Academics

More About Our Curriculum

Our academic activities and events are summarized every week in our detailed newsletter sent to families. We have a sample newsletter from 2014, anonymized, as a PDF (note: it’s 2.8 MB), and another from 2021 (only 37 kB, no images). Student report cards are narrative in form, with concise summaries of what was covered in each subject and of the student’s strengths and areas needing work. The sample report card from 2014, also anonymized (also 2.8 MB as a PDF), shows how effectively we inform parents of the progress being made by the children they entrust to us. We have a new format for the report cards in 2021-22; we’ll have a sample posted soon.

We also do outreach to the community.  Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, our students and teachers performed in publice venues, often for sharing our Chinese program.  We anticipate a performance at the Branigan Cultural Center in downtown Las Cruces in February, 2022.  Board Chair and teacher Vince Gutschick continues the weekly short podcast for our local NPR radio station, KRWG, that he began in December, 2018. The podcasts are archived at the link above and are aired every Tuesday at 8:45 AM and 6:45 PM. We also have the website lcaoutreach.org, on which there are two major sections, on international travel and an extensive analysis of the habitability of planets, a hot topic in science and in the public eye.

Early K – K 

The early years are more critical than educators ever realized before, with reading skills set on their path by age 3.  The Children’s Reading Foundation emphasized this in recent years.  Thus, we offer not only kindergarten but also early kindergarten.  The latter class is suited to students with skills such as early reading, of a nominal age of 4 years at the beginning of the academic year, though we have no firm age cutoffs in any of our grades.  EK students participate in classes with the kindergarten students in the morning, departing at noon – either 11:45 when classes end or 12:30 when recess and lunch end.

Teacher Katie Bushma brings with her degree in early childhood education, with a valuable minor in psychology, and much classroom experience during her degree studies.  Students are immersed in a program covering:

• English, including phonics, spelling, reading, and reading comprehension. Arielle reads to students; several students read to the other students.
• Handwriting – augmenting their language skills, students learn handwriting, in the D’Nealian method.
• Spanish – Teacher Yolanda Guevara introduces elements of Spanish, from vocabulary to early grammar. Students read, act, and listen to stories in Spanish.
• Chinese – kindergarteners go to class with acclaimed teacher Yulin Zhang, in the purple class for first-time learners of Mandarin.
• Mathematics – students work on fundamental skills in number recognition and arithmetic operations, both written and oral. They use many manipulatives as well as the Singapore math books.
• Our world, a melange of science and social studies. Katie presents topics in an order than keeps student interested, moving, for example, from the geology and geography of continents and oceans to astronomy – the planets by name, order, and orbital period; stars from birth to death; constellations – to how plant
• s develop and grow

• Music, learning about musical instruments of the world, international songs, tones (arranging tonal bells and matching their voices to bells), and dance. Videos supplement classroom resources.
• Art – students gain an eye for color, manual skills in construction, and joy in art through, frequently drawing and making 3-D constructions.
• Physical education – play in the courtyard encompasses running, climbing, and ball games

Students transition to grades 1 & 2 taught by Arielle Lane.  Arielle has experience in the Montessori system.  She has taught LCA students earlier as their early K / K teacher, with notable success.

Grades 1 & 2

These young students have their own classroom with very diverse teaching materials and equipment.  Our core teacher is Arielle Lane, with 6 years’ experience teaching in our school and earlier Montessori teaching. Arielle covers math, science, spelling, cursive handwriting, English, and social studies. Katie Bushma comes to the classroom to teach music. Yolanda Guevara comes to the classroom to teach Spanish.  Students leave the classroom for classes in Chinese (one of several levels, according to their ability) and science 1-2, as well as for PE and tennis. 

A dual focus of early childhood education is academics and socialization.  The 1^st period has a focus on social interaction and structuring the academic day.  Students organize their personal belongings in cubbies along the walls.  All teachers for grades 1&2 draw on great resources in the room – about 1,000 books, large wall maps, large whiteboards, an LCD projector, instructional games, and other materials.  Comfortable furnishings allow students to settle in for classes – on chairs at tables for more formal instruction and on the rug for movement and play exercises.

Students gain skills and confidence in English, written and spoken, including phonics, grammar, and style.  The depth of instruction is comparable to much higher grades in other schools, delving into genres of writing (e.g., discursive, argumentative), an expansive vocabulary, spelling, and illustration of stories.  Students use the highly effective Singapore math program, each student working in a workbook selected as sufficiently challenging for his or her level.  Students progress among math levels upon passing a hierarchy of in-book exams that verify their mastery of each level. Art as both drawing and 3-D construction is taught as a subject and is integrated into subjects such as English or social studies.

English

English skills are critical to success throughout one’s lifetime, even internationally.  In addition to formal reports to this effect, Board Chair and volunteer teacher Vince Gutschick heard this assessment from Engr. Francois Tardieu, his colleague and his host for a sabbatical year of research at INRA in France: “Yes, it’s true that the French are reluctant to speak English, but it’s not for the reason you think.  We think that English is the official language of science and business, so we hesitate to make a mistake in English.”  (Vince made his own amusing mistakes in perfecting his French while there!)

English in grades early K, K, and 1-2 is integrated throughout the day, with lessons in grammar, spelling, phonics, reading, and writing.  It is rewarding to see young students reading to each other as well as telling stories of events.  Students learn sight words while working into the grammar and pronunciation of English, the tricky language. Frequent short tests reinforce their spelling prowess.  Frequent writing, from phrases to short essays, consolidates their gains in syntax, style, and punctuation.

English, grades 3-5

• English reading meets 5 times each week. Students read assigned books and create reports on them (bridging the activity with the writing class); in class, they discuss the characters, the plot, and the cultural aspects evident in the writing.  Students share their findings about books they individually elected to read.  Reading worksheets, spelling lists, and grammar lessons round out the reading.  Teacher Elizabeth Brasher elevates the class to near-university level,  drawing on the experience teaching at that level and on her M.A. in Creative Writing.
• English writing meets 5 times each week. In addition to writing reports about books in the English reading class, students prepare papers in several styles of writing (e.g., discursive, argumentative).  They write imaginative or discursive stories and essays about current events or about themselves.  They maintain writing journals.  Spelling lessons and tests reinforce good style.

English, Middle School

• Middle-school English reading meets 5 times each week. Students read assigned books, which are discussed in class.  The activity reaches into the next class, English writing, as students write reports and papers.  Teacher Elizabeth Brasher elevates the class to near-university level,  drawing on the experience teaching at that level and on her M.A. in Creative Writing.
• Middle-school English writing meets 5 times each week. In addition to writing reports about books in the English reading class, students prepare papers in several styles of writing (e.g., discursive, argumentative).  They maintain writing journals. Spelling lessons and tests reinforce good style.

Spanish

Spanish is taught in two sections, for grades 1-2 and for grades 3-8, by Elizabeth Brasher.  Shortly, we will give extra details beyond the description below.

Spanish is a Romance language, that is, one derived from Latin. As such, it has retained detailed conjugation of verbs and some elements of the declension of nouns over and above pluralization. These traits make it rather different from English. Fortunately, its pronunciation is very regular; if you see a word spelled, you can pronounce it, and generally the converse is true – if you hear it, you can spell it and possibly comprehend its meaning. There are also many cognates, words of similar spelling and meaning, between English and Spanish. These help one learn one language from the other, though there are a few pitfalls. Some sounds in Spanish do not occur in English and must be learned, preferably at a young age, which is where we start.

Our outline for teaching Spanish starts with acquiring a strong vocabulary base in the lower grades using repetition, game playing, music & song, labeling objects, art, etc. As the children progress, we continue with vocabulary and start learning to put together simple sentences (although this is started early on too!) conjugate verbs, simple translations, and this is taught using the same methods as above. Also, with all groups, and at an age appropriate level, we explore history, geography, customs etc, of Spain and Latin American countries by reading, game playing, cooking, music, discussing current events, etc.

CHINESE

Chinese is very different from both English and Spanish, which are phonetic languages.  Chinese is a tonal language, so by changing the tone of syllables in Chinese, you can completely change the meaning by changing the tone of a single syllable. For example, “I kissed her” is just a tone change away from “I asked her” in Mandarin (the dialect we teach at the LCA).  To make it even more different, Chinese is written with ideograms. Again, we’ll give an example. Here is the Chinese equivalent of “hello,” although the literal translation is “you good”: 你 好. ”You” and “good” are each written as single syllables, as is usually the case in Chinese. As you might guess, Chinese class is different from English and Spanish.

Instructor & Levels

Chinese is taught by Nanjing-born teacher Mei Dai, who holds award from the Chinese government for excellence in teaching non-native speakers.  It has 3 sections, purple, red, and gold, for different levels of proficiency. A surprise for Mei Dai, our Chinese teacher, is that the children asked to learn to write the characters much earlier than she had intended to teach them.

Teaching Goals

Students learn the Chinese pronunciation system (pinyin), identify simple Chinese characters, and know basic Chinese character strokes and the order of writing strokes. We use real-life topics, hands-on cultural experiences, and cooperative learning activities to teach basic conversational sentences. All of the language programs and activities are designed to encourage students to develop interests and build the foundation in learning Chinese. The aim of the Chinese class is to enable students to develop communication skills, focus on language as systems, and gain insights into the relationship between language and culture, leading to lifelong personal, educational, and vocational benefits.

Teaching Activities

• Flash cards, CDs, and memory games to learn and review Chinese characters.
• Songs, tongue twisters, and reading accented Chinese poetry to develop students’ control of Chinese tone.
• Practice writing Chinese strokes and simple characters.
• Scramble, unscramble, and flashcard matching with corresponding posters to identify the characters.
• Make sentences from flashcards to create their own sentences.
• Group activity conversation and dialogue of real situations
• Chinese culture, history and holidays; viewing of story, film, and historical pictures
• Chinese crafts (Tangram, cutting paper, etc.)

Useful Websites

• http://thechineseworld.org/
• http://www.pinyinok.com/
• http://www.chinese-tools.com
• http://www.zhongwen.com
• http://www.mandarintools.com
• http://www.xuehanyu.org.cn
• http://www.babelbee.net/resources/Chinese
• http://www.iflylanguage.com
• http://www.languageguide.org/mandarin/
• http://www.usborne-quicklinks.com/

Useful Books

• Practical Chinese—The Effective Way of Learning Reading, Writing, and Speaking Chinese by Wendy Lin.
• First thousand words in Chinese

MATHEMATICS

We use Singapore math in all classes, from EK-K through 8th grade.

In grades 1-8, Singapore math meets 10 times each week in 35-minute periods. During more extensive COVID-19 restrictions in academic year 2020-21, we changed to 5-6 hour-long blocks in order to reduce student traffic during class changes.  Now, in the 2021-22 year, we have returned to the 35-minute periods. In early kindergarten and kindergarten math is scheduled in numerous intervals. Small class sizes, limited to 11 in this group, enable effective instruction.

Students work at their own level in the Singapore math books.  Teachers Arielle Lane and Lou Ellen Kay work with each student individually to add explanation to that in the book. Young students benefit from an array of manipulatives to grasp arithmetic concepts.

Background: We chose to use Singapore math from the day we opened, 15 August 2009.  Here is a quick overview of the system of teaching:

The pedagogic philosophy and methods of Singapore math are presented in a number of posts on the site for the enterprise .  One such post includes this short discussion:

The fact that problem solving is the central idea in Singapore math can be seen in the pentagon from Singapore’s Mathematics Framework below.

The Framework states, “Mathematical problem solving is central to mathematics learning. It involves the acquisition and application of mathematics concepts and skills in a wide range of situations, including non-routine, open-ended and real-world problems. The development of mathematical problem solving ability is dependent on five inter-related components, namely, Concepts, Skills, Processes, Attitudes and Metacognition.”

We chose Singapore math over all other options for several key reasons. First, its methods are intellectually satisfying to both teachers of mathematics and power users of mathematics in their careers.  Second, it has proven effective.  The island country of Singapore is consistently a leader in math performance internationally:

From the American Institutes for Research Report, What the United States Can Learn From Singapore’s World-Class Mathematics System (and what Singapore can learn from the United States):

An Exploratory Study. PREPARED FOR: U.S. Department of Education Policy and Program Studies Service (PPSS) (2005)

A critical overview of whole Singapore educational system is also available online.

SCIENCE

Children are naturally curious about how the world works, from stars to their little red blood cells. We have notable strengths in meeting students’ curiosity in our science curriculum.  That curriculum is of our own design. Our youngest students in grades early K through 2 benefit from the educational backgrounds of teachers Katie Bushma and Arielle Lane. Arielle has 7 years’ experience in teaching young children; Katie is a new teacher with depth and enthusiasm. In teaching the older students, Lou Ellen Kay (PhD, biology, City University of New York) and Vincent Gutschick (PhD, chemistry, Caltech) draw on their deep backgrounds that cover core areas of the sciences.  Vince has been cited in a Stanford-led study as currently ranking in the top 2% of scientists worldwide. They both draw as well as on their decades of experience teaching students at levels from elementary through graduate school – over 30 years, each.  They also draw on our remarkable scientific equipment and supplies, originating in Lou Ellen and Vince’s long research careers, supplemented by current purchases. The remarkable resources include a vacuum chamber, a spectroradiometer, Geiger counter, hydroponic plant-growth systems, a full array of electronics parts and equipment, a variety of fossils and bones, model rockets, dissecting and staged microscopes, a high-speed camera. and more.

 Our teachers have academic freedom, developing their own curricula, not hemmed in by any standard curriculum that cuts inquiry short. We all use elements of the Socratic method, posing questions for the students to create their own framework of knowledge. Students often propose topics, with teachers working in suggestions that build interest. Students have science in 4 to 6 periods each week in the current schedule (we adapted to fewer, longer periods during earlier, more restrictive precautions for COVID-19). 

In the early grades, Arielle and Katie introduce topics in an order than keeps student interested, moving, for example, from the geology and geography of continents and oceans to astronomy – the planets by name, order, and orbital period; stars from birth to death; constellations – to how plants develop and grow.

In grades 3-5, Lou Ellen expands lectures with copious imagery – textbook figures, images from scientific journals, videos – as well as class discussions and hands-on work.  For the latter, she draws on our abundant collection of samples, especially biological and geological, plus live plants, live and preserved insects, and more.  Students watch insects develop in terraria.  They use microscopes to examine anatomical features of organisms or rock textures.  Segments of a semester cover geology and astronomy; students can examine the long table that Lou Ellen painted with the life history of various classes of stars.

In grades 6-8, Vince focuses on physics, chemistry, and biology in progression, while frequently mixing in concepts from all disciplines effectively, extending from agronomy to geology and beyond. Students particularly relish experiments that have deep technical design (analyzing model rocket altitude as a function of engine impulse, with lots of geometry in the field measurements), and moments of deeper insight or even drama – sodium metal decomposing in water, with a transition to explosion in warm water. Vince imbues the sessions with math, a core of all sciences, engaging students in calculating results all along the way.

TECHNOLOGY – MIDDLE SCHOOL

This class is based on projects, large and small, It is based on discussions, It is based on and visits to places where technology is used. Students learn how things are put together, by disassembling them – from a pocket calculator to an ink-jet printer. They learn how to put things together, from concept to finished product. Teacher Dr. Vince Gutschick leads the sessions, with much give-and-take with the students. He draws on his background in a scientific career, in which he built much technical apparatus and obtained a patent for sensing light incident on many plant leaves simultaneously.

A great example of this last effort is the design and building of the light-up periodic table of the chemical elements. Lou Ellen Kay and Vince Gutschick, with their son David and his now wife, Yi, visited the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico, where they saw a periodic table with 4 different patterns of elements lighting up – elements formed in the Big Bang, or in the Sun now, or in the Sun at the end of its life, or in a supernova. Vince got the idea for students to build a periodic table with far more capabilities, displaying elements one-by-one by atomic number, or by order of discovery, or by abundance in the Earth’s crust, or by abundance in the human body. For each choice, an LED lights up behind the appropriate element’s cell. At the same time, a narration researched, written, and recorded by the students plays. The choices are made using 4 buttons that address a program written in Python on a tiny Raspberry Pi computer, with commands sent to a complex logic board with 19 addressable latches and 10 comparators. He and the students worked out a physical design, as well as the user experience. They did the electronic layout, the drilling, the wiring and soldering, the programming. As of November 2016 it’s in the final stage of removing the “bugs” in the logic board operation.

Students learn how other people create and manage technologies. Students in grades 3-8 visited a well of the Jornada Water Company, where company co-owner Denny Rogers showed them all the piping, monitoring, and water quality adjustment elements.

Students also learn about more remote technologies – satellite remote sensing (we have a ground station for NOAA-18 and -19, being revamped currently), human flights to the moon and Mars, and the operation of cell phones, among others.

They discuss the social effects of technology (haves/have-nots, desocialization). They learn about the massive intellectual investment tying together the efforts of literally millions of people in making a cellphone, from scientists to engineers to designers to miners to factory workers to patent lawyers to financial managers to regulators to cellphone tower erectors.

SOCIAL STUDIES

We have two sections of social studies.  The section for grades 3-5 is taught by Elizabeth Brasher, who brings her additional skills in English to this class.  The section for the middle school is taught by Ellen Armitage, who brings math skills to the mix.

Shortly, we will add the details of these two important classes.

MUSIC

Our students’ voices have been lifted in song from our start, with only COVID-19 restrictions currently curtailing this in class.  Up through 2019 students practiced songs and dances for the twice-yearly end-of-term performances held in the evening. They learned to sing in English, Chinese, Spanish, and an eclectic mix of languages from Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America.  We look forward to returning to all the vibrant singing by enthusiastic students.  In the meantime, we have a selection of images and videos of those wonderful end-of-term performances, from 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Our students also get more formal involvement in music, properly adapted to pandemic mandates (alas, no singing). The early kindergarten and kindergarten students learn the sounds of various instruments.  They move to music of diverse genres.  The students in grades 1-8 get weekly instruction from teachers Elizabeth Brasher and Katie Bushma.  They, too, learn the sounds of instruments, listen to music of many genres, and learn to read music.

MUSIC APPRECIATION

LCA parents and music aficionados Paul Bowman and Ken Haubner bring their audio equipment to the grade 1-2 room, which can be darkened for video projection to go along with the music.  Students in grades K-2 attend 2 periods and students in grades 3-5 attend 1 period weekly; a scheduling conflict made it impossible for middle-schoolers to attend this semester.

The theme this semester, Fall 2016, is 20th-century American music, covering many different genres – from blues to rock to jazz to musical theatre to ragtime and onward. Students listen, comment, and dance.

COMPUTER PROGRAMMING

Students learn programming in four groups. Board Chair Vince Gutschick is the teacher. He has 58 years of programming experience in Fortran (scientific programming, from mainframes to current laptops), BASIC (for field dataloggers), four Web languages (HTML, PHP, pmwiki, WordPress), and Python.

One group has been learning much on their own in Scratch visual programming, either at scratch.mit.edu or at code.org. Vince began the Fall 2021 semester with deep background, an overview of how computers work, from hardware to firmware to software to “wetware” (how programmers thrive).

Third-graders are new to programming or have done a bit but are early in their learning about computers. They work in Scratch visual programming at code.org, learning to solve increasingly interesting and challenging puzzles (characters called sprites need to move and take actions along the way; one sprite draws geometric figures that vary from simple to complicated). We share screens to learn methods of solution.

Students in grades 4-5 have all had experience in Scratch programming. They have moved to scratch.mit.edu, where they create their own projects – defining background, any number of sprites, and code modules for movement, conditional actions, sounds, etec.

Students in grades 6-8, with one 5th-grader, are gaining skills for programming in Python 3.7. Two students are experienced and three are new to the game. We all use the programming interface colab.research.google.com, which allows coding and execution in the same window for rapid rewards (and ever-critical debugging). We share screens in Zoom to share insights.

SPECIAL TOPICS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL

Teacher Lou Ellen Kay enriches the middle-school curriculum with a special topics class each semester. in Fall 2016, the class is biogeography, the study of the distribution of organisms and the consequences for the development of human cultures. It’s based on critical reading of the noted book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Students read chapters, take notes, and join in deep discussion, with occasional quizzes to test comprehension. In AY 2015-16, the course was Chinese history and geography. A core of the class was the Great Courses video on China by Ken Hammond. Students viewed the videos and entered discussions of the significance that reaches down to our times. Lou Ellen draws on deep research, her direct experience in China (and botany and 35 other nations, and more), and selected videos.

PHYSICAL EDUCATION

Our students are very active. While we are a small school and have no coaches or teams, the students have both informal physical activity and formal physical education. We have two play areas, an enclosed courtyard with comfortable pea gravel (superior to other surfaces) and a paved and access-controlled large parking lot. Students engage in vigorous free play at morning and afternoon snack periods, as also at lunch. With revised COVID restrictions they can engage in ball games with hand-washing afterward. Younger students play at a great variety of self-initiated games in our enclosed courtyard – abbreviated-field soccer, dome-climbing, tag

In formal PE, teacher Elizabeth Brasher imparts elementary skills up to team games – soccer, basketball, kickball baseball. Board Chair and teacher Vince Gutschick has been teaching tennis to students at many levels since 2014. Prior to COVID restrictions we had twice-yearly archery instruction, ending with competition, using the equipment of New Mexico Game and Fish. We look forward to having these sessions again as the pandemic eventually resolves itself.

TENNIS

Vince Gutschick teaches tennis to all grades in 5 separate classes each week, students being grouped as grades EK – K, 1-2, 3-4, 5, and 6-8. The largest class is EK-K, currently 11 players in Fall 2016. While never having been a tennis team member, Vince has 40 years’ experience in another racquet sport, racquetball, with most skills translating well.

The local chapter of the US Tennis Association, Southern New Mexico Division, helped us with both visits by instructors and applications for financial aid. The latter aid took the form of a grant for much tennis equipment (racquets, balls, net, ball cart, instructional games, mobility ladder) and then professional striping of our parking area for 3 overlapping courts (2 red, 1 orange). We purchased on our own a ball-return net for indoor practice.

Classes take place outdoors on good days, indoors on days with extreme weather. Instruction covers the rules of tennis, mobility exercises, the ground strokes, the serve (overhand for older students), strategy, sportsmanship, cooperation in doubles, and care of equipment.

CURSIVE HANDWRITING & TOUCH-TYPING

We may all agree that touch-typing is critical in modern careers, even those taking people far outside an office or lab or shop or store. We have the TuxTyping program on our Linux desktop computers. Working on their own, students then report lessons taken and typing speed to teacher Lou Ellen Kay.

Handwriting in cursive is essential to taking legible notes quickly, for classes here, for classes in students’ next schools, and in almost any career. Students learn the modern cursive (D’Nealian) from extensive writing on worksheets that teacher Lou Ellen Kay monitors.

Scheduling for these two subjects is informal – students who have unassigned periods in the week take these classes in those periods. Students who have no breaks, such as some middle-schoolers, work on these after class or else have learned them in prior years.

SPECIAL OVERVIEW OF MIDDLE SCHOOL

We launched our unique middle-school curriculum in the Fall 2014 semester.  Middle-schoolers now have 15 classes each semester:

Unique to middle school:

• Grades 6-8 Singapore math meets 10 times each week. Students work at their own level in the Singapore math books.  The teacher (Ellen Armitage since 2014) does not lecture but works with each student individually to add explanation to that in the book. Students complete 1, 1.5, or even 2 years’ books each year.  Additional detail is on the mathematics page.
• Middle-school English reading meets 5 times each week. Students read assigned books, which are discussed in class.  The activity reaches into the next class, English writing, as students write reports and papers.  Teacher Elizabeth Brasher elevates the class to near-university level,  drawing on the experience teaching at that level and on her M.A. in Creative Writing.
• Middle-school English writing meets 5 times each week. In addition to writing reports about books in the English reading class, students prepare papers in several styles of writing (e.g., discursive, argumentative).  They maintain writing journals.  Spelling lessons and tests reinforce good style.
• Middle-school science meets 5 times each week. Students participate in discussions and experiments, each semester taking unique turns to follow current scientific events and student interests, while addressing core concepts.  Vince Gutschick teaches physics and chemistry, drawing on 53 years – and counting – of research in diverse fields at major institutions with colleagues from 8 nations.  Dr. Lou Ellen Kay teaches biology, drawing on a similarly long career in research and teaching, beginning in botany and expanding to anatomy and physiology.  Both class segments use the diverse equipment and supplies we have gathered.
• Middle-school technology meets 2 times each week. Vince Gutschick engages students in discussions and projects, including the very large project of the light-up periodic table of the chemical elements.
• Middle-school social science meets 3 times each week. Students learn about political processes, the selection of political leaders, the history of dominion over land, the writings of political philosphers, and more. Students have presentations by teacher Ellen Armitage and their own vigorous discussions.
• Middle-school geography, a special focus in social science, meets once each week. Teacher Ellen Armitage extends the social science curriculum to give students the tools to use geographic information, as they learn map projections, coordinate systems, topographic and political maps, atlases, and indices.
• Grades 6-8 tennis meets once each week. Vince Gutschick, though never a tennis team member, draws on 40 years of racquetball and on instructional help from the US Tennis Association.
• A specialty class in history or culture meets 2 times each week. In the Fall 2016 semester, the course is biogeography, the study of the distribution of organisms and the consequences for the development of human cultures.  In AY 2015-16, the course was Chinese history and geography.  Teacher Lou Ellen Kay draws on deep research, her direct experience in China (and botany and 35 other nations, and more), and selected videos.
• Computer programming meets 2 times each week. Students learn modern languages, particularly Java and javascript for Web applications, from volunteer teacher Mark Leisher. Mark has been the IT resource for NMSU’s math deparment, and, now, NMSU’s College of Business.

Shared with other age groups; some additional detail is found on pages for these specific subjects:

• Grades 3-8 physical education gets everyone in these grades out 4 to 5 times each week on the courtyard or the blocked off area of our parking area for activities of free choice or, on occasion, teacher- or student-organized games. The activities range from tag to soccer to dome-climbing.
• Grades 3-8 music meets 2 times each week. In the Fall 2016 semester, Elizabeth Brasher assumed the class, teaching students voice as they sing a variety of classic songs.
• Spanish 3-8 meets 5 times each week. From formal grammar to contests to identify items or persons by student-written descriptions, students gain confidence in written and conversational Spanish under the guidance of teacher Elizabeth Brasher.
• Chinese meets 5 times each week, with students in either of the two upper levels, red or gold. Students learn to read, write, and pronounce Chinese characters, construct sentences, sing, and more. Nanjing-born teacher Mei Dai holds award from the Chinese government for excellence in teaching non-native speakers.  She has led students to regional competitions sponsored by the cultural attache of the government of China.
• Art 3-8 meets once each week. Students pursue their own projects under the guidance of teacher Lou Ellen Kay, herself accomplished in botanical drawing and in creating furniture in the shape of animals.