SPARHAWK LOWER SCHOOL
MISSION STATEMENT
Respect for children and trust in their inherent enthusiasm for learning are central to the design of Sparhawk School's educational processes and objectives. Our purpose is to provide a foundation of academic strength, to facilitate critical and creative thinking, and to nurture qualities of character in our students that will sustain them throughout their lifetimes, whatever challenges and adventures may come.
SPARHAWK AT A GLANCE Sparhawk School is an independent, progressive day-school on New England’s North Shore for students in grades PreK-12. It was founded in l994 by Louise Stilphen, and is built on the premise that in a resourcerich environment, where all members of our community share in the responsibility of fostering a culture of kindness, intellectual vitality can flourish for students of all ages. Honoring children and celebrating ideas is the work that we do. We value deep inquiry, encourage exploration and applaud innovation. Children in our school gain skills that empower them to be self-initiating, self-directing learners, as well as joyful, responsible, and independent beings. Above all, this is the measure of our success.
PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION Sparhawk School honors the uniqueness of each and every student. Our educational tenets and curricular considerations derive from recognized standards of excellence; however, implementation is shaped by student's individual needs, goals, and dreams. Students have a voice at Sparhawk. As progressive educators, we recognize the "whole child" by fostering the development of academic minds within a community that also shapes and advances students' social and emotional well-being. We appreciate each student’s ability to learn and grow and we believe that the measure of success is in the integration of their academic and personal growth. First and foremost in our planning and decision-making is assessment of how our students will benefit now and for the future. The interplay of these passionately-held values creates the signature Sparhawk experience.
THE OUTDOOR CLASSROOM
“To raise a naturebonded child is to raise a rebel, a dreamer, an innovator… someone who will walk their own verdant, winding path.” ~Nicolette Sowder
Creator of Wilder Child
WOODS
VIEW PREK + KINDERGARTEN
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” ~William Butler Yeats Poet and Nobel Prize Winner
Beginning your child’s education in Sparhawk School’s early elementary program promotes the foundation for a life-long love of learning in a nurturing, child-centered environment. Influenced by Reggio-Emilia, Montessori, Multiple Intelligences and Progressive Learning Theory, our program offers your child individualized attention, the time and space to cultivate curiosity, and a daily schedule that provides both academic and play-based activities. Throughout their day, Sparhawk children immerse themselves in nature, build social-emotional awareness through thoughtful community-oriented activities, and begin building independent thinking skills and confidence. Sparhawk students, even our youngest, learn that their "voices" matter.
Our staff deeply respect children and trust in their inherent enthusiasm for learning. When your child enrolls at Sparhawk, your family joins a community where collaboration between parents, teachers, and students is paramount. You and your child are supported at Sparhawk. Growing up can be hard at times. Parenting can be challenging. Together, we work cooperatively to ensure your child experiences the support and cooperation to engage in the busy task of growing up. We place a special emphasis on socialemotional development in our Pre-K and Kindergarten program. We accomplish that by building a value system that honors community, creative and critical thinking, empathy, and conflict resolution.
CREATING GOOD GLOBAL CITIZENS
FARM CAMPUS UPPER ELEMENTARY PROGAM
The fundamental purpose of Sparhawk's Upper Elementary program is to cultivate independent thinking, protect children's natural joy and ease in learning, and to preserve their sense of creativity, curiosity, and self-esteem. Children flourish in Sparhawk's resource-rich and emotionally supportive environment. Sparhawk offers a progressive and experiential approach to education. Collaboration and teamwork, creativity and imagination, critical thinking and problem-solving, are the core tenets of the Sparhawk approach. Your child will learn in a hands and minds-on environment through authentic experiences. We are dedicated to maintaining the small class sizes that ensure the continued quality of curriculum that each student receives. With an average 9:1 student to teacher ratio, each child benefits from individualized attention these ratios afford.
RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND NEUROSCIENCE CONFIRMS WHAT PARENTS HAVE LONG KNOWN Every child learns in a unique way, and their ability to learn depends largely on the suitability of the learning environment . Thus, it is of paramount importance to choose a school that promotes your child’s strengths and abilities. We will respect and encourage your child’s unique profile of strengths and teach them to embrace those strengths as a personal resource.
THE SPARHAWK WAY
EXPLORE CURRICULUM "Finding the proper educational fit is a defining moment in each family's life. No website, conversation or brochure can adequately convey the feeling a student gets from walking into a classroom that feels like home." ~Louise Stilphen Sparhawk Headmaster and Founder
HUMANITIES
We encourage our students' emerging abilities to make sense of, even question, what they read and hear. In other words, we teach them to become critical thinkers as well as knowledge generators. The scope of content in the humanities is limitless. Thematic programs provide frames of reference for the integration of vast amounts of knowledge and for crosscurricular insights necessary for effective consideration of mighty ideas.
We use thematic curriculum each year to provide this focus. For example, Community Theme Time is an exciting and intensive humanities experience where students delve deeply into thematic curriculum. Our experienced teachers also find creative ways to weave and connect this theme throughout the curriculum, in hands & minds-on ways. This class is solely dedicated to mixed age experiential exploration of specific concepts particularly through the lenses of science and the humanities.
WORLD LANGUAGE Sparhawk’s world languages program uses a dynamic learning approach that begins in PreK and evolves across the grades through high school. Early elementary students are introduced to world language through Spanish art classes. The focus is on the enjoyment of learning another language and culture, readily accessible to young children through song, art, role play, cooking, and learning basic commands. Our goal at this age is to carefully cultivate an appreciation and excitement around the study of other cultures.
Classes for our students are highly interactive. The four skills of listening, speaking and then reading and writing are emphasized in an organic fashion, similar to how a child learns their primary language. Students are encouraged to first hone their listening and speaking skills, and, as they progress, to read and write with ever-higher levels of ease and fluency.
LANGUAGE ARTS Sparhawk School’s academically and artistically-rich approach to reading, literary analysis, critical thinking, writing, speaking, and listening is the keystone to our interdisciplinary curriculum. Language skills are the primary means through which students gain access to the world’s great stores of knowledge. Skills learned in language arts transfer to every domain of the students’ lives and stay with them forever. As your child's language arts skills improve, confidence grows, and they begin to apply the writing process effectively in other classes. Students express their knowledge concisely and accurately in science. They synthesize information and form their own opinions based on research in history, express sensory, emotional and metaphysical experiences in poetry, and articulate proofs, principles, and conceptual understanding in math.
NATURE + PLAY BASED LEARNING
"If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow." ~Alfie Kohn
Author and Lecturer
EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION
“Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.” ~John Dewey
Scholar and Philosopher
DESIGN THINKING Design thinking integrates STEM subjects and the art of design in education. These programs teach students to think critically and have an engineering or design approach toward real-world problems while using and building their mathematics and science base.
The Sparhawk Lower Campus is equipped with a Makerspace, which is utilized during regular class time and during enrichments.This is a zone of discovery where learners can collaborate, share ideas and build interests.
SCIENTIFIC LEARNING
Science classes are designed to enthrall and inspire students with the wonders of the natural world. Students are intrinsically inclined toward questioning and discovery, a quality we embrace. Driven by curiosity, our young adventurers find Sparhawk's hands-on and minds-on scientific investigations irresistible. Our students learn scientific facts, vocabulary, tools, and processes that are used by professional scientists in their continual quests for information and
understanding. Science is explorative because it is a discipline that uses what we know, so far, to investigate what we do not know yet- a natural for young minds because everything can, and should, be questioned. When taught joyously, your child can learn that science is a domain for explorers and its frontier is endless in scope and time. Our goal is to initiate students into what is possible in this fascinating field of study.
KINESTHETIC + OUTDOOR
ACTIVE
BODY
CENTERED MIND
“When a room is dominated by predigested materials, the message is implicit: others have done the thinking, you memorize.” ~Francis Hawkins Early Education Expert
We recognize the importance of movement, physical activity, and outdoor play and its impact and influence, on the cognitive, social-emotional and physical well-being of our students. Kinesthetic and outdoor learning is embedded in our curriculum and is an integral part of our everyday learning at Sparhawk. The classrooms are designed with a variety of tools to increase movement and assist in centering the mind and body to maximize your child's learning experience. Sparhawk teachers vary the length of activities in a given class period and are in tune with the needs of each individual and group, recognizing our inherent need as humans to move.
We value and recognize that childhood and the outdoors go hand-in-hand. There are innumerable bright learning opportunities available to your child on our seven-acre woodland campus and playgrounds. Learning occurs in our outdoor classroom during morning, mid-day and afternoon recess periods as well as during academically appropriate times. This is a time to reboot; to hone social skills; to discover and exercise; to engage in imaginative or cooperative games such as: Building woodland forts and villages Exploring the water flow of run-off puddles morphing into hillside streams Practicing sport skills and playing games Sledding, running, laughing, playing games and enjoying the natural elements
HANDS + MINDS-ON LEARNING
MATHEMATICS Math is a foreign language, in the sense that few students have much explicit experience of it before coming to school. It is an abstract, ordered, logical, and convergent language that, in the earliest years, requires a connection to the real world. It needs reference to real objects, otherwise, math is intangible and mysterious, abstract and untouchable at a time of life when much of experience and understanding is concrete rather than abstract, and in the absence of experience, meaningless. At Sparhawk, students of all ages are given the opportunity to solve practical, real-life problems as well as those found in standard math curriculum. In other words, we combine traditional skilldevelopment and practical applications. The applications, often called “handson” or “experiential” learning, allow students to use and practice their emerging toolbox of skills, in context, and in ways that are intrinsically interesting and make sense to them. The result is greater enthusiasm, sustained interest and, ultimately, comprehension. ENRICHMENTS
Enrichments are six-week-long courses that offer learning experiences outside the regular curriculum. The rich menu of choices allows students to sample from a variety of topics, skills, and experiences they might not otherwise discover. Teachers create courses that engage visual, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal, musical, logical and mathematical, linguistic, and naturalistic intelligences.
VISUAL, MUSIC & DRAMATIC ARTS
THE
ARTS We believe that experiences in the arts are essential and that they are a value for one's entire lifetime. The abstract, symbolic nature of the arts are a valid and powerful means of searching for and sharing fundamental questions and truths about the human experience. Participation in the arts inspires creativity, fosters the development of problem-solving, critical-thinking, and literacy skills, and builds self-esteem and character.
VISUAL ARTS
The mission of our visual arts program is to help students fulfill their inherent creative potential, develop confidence using their artistic voices, and to make visual art a comprehensible language.
On a stroll through the art room, one might observe students working with clay, studying perspective, doing still-life studies, weaving, or acting out scenes from famous works of art.
Your child will connect with art in a variety of ways, including through independent and guided exploration, technical instruction, and the study of art's role in reflecting and influencing culture throughout history.
Our students showcase their learning at two spring events, the Lower School Art Show and the Artist Wax Museum. The Wax Museum (pictured above) is a cross-curricular research project including language, visual and dramatic arts components for students in the 4th and 5th grades. In addition, we host several exciting community arts events each year including Soup + Cider and Open Studios.
Movement, song, drama, and games are a few of the elements that enhance both the classic and uncommon themes explored in the classroom.
MUSIC
Movement is an important part of every music class, as is singing and developing rhythm, and our songs most often incorporate instruments. We improvise, create, play, and dance our way through a carefully created scope-and-sequence of music learning. There are many opportunities for joyous performance, both during the school day and in planned concerts. On any given day, a visitor will find our musicians happily playing xylophones, percussion instruments, and keyboards, or singing in chorus with friends. The music program is further enhanced by after-school private lesson offerings. Sparhawk students learn to read music on the staff, sing solfége, explore melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre based on the Orff Schulwerk and Kodaly methods. Your child will be exposed to a wide range of music and styles from traditional folk songs to contemporary and original works. Students improvise, compose, listen to and analyze music, understanding its relationship to history, culture, and other arts. Sparhawk School is proud to be a Satellite School of Seacoast Academy of Music. SAM offers a wide range of optional music lessons taught after-school by experienced music professionals. DRAMA
Our teachers use theater and drama elements as experiential tools for teaching and learning. Dramatic experiences are collaborative and interactive, giving students the opportunity to explore this important form of artistic communication. Examples of learning: Bird-naming ceremony- students present their class name through student-generated skits. Our teachers create communitytime experiences where students are immersed in learning through role playing. Class and multi-grade plays and historical reenactments explore thematic topics from sea shanties to world myths. Enrichments include movie-making, improv and puppetry.
EVIDENCE
OF LEARNING SHOWCASING ACHIEVEMENT
Sparhawk's comprehensive and formal threepart assessment process considers the growth of the whole child, far beyond just their basic academic benchmarks. Trimester Review of Achievement The Trimester Review of Achievement is a comprehensive scope-and-sequence inventory of important academic skill sets. You will receive this series of checklists and commentaries on your child's progress three times per year. This Review tells you very specifically what your child's foundational skills are, item by item, at that specific moment in time in their development. Portfolios The Portfolio is a window into your child’s learning experience, a manifestation of skills, and a visual record of their journey through each grade level. Portfolios are curated collections of work samples, pictures, and reflections created by your child. While the Trimester Review is a tool written for adults to make sense of the learning process, the Portfolio represents achievement in the language of the children. Narrative In June, your child’s homeroom teacher will compose a personalized passage summarizing your child’s year-long experience of social, emotional, and academic growth. This writing is a heartfelt commentary, indicating a deep understanding of your child as an individual. Parent Conferences You will meet one-on-one with your child's teacher to engage in in-depth conversations regarding academics and the overall well-being of your child. In addition, the staff and school Director are readily accessible on a daily basis.
TOUR. EXPLORE. LOVE. CHOOSING SPARHAWK
The first step in the admissions process at Sparhawk School is to schedule a tour with our Admissions Department. During your tour, you will explore our campus, engage with our teachers, and meet our community. After your tour, interested families may schedule a full day visit for their child. The final step in the admissions process is completing the application, located online for your convenience. MAKING SPARHAWK A REALITY
We are committed to making independent progressive education at Sparhawk a reality for as many students as possible. Our financial aid program is aligned completely with our vision as a school. We seek kind & compassionate students with academic excellence who are active in their school and community. Financial aid and scholarship information is available on our website: sparhawkschool.com/admissions
SPARHAWK SCHOOL
Lower School 259 Elm Street Amesbury, MA 01913 Upper School & Admissions Office 4 Noel Street Amesbury, MA 01913 Sparhawkschool.com 978.388.5354