Students make connections and acquire a toolbox of skills through performance of authentic, complex tasks of increasing challenge. This allows each of them to examine the personal and interpersonal implications of thoughts, feelings, and responses, in order to gain and apply emotional wisdom throughout a lifetime of learning. Art Nueva's art program is a sequential, spiraling curriculum which stresses expressive outcomes. The art specialists regularly plan curriculum with homeroom teachers and other specialists to relate art to the integrated studies program. For example, students studying ancient Greece create figure drawings to be used to embellish their own pottery creations.
Projects are developmentally appropriate and include virtually every medium.
In addition, students regularly visit local museums to see permanent exhibits and temporary collections and installations. We currently offer Spanish as an elective to 1st through 8th grade. Japanese is taught as a regular part of the Middle School curriculum and culminates with a trip to Japan at the end of 8th grade. The students in the Nueva Garden Program have the chance to explore, observe, document, categorize, synthesize, invent, and discover their vision, which continues to grow and change as the children return to the garden each year to collect new insights on their personal strengths and abilities to affect positive change. Throughout time, growing and tending gardens has inspired presidents and geneticists such as Thomas Jefferson and Gregor Mendel, great philosophers and ethnologists like Henry David Thoreau and Jane Goodall and other great thinkers.