Other Subjects

Gantry View School’s program includes classes that round out our students’ education: Spanish and Mandarin, Coding, Fine Art, Music, Drama, and Movement Education and Fencing. Offered at various points throughout the year, they are constructed with the same degree of thought and detail found in the core components of our program. Students access enriching content and apply their growing body of skills from other areas to these important arenas for learning.

Spanish or Mandarin

Starting in kindergarten, GVS students participate in either Spanish or Mandarin classes twice a week in order to learn and practice greetings, basic conversational phrases, common vocabulary, numbers, and songs. Students produce many responses and engage in early literacy activities in these highly interactive sessions.

As students get older and acquire basic knowledge, they receive more advanced instruction in conversational phrases, vocabulary-building, verb conjugations, grammatical gender, and reading and writing. Instruction is often grounded in real-life situations—going to the restaurant, shopping, communicating with friends and family, and life in Spanish- or Mandarin-speaking countries and cultures. They acquire solid competency in their chosen language, and connect with the food, celebrations, music, and beliefs that help form the diversity of Queens.

Native speakers of Spanish and Mandarin benefit from GVS’s language tracks, too, as they work on their pronunciation and literacy skills: grammar, spelling, reading, writing (pinyin and characters), and higher-level conversation. The learning and work these students do promote confidence and fluency, enabling students to move from basic conversationalists to impressive speakers.

Art

Art is a means of expression, collaboration, and building of component skills. Students learn about shapes (2D, 3D), color (mixing, juxtaposition, impact), and dimension (perspective, foreground, background, shading), and how to incorporate these elements into different media—drawing, painting, collage, mosaics, sculpture, photography, fiber arts, calligraphy, and printmaking. There are studies of famous artists and how they communicated their ideas, while students are given creative license to express their own.

Belief Systems

Beliefs underlie our attitudes toward religion as well as our day-to-day experiences, like what we eat and how we regard food, how we view people of other cultures, our feelings about birth and death, and issues surrounding social relations. Through respectful discussions, readings, presentations, guest speakers, sensory experiences, and writing assignments, Gantry View’s Belief Systems curriculum guides students to explore what they believe and to analyze and evaluate differing opinions and sources.

The curriculum is often woven into our core subject classes. Its content and activities target different age and skill levels, so that all of our students can tie together their skills and knowledge and share their ideas about issues that directly touch their lives.

Movement Education

Movement Education promotes beneficial habits of fitness, nutrition, and general health maintenance. It is designed to develop student fitness and coordination skills, awareness about personal space, and control of the body. Students learn activities that they can do on their own and with others, like stretching and running, strength- and endurance-building, cardio enhancement, yoga, and more. They also learn about good nutritional and sleep habits, and the ways in which physical condition impacts emotional states, energy level, and the ability to learn. While movement education occurs during dedicated periods several times each week, it also takes place throughout the day, for example, in science and lunch/recess.

Fencing

Fencing—both sport and art—requires strength, balance, responsive reflexes, and self-control. Students commence the acquisition of proper forms and technique as they learn correct footwork, blade work, and distance control. They practice the etiquette for using equipment (including electronic), the rules of the sport, and showing courtesy toward their opponent.

Music Theory/Appreciation

Music is a lifelong source of pleasure when you are an active listener who seeks to understand what a composer or musician is trying to accomplish through techniques, patterns, and language. GVS students have the opportunity to become active listeners, and appreciators, of the varied forms of music in western musical traditions (classical, jazz, blues, folk, rock, pop) and in other cultures and parts of the world throughout history. They learn to identify musical forms, instruments, styles, important composers, and seminal works from around the world and in key periods of music’s development. They become skilled at recognizing basic and universal elements of music—rhythm, notes, pitch loudness, and meter—and develop an ear for how music can express emotions and ideas.