There is a better way to teach and learn—and a better way to engage and act. At CCS, students are actively and intimately engaged with their studies and their world. Education is about challenge—in thought and in action. We always value awareness, individuality, and diversity over standardized grades.
LANGUAGE ARTS
Don’t Recite a Line, Write a Saga
Walk around our campus and you will see children with books. Carrying them, sharing them, and, of course, reading them. They bring their books with them to lunch just to sneak in a page or two. Readers make writers, which is probably why CCS students’ natural love of storytelling is so vibrant and nuanced from Kindergarten through graduation. The goal of our language arts program is for our students to develop a life-long love of reading and writing - a love of language -and to hone the skills necessary to communicate and connect with the world around them.
Our faculty use elements of Lucy Calkins’ updated Reading Workshop to teach students to read, and then encourage personal voice and experience to help the children craft meaningful stories of their own. From narrating their Identity Journal in Kindergarten to writing their I Am From poems in 6th grade, CCS students take the solid foundation of structure, grammar, and purpose imbued in them by their teachers to pen the arcs of their lives and the diverse world in which they live. The complexities of the texts, themes, and strategies evolve over the grades in their guided reading groups, writer’s workshops, and lit circles, resulting in engaged literary minds.
MATH
Don’t Accept a Theory, Craft a Hypothesis
Math is everywhere. Our teachers said it to us when we were in elementary school, and we show it to our students every day as the integral foundation of our math program. The CCS math curriculum is based on real life as much as possible as mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it. We do not teach math as a rote set of algorithms and bundles of memorization, but rather demonstrate it inside and outside the classrooms so that students see how integral it is to discovery. Everything from basic addition and subtraction to algebraic problem solving is taught in the classroom and then mastered in action, whether it be cooking, measuring, woodworking, block‐building, or graph-making.
Experiencing a multi-dimensional math curriculum that is integrated in all aspects of life allows our students to see numbers and solutions from different perspectives and design new ways to solve problems. Our faculty utilize CGI (Cognitively Guided Instruction) as a benchmark for math instruction. CGI supports the idea that children enter school with a great deal of informal and intuitive knowledge of mathematics, and children will identify themselves as mathematical thinkers when the environment encourages children to use procedures that are meaningful to them. This work develops the true markers of a mathematician.
LIFE STUDIES
Don’t Glance from Afar, Get Up Close and Personal
Life Studies is the core of the CCS curriculum and the way that we empower our students to authentically engage in the world around them, both familiar and vast. Children are natural born scientists. They are constantly making observations and making sense of the world around them through meaningful experiences. Students go on frequent field trips- often more than one a month- so that they are presented with tactile learning experiences that help them become better researchers who make connections about the world.
It’s one thing to read about the rainbow eucalyptus trees, but another to go to the Huntington Gardens to look at and touch them. CCS also brings performers, storytellers, and cultural experiences to campus often, enabling the entire school to experience these artists as a community. Identity work is done at every grade- from namesake research to hair studies- and many projects, like self portraits, are repeated every year. Examples of additional subjects we explore include:
Lower Grades: Indigenous Peoples, Family & Elders, Human Body
Middle Grades: Geography, Water, Family History, Transportation, CA History
Upper Grades: Marine Biology, World Geography, US History, and Ancient Cultures
The Arts
Don’t Fear Failure, Fail Creatively
The arts aren’t supplemental at CCS, they are essential. Visual Arts/Print Shop, Creative Movement, Music, Library, and Physical Education are integrated into everything we do and act as natural extensions of the classrooms and what is being taught in them. If one classroom is doing a study on Japanese American history, then they are also learning a fan dance, playing Japanese music on xylophone, reading stories about the internment, perfecting woodblock prints in the art studio, and more. By providing myriad avenues for each student to access a subject, we are able to tap into their individual, natural connections to the topics, therefore making their knowledge of each more substantial, meaningful, and memorable.
The arts enhance cognitive development, foster creative expression and the ability to solve problems, and encourage a willingness to take risks. They provide new ways to understand the world and pave avenues to express intricate concepts. When CCS students create songs, dances, stories, and art, they express complex and sophisticated ideas about their studies while exemplifying original thinking and responsibility that are the hallmarks of education for democracy.
STEM (the “E” is for Environment)
At CCS, the “E” in STEM education stands for Environmental Stewardship- a key tenet of our educational philosophy. From the world just outside the classrooms to the those beyond our hemispheres, our STEM program is rooted in Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) that utilize investigative thinking, design solutions, analyzing data, and evidence-based arguments to make scientists out of all CCS students. In our outdoor classroom- among our raised planting beds and ongoing experiments- children learn about the water cycle, climate change, biomimicry, and the growth life of the plants and trees that surround them on campus. When they are inside our science lab, they dive into technology, microscopic examinations, ciphers, and binary code.
This multidisciplinary work happens at all grade levels, with varying levels of intricacy, so that the study of life, its properties, technology, and the forces of our world are familiar to all. By the time they are CCS graduates, our students have learned not only how to grow and nurture a seedling, but also why that seedling would grow differently on the bank of the LA River than it did in CCS’ backyard.
Find out how our students' successes go far beyond a report card.