Subject Classes

All children at CWS participate in musical activities daily with their lead teachers. Singing, attentive listening, and coordinated movement are part of the daily musical activities in the youngest grades, where students also hear beautiful tones on chimes, glockenspiels, and lyres as part of their story and circle work in the early childhood program.

In the grades program, teachers introduce pentatonic flute work in grades 1-3 as part of their weekly Main Lesson work.

In Grade 2 students begin a weekly class with our music teacher. Lessons focus on tone, listening, unison singing, and rhythmic group movement. Students learn to sing with solfège syllables and hand signs and connect songs and various qualities of music to rich imaginative stories, the seasons, and their classroom work.

In grade 3, music classes add rhythm and picture notation to the singing and movement work. Engaging stories help students build mental pictures of rhythm concepts and children begin to read and write rhythms using stick notation and formal notation. Singing includes rounds and more complex melodies and movements.

In Grade 4, all students have a music class three times per week and learn to play an orchestral string instrument (violin, viola, cello, or bass). Students continue to expand their capacities for more complex singing and build on their work with instrumental instruction with multiple classes a week until they graduate from the eighth grade.

In Middle School, students may have the opportunity to join a middle school choir, a recorder ensemble, an optional strings chamber group, a creative music elective, or a taiko drumming ensemble.

The CWS Music and Strings Program hosts two large concerts each year to celebrate and share the work of the students. Our music teacher also helps connect interested string players to our local youth symphony, private lesson teachers, and other musical opportunities in our community.

We teach handwork in order to learn practical skills and dexterity but also to further cognitive development. Handwork supports every student’s unfolding as a well-balanced individual with self-confidence. Mathematical concepts such as parallelism, mirror imaging, progression and geometric forms are implicitly experienced through a tactile learning process. Students receive fundamental skills and understanding to experience how basic materials are made. As the projects become more complex through the grades they gain a great appreciation for the development of processes and technology.

For first and second grade, children learn to knit and purl. In third grade they learn to crochet and throughout the year will process fleece and learn to spin on a drop spindle. In fourth grade, the children take up cross-stitch. In fifth grade, children learn how to knit with four needles and make socks. Sixth grade brings the opportunity to design and hand-sew an animal. Seventh grade progresses to hand-sewn dolls and doll clothing. In the eighth grade, while students are studying the Industrial Age, the Handwork curriculum involves learning to sew with a sewing machine.

Our Agricultural Arts Program serves 1st -8th grade students and takes place in our garden, greenhouse, dry-farmed field, orchard, chicken pasture, woodshop, and school forest. Agricultural Arts is land-based education and includes gardening, composting, animal care, cooking, herbalism, broommaking, basketry, woodwork, native plant tending, forestry, orcharding, regenerative agricultural practices, and the stories of land tenders locally and around the world. Hands-on projects are the core of the children’s work in the Agricultural Arts Program, and the concepts the children internalize come directly through this experiential learning.

The program begins with growing the children’s awareness of the rhythms of the land and the seasons in the early grades (1-2) through seasonal planting and harvest. In the middle grades (3-5), students learn basic organic garden practices, cultivate native plants and First Foods, study garden-based botany, and explore the many gifts of the land through cooking, herbalism, and plant-based craft. In the upper grades (6-8), students learn the ways of trees and the forest through multiple propagation methods (cuttings, grafting), planting and tending trees, greenwood carving, and other woodwork. Students throughout the grades engage regularly with our school flocks of pastured chickens, our school compost, our rainwater harvesting systems, and ever-present tastings in the garden. Through a combination of hard work on the land, creative expression through plant-based craft, and the tangibly grounded knowledge of why we do what we do, our collective work connects the children to the land and empowers them to engage deeply with the living world around them.

Corvallis Waldorf School was developed into a dynamic farmscape in which the students tend the land and learn to work with its gifts through an experiential and Indigenized curriculum. The students not only tend to the land, but they also learn how to use the gifts of the land through practical arts and develop tangible skills, creative capacities, and an embodied understanding of the land.

Click the link below to learn more.

Español

El programa de español tiene como meta general,  desarrollar en los  estudiantes el deseo, la motivación y la capacidad de comunicar, entender y expandir su vision y percepción de otras culturas. 

El programa expone a los estudiantes al idioma de una forma lúdica y dinámica, aprendiendo a través de juegos, canciones, rimas, versos, trabalenguas, arte  e historias adecuadas para su edad e intereses.

Durante los primeros años,  hasta el tercer grado, la exposición es netamente oral, se aprende escuchando y expresando a través del cuerpo, el movimiento y las actividades artísticas que facilitan el reconocimiento del sonido  y el ritmo del idioma. 

En los grados más altos, cuarto a octavo, los estudiantes aprenden de una manera integral y natural la gramática y la estructura del idioma, a través de historias que abarcan aspectos culturales, vocabulario práctico en contexto  y  conceptos gramáticamente apropiados para la edad de los estudiantes. Con el método TPRS, “Total Proficiency through Reading and storytelling” , los estudiantes escuchan, escriben, leen, actúan y hablan el lenguaje.  Después, pueden deducir las reglas gramaticales que les ayudarán a crear y expresar sus propias ideas. Actividades artísticas como el dibujo, la música y el baile forman parte del proceso de aprendizaje.  

The general goal of the Spanish program is to develop in the students the desire, motivation, and ability to communicate, understand, and expand their vision and perception of other cultures. 

The program exposes students to the language in a playful and dynamic way, learning through games, songs, rhymes, verses, tongue twisters, art and stories appropriate to their age and interests. 

During the first years, up to the third grade, the exposure is purely oral; it is learned by listening and expressing through the body, movement, and artistic activities, which will facilitate the recognition of the sound and rhythm of the language.

In the higher grades, fourth to eighth, students learn the grammar and structure of the language in an integral and natural manner through stories that include cultural aspects, practical, in-context vocabulary, and grammatical concepts appropriate for the age of the students. Using the TPRS method “Total Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling,” the students listen, write, read, act, and speak the language. Afterward, they can deduct the grammatical rules that will help them create, express, and communicate their own ideas. Artistic activities such as drawing, music, and dance are incorporated in the learning process. 

Movement education at CWS includes games, fitness, posture, gymnastics, sports, dance, circus arts such as juggling and unicycle, and training for the Olympiad (5th), World Games (6th), and Track and Field Meet (7th-8th). In addition to developing joy in playing and moving, the program’s goal is to strengthen student foundations that support and allow for literacy, numeracy, and deskwork capacities.  The games program recognizes that presenting and teaching games and movement is simultaneously a study in child development and aims to meet the student’s needs at each stage by presenting increasingly complex skills and games as children are developmentally prepared to enter each new space.  This is done while being mindful of all abilities in the group and setting up games so that each and every student can find success and joy in games and movement.

In the early grades, students develop awareness of their bodies and ways of moving through games as well as through tumbling and gymnastics.  Starting in first grade, games focus on a circle component with imaginative tales as a basis for movement.  As students progress through the grades, those games are built upon and become increasingly complex and teach basic skills for organized sports in a fun, non-competitive manner.  By the time students reach middle school, they have the foundational skills needed to explore many organized sports, such as soccer, basketball, volleyball, baseball, hockey, and ultimate frisbee.  Upper grades are also taught javelin, discus, archery, and wrestling to prepare them for larger inter-school events (Olympiad, World Games, and Track and Field meet).