities. In language arts class, half of the sixth grade students are choosing their best poem—the haiku? the free verse?—to present at the Middle School Poetry Reading before an audience of parents, teachers, while the other half are in art class, using their laptop computers to research the life and artwork of Vincent Van Gough. In the dance studio, the seventh grade girls are stretching at the barre, before they learn a new combination of leaps and pirouettes; while the seventh grade boys are in music class learning their choral parts for the Middle School musical. In the Spanish classroom, half of the eighth grade students are speaking in Spanish as they role-play visits to a Spanish pharmacy during which they describe their cold symptoms and ask for medicine, while the other half of the eighth grade class is in social studies—where they have been divided into two groups, the Spartans and the Athenians, and they are debating the Peloponnesian War.
In the afternoon at 3 o’clock, the Lower and Middle School students gather their books and backpacks. While some students will go home for the afternoon, others will stay and head off to their after-school activities.
It’s a typical day at the Lower and Middle School.
