Our Days

The White Clay Learning Center operates with the conviction that meaningful learning will occur across all content areas if children are presented with rich and meaningful subject matter without it being placed into categories and time constraints.  We achieve this level of commitment and excitement among our children and their families through the following approaches:

• Small class size afford our teachers the flexibility of working with our students on an individual basis or in very small groups.  We utilize multi-age-level classes to create an atmosphere of a heterogeneous group of communicating and collaborating individuals. With guidance in this environment children become proficient in respecting and understanding children and adults of varying ages.

• We Integrate classical subjects, such as reading, writing and arithmetic, into our unique and meaningful curriculum for any given three-month unit-theme (e.g. World Rivers, Oregon Trail, Botany or China).  White Clay emphasizes an understanding of the traditional subjects such as: Reading, Language (including Latin and Greek roots), Mathematics and various forms of Literature. 

• We provide a personalized education at White Clay by analyzing each child's unique intellectual neuro-developmental construct, based on the work of Dr. Mel Levine. This analysis then allows our teachers to formulate a learning plan for each individual child. We strive to optimize each child's learning strengths, as we realign their weaknesses. We aim to provide each child with the understanding of how they best learn, and give them the tools to use in order to make this optimal learning occur throughout their lives.

• Weekly adjustments. Every week our students dive into lessons within each of these subjects, based on their individual progress.  Our teachers assess understanding weekly and then assign follow-up work for the students to complete during their home study time that week.  Back at school, we weave these concepts into the remainder of our week as we explore our unit-theme, which focuses on a variety of investigations and activities, spanning all subject matter. 

	Student dives into investigation using a microscope. [click on picture for larger image]
	Primary students adding data to the weather center. [click on picture for larger image]
	Secondary students designing PowerPoint™ files for later presentations. [click on picture for larger image]

• Enriching and informative materials aid us in enveloping our students with meaningful content.  At White Clay we do not purchase textbooks, because they tend to lightly gloss over subject matter.  Instead we keep a library of information that the children refer to daily throughout the unit-theme.  We also purchase a wide variety of resources and materials for each theme we plan.  In addition, we carefully select math, language and reading workbooks from our favorite publishers, which will specifically target your child's academic abilities.

• Learning Differences at White Clay. White Clay Learning Center's intimate, individualized and holistic educational program is also effective in educating some children with mild to moderate social/learning differences. These differences in children range from the highly gifted to those who struggle in the traditional classroom environment. This all inclusive environment benefits all of our children as together they experience daily lessons of how to work with, how to adapt to, and how to understand a more realistic and varied population of people. Our individualized curriculum is planned and implemented by our classroom teachers and Individualized Education Specialists. Tuition rates for this program are set on an individual basis. 

• Extracurricular subjects are also an important part of our program. White Clay’s talented "special subject teachers" provide us with our art and conversational Spanish classes.  When appropriate, our "special subject teachers" integrate our unit-theme topics into the students' weekly lessons.  White Clay students also develop an understanding and appreciation for the literary and dramatic arts through their participation in theatrical performances and poetry readings (includes their own writing and set making) each year.