This is my Place and Time.
The teacher of the fourth grade class increasingly experiences the children as emerging individuals with strong personalities and distinctive gifts and talents, as well as challenges.
* Focus on group activities draws the class together as a social whole: plays, movement lessons, games, stage performances and the ‘week in residence’ at Black Creek Pioneer Village all support this end.
* Students need a great deal of form to meet school tasks, both academic and otherwise. Self-discipline and healthy work habits are developed at this age, often through spelling words and vocabulary lists in French or German.
* Increasing objectivity permeates the curriculum, such as the first overt science study: study of the self and observation of similarities, differences and relationships between the human being and animals. This study is extended through painting, modelling, play acting and poetry recitation.
* Geography study starts with the local area and its geographical characteristics. . Learning to make maps of their classroom, school and neighborhood and discovering the directions of north, south, east and west as they are manifested by the movement of the sun and planets gives the children a sure way to find themselves in the here and now.
* The week-long experience conducting classes at the Black Creek Pioneer Village school is a highlight of the year as students attend daily, in costume. The experience extends to appropriate lunches (in baskets and Mason jars) and recess activities including stilt walking, skipping and marble playing.

Main Lesson Subjects

* Arithmetic (fractions), long division, advanced multiplication
* Reading, grammar, spelling, composition, dramatization
* Local geography and history
* Norse mythology and sagas
* Study of humans and animals
* Two class plays.

Skills Lessons

French and German grammar and reading, music classes continue with singing canons, singing rounds, and using harmonies. Instrumentally, the children continue recorder playing and playing the violin in a group, both of which now require reading from notation, eurythmy (a movement art), painting, embroidery, hand sewing and cross-stitch, physical education, form drawing.

Field Trips:
Fall: Black Creek Pioneer Village for one week.
Winter: Alpine, Nordic skiing, and skating.
Spring: Bike trips
June: End of year trip to Pinecrest Camp for 4 days.