Willowbrook Campus

Our sixth graders have begun a sculpture unit with their art teacher, Brittany, a local sculpture artist. The first stage of the creative process leading up to sculpting an original dragon included some background research before preparing their Bestiary Report. This preliminary brainstorming involves a design sketch, their dragon’s species name, location, and descriptions of the dragon’s physical characteristics and behavior. Our sculptors then began to shape their dragons around a wire armature, mounted on a pedestal base. This interdisciplinary

Our 5th grade students recently visited the school’s regenerative farm, Rebel Mountain in Claremont, as part of their eco-literacy and gardening studies. While harvesting fruits and vegetables and observing growing practices was on the agenda for the farm field trip, the students also incorporated math and problem solving into their visit. “The kids were required to scale a recipe to feed the entire class and they had to harvest the volumes of food they found through their recipe conversion,” shares

Students in upper grades at our Willowbrook Campus enjoyed studies in African Culture through our Scholar in Residence Program this semester. Supported through SEEDS Arts & Education, the program included three workshop sessions led by Rose Mwangi. Ms. Rose, who is a teacher of African Culture and was the late Anneliese Schimmelpfennig’s personal assistant, led children through three educational workshop sessions including geography, language, music, dance, and drumming from several African countries. The students especially enjoyed learning the African dances.

The 5th grade students recently completed their Historical Figures Project presentations as part of the class American Revolution unit. Mr. Joshua shares, “Students selected a significant contributor to the American Revolution, researched, and then presented a lesson about that figure with an added creative element. Some were movies, news reports, Jeopardy matches, board games, sculptures, and song performances!”

Our Fourth Grade students recently visited the Bowers Museum to learn about life on the ranches back in the days of early California settlers. They looked at how the land was divided and jobs they could have had back then, and how to make clothing with paint designs using insect pigment. They also learned how the missions affected this land ownership, spreading religion across California.