The Nueva School's Innovative Learning Conference

A Morning of Humanities
This morning will introduce aspects of a new approach to Language Arts and the Humanities in the elementary and middle school. Matt Berman and Pete Bowers collaborate on three sessions about Language Arts, Humanities, Word Study, and how they all interact and work together in the classroom. In this way participants get to see the how structured word inquiry (Bowers & Kirby, 2010) can be integrated in any subject area with brief organic investigations that will come up in sessions on History, Philosophy, Grammar, Vocabulary, etc.; and how explicit SWI lessons make such learning possible.

Part 1: Theme and Variations
STEM gets all the attention in schools these days, but the Humanities have never been more important. Of course reading and writing are essential, even more so now in the online world in which our students live. And we see every day in the news what happens to those who don't communicate clearly, don't have a deep understanding of the sweep of human history, and don't think for themselves rationally. In this first session, we will talk about how themes and central subjects tie the curriculum together, touch briefly on reading, the place of poetry and music in the program, and focus on writing and language skills: spelling, handwriting, grammar, punctuation.