Grade One Students present Americana Day, at which they share with their parents various activities in movement, art, music and classrooms. There also is a Michigan week celebration in song. Grade Two Grade 2 presents a Japan unit for parents. Second graders perform at their Moving Up ceremony. Violin instruction is offered to all second graders.
Students receive group instruction twice a week.
The Lower School has embarked on a program for Pre-K3 through Grade 1 in which each child will experience piano keyboard instruction. Research compiled by Dr. Francis Rauscher and Dr. Gordon Shaw at the University of California at Irvine indicates a strong causal relationship between keyboard music and abstract reasoning in young children. Spatial reasoning is the ability to connect relationships among objects. This particular kind of reasoning represents association with specialized higher order thinking. Keyboard playing was chosen as the primary means of instruction because its linear representation of pitch clarifies the spatial relationships of music, making them easily accessible visually, aurally, and kinesthetically.