Curriculum

Engineering in the DREAM Lab
In 6th Grade Engineering, students develop technological literacy and engineering skills through hands-on projects such as woodworking and digital design. Project-based learning is central to our approach, allowing students to apply their skills to real-world problems and unleash their creativity by designing and creating their projects. Emphasizing collaboration and teamwork, students work together to tackle engineering challenges, fostering communication and problem-solving skills. They use specialized equipment like laser cutters and 3D printers and work on projects like catapult design, architecture and aerodynamic paper airplanes. Projects are often student-initiated and, in recent years, have included:  

• Catapult design challenge
• Interdisciplinary architecture project
• "Dream Home" CAD project
• Engineering research presentation
• Aerodynamic paper airplanes

The Empathetic Learner
Literature and writing instruction in Grade 7 is centered around our central theme for the year: Empathy. Through our literature selections and writing assignments, students learn about literature and the art of empathy for the characters they read about, for identities different from their own and for their peers. As such, literature selections for the year include A Thousand Questions, Some Places More Than Others, The Giver, Inherit the Wind, The Magic Fish, Funny in Farsi and short stories and poems. Vocabulary and grammar remain essential to study while writing instruction focuses on creative and analytical pieces. Students craft their poetry, write personal vignettes and learn how to create a thesis statement, structure the five-paragraph essay and revise and edit their work. Students set goals, revise and reflect on their writing through a year-long digital writing portfolio project.

Literacy 7 
Literacy is a comprehensive and required interdisciplinary course for all Grade 7 and 8 students. Focusing on nonfiction, this course aims to make students comfortable with reading and writing strategies that serve across disciplines. Nonfiction reading devices teach students how to approach any nonfiction text. Throughout the course, students work to develop and incorporate literacy skills into a multifaceted reading project and a formal argumentative essay. In addition, the students learn note-taking, research and presentation skills, ensuring a well-rounded learning experience.

Understanding Character and Perspective
English Grade 8 is a comprehensive preparation for Upper School, focusing on themes of character and perspective within literature. The dynamic curriculum integrates close reading strategies, MLA formatting, creative writing, Socratic Seminars and project-based learning. Students analyze key literary elements through close reading and engage in lively discussions, honing their critical thinking skills while fostering enduring peer-to-peer collaborations within the classroom. Emphasizing formal writing and vocabulary development, the course prepares students for Upper School and fosters individual voice, style and revision skills through various creative writing assignments throughout the year. Thematic units based on core texts like Annie John, Romeo and Juliet, Animal Farm, and short stories and poetry provide a rich literary landscape for inquiry and thematic examination. Public speaking skills are further developed in eighth grade as students have regular opportunities to present their work to the class. Project-based learning opportunities further deepen understanding and application of analytical skills in real-world contexts, fostering a lifelong appreciation for literature and its relevance to the universal human experience.

Literacy 7 
Literacy is a comprehensive and required interdisciplinary course for all Grade 7 and 8 students. Focusing on nonfiction, this course aims to make students comfortable with reading and writing strategies that serve across disciplines. Nonfiction reading devices teach students how to approach any nonfiction text. Throughout the course, students work to develop and incorporate literacy skills into a multifaceted reading project and a formal argumentative essay. In addition, the students learn note-taking, research and presentation skills, ensuring a well-rounded learning experience.

Financial Literacy 8 - This is an interdisciplinary course.
This course offers a practical, real-world, interdisciplinary experience that teaches students skills that have applications directly outside of the school environment. From the fundamentals of financial literacy, governments, economics and banking to investment and the stock market, students deepen their understanding of money, how it affects us personally and how the fundamentals work together to build global economies. Financial literacy extends the curriculum taught in other Middle School math and social studies courses.

Physics of Energy Transfers
Grade 6 Science is a hands-on physical science course. Concepts and principles are derived from analyzing observations and experiment data. Students actively participate in problem-solving, laboratory skills, and experimental procedures. Attention is given to energy transfer between objects and how energy exists in our universe. These forms of energy are studied in detail: light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and motion. During the year, a research project on a famous physical scientist is done to round out the students' research and analysis skills fully.

Chemistry through Planet Earth
In 7th grade science, students jump into the captivating world of chemistry, focusing on fundamental topics like the atom, matter, the periodic table and chemical reactions. Students comprehensively understand these principles through interactive lessons and hands-on experiments. They then apply their knowledge to relevant environmental topics to examine the connections between chemistry and the world around us. Whether analyzing the atmosphere's composition, exploring water's properties or investigating strategies to combat pollution, students leave with a deeper appreciation for chemistry's role in our environment.

Biology: Life's Building Blocks
Students continue to develop the skills of scientific investigation, which began in Grade 6, including identifying variables, setting up controlled experiments, making predictions and generating hypotheses, and observing, collecting and presenting data. Graphing skills are reinforced with practice in preparing and analyzing graphs from collected data. Coursework includes textbook assignments and extensive laboratory investigation involving the use of the microscope, some dissection and practice in measuring, recording, interpreting and presenting observations. Students explore the activities and requirements for life common to all living things, the organization of living things at the cellular level, the heritability of traits and the relationship between structure and function in plants and the human body.

Cultural Anthropology
Grade 6 begins with an introduction to anthropology as a tool for understanding our culture and the cultures of the world's indigenous peoples. The course is divided into human universals, the elements that all human cultures have. Using a global spectrum of examples, we look at the life cycle, economic survival, communication, power and authority, and the necessity of "living in two worlds" as indigenous cultures encounter the Western world. We stress critical thinking and clear self-expression skills, reading for specific information, drawing conclusions and comparisons and using evidence to support cultural theories. At the end of the year, students research and write an ethnography about their subculture.

American Civics
In recent years, seventh-grade social studies at Baldwin has studied global issues of enduring importance through the lens of "global citizenship." To help students understand global citizenship, we have enriched this year's seventh-grade social studies curriculum to include a firm grounding in United States civics and citizenship.  Students in the revised course will understand how the tools of democracy work, which people and institutions exercise what powers and where they fit in as citizens. Students will explore the meaning of citizenship at different levels and the challenges of civic-minded problem-solving. Investigating our founding documents, early national history, and the evolution of civil rights will lay the framework for students to understand better the local and global communities in the second semester.  Students will be able to appreciate their privileges, possibilities and responsibilities as citizens while thinking critically about the challenges facing the international community. Students will emerge from the course better equipped to engage meaningfully with current politics and social issues, developing their voice as citizens among their peers.

World History
In eighth grade, students take Ancient Civilizations, the first part of a two-year sequence of courses on world history. Beginning with the evolution of the human species, the course surveys various early civilizations from the Mediterranean world of Greece, Rome and Mesopotamia to classical China. As we move through the ancient world, each unit specializes in a particular theme, like agriculture, art and religion. At the end of the year, students develop a research project based on their interests in the course, write a paper investigating their topic in-depth and deliver a presentation communicating their research.