The middle school years, Grades 6 through 8, are a time of transformation. Students are beginning to turn their gaze outward, questioning, comparing, and seeking to understand the world with growing independence and discernment. At Sebastopol Charter School, the curriculum meets this emerging capacity with academic depth, artistic challenge, and meaningful responsibility. Through history, science, literature, and mathematics, students explore the complexity of human experience and the natural world, while continuing to develop their own voice and sense of purpose.
Subjects are brought with imagination and rigor through continued main lesson blocks that integrate narrative, artistic expression, and critical thinking. Teachers invite students to engage not only intellectually, but also emotionally and practically. Whether through a hands-on physics experiment, a thoughtful essay, or a class play, students are encouraged to step into new capacities, learning to reason, to create, and to contribute as individuals and as part of a community.
Grade 6
Sixth graders are feeling the influence of the approach of puberty. As the long bones of the limbs begin their growth spurt and the children are increasingly aware of their bodies, the time is right for geology, the study of the physical body of the earth. The children at this age have a love for things delineated as absolutes; everything is experienced as black or white, and the nuances of shades of gray are distant at this age. Roman law, black and white drawing, specific gymnastic exercises involving the overcoming of obstacles, and the teaching method of “compare and contrast” all speak to the developmental stage of the children.
The Roman era epitomizes historically what the children are experiencing in their bodies. Of all the ancient cultures, the Romans most strongly dominated and transformed the physical world.
Whereas geometrical shapes have been drawn freehand in earlier grades, the sixth grader learns exact constructions with compass and straight-edge, and the mathematical properties of these shapes. Business math and perimeter and area provide the means of introducing simple formulae.
- Roman History and Civilization
- Medieval European History
- World Geography
- Astronomy/Meteorology
- Optics/Magnetism/Acoustics
- Constructive Geometry
- Business Math/Percents
- Singing
- Recorder playing
- Ensemble Orchestra
- Speech and Drama
- Woodworking
- Handwork
- Spanish
- PE and sports
- Technology/Cyber Civics
Grade 7
Seventh graders are increasingly experiencing themselves as individuals with tastes and impulses of their own. They rightfully challenge accepted practices and ideas in order to understand and participate in a more independent way. The history of the Renaissance, Age of Exploration, and the Reformation meets their inner experience along with biographies of human beings who fought with the cultural life of their times in order to adhere to their own individual conscience rather than the laws of the State or the Church.
At a time when their center of gravity is experienced differently and a physical lethargy can be felt, the students are introduced to the new topic of mechanics. A physiological and developmental context is given for discussion of sexuality, substance abuse, and peer pressures by a study of nutrition and health, which includes an introduction to the digestive, circulatory, respiratory, and reproductive systems of the body.
- Age of Exploration
- The Renaissance
- World Geography
- Euclidian Geometry
- Algebra/Area/Volume
- Health and Nutrition
- Physics
- Chemistry
- Chorus
- Recorder playing
- Ensemble Orchestra
- Woodworking/Sewing
- Speech and Drama
- Spanish
- PE
- Team sports
- Technology/Cyber Civics
Grade 8
Grade eight has as its guiding principle the sense of completion of all that has gone before. The students themselves are in the process of completing their passage from childhood into the territory of youth, where they will enjoy greater perspective, sharper powers of observation, and growing critical faculties. From this new vantage, with their new capacities, the students can develop the scope and the perceptive abilities to recollect, and to connect, to see relationships – abilities which make it possible to build a comprehensive picture whether the subject is history, physics, or math.
- American History
- Shakespeare
- History of Revolution
- Grammar/Composition
- Modern History
- World Geography
- Solid Geometry/Algebra
- Anatomy and Physiology
- Physics
- Chemistry
- Chorus
- Recorder playing
- Ensemble Orchestra
- Speech and Drama
- Machine Sewing
- Woodworking
- Spanish
- PE
- Team sports
- Technology/Cyber Civics
