The Sparhawk Performing Arts Program

Welcome to our SPA - a place where the members of our learning community can nourish their artistic minds, expressive bodies, and creative souls. Here we strive to foster an environment where students may develop performance and communication skills, seek confidence in their talents, explore varied areas of creative expression, and appreciate guided glimpses of the vast repertoires of music, dance, and theatre with attention to their cultural and historical contexts. Students engage in an experience steeped in many melodies, spiced with the movement of rollicking rhythms, and garnished with lyrical language.

Music Electives

The music program for grades k-5 is an exciting and wonderful journey. Using the Orff approach, and building on yearly themes, students explore musical concepts by playing, singing, moving, reading, and writing. We improvise, create, play, and dance our way through a carefully created scope and sequence of music learning.
There are many opportunities for joyous performance, both during the school day and in planned performances. On any given day, a visitor will find musicians happily playing beautiful xylophones, percussion instruments, and keyboards, or singing in chorus with friends.
The music program is supported by our private lesson program, where students can choose to study guitar, keyboard, and drums.

Drama Electives

Sparhawk Spotlights, our theater company, performs twice each year, with a play in the fall and a musical each spring. Past productions include The Brothers Menaechme, Evita, Flower Drum Song, Grease, Fiddler on the Roof, Beauty and the Beast, Ah Wilderness, and The Sound of Music. Currently we are rehearsing The Secret Garden. Productions are open to all Sparhawk School students K-12.

Studio Art and Art History

Students at Sparhawk have been busy creating works of art through the diverse spectrum of media available in our art studio. Here, once again, choice is paramount as students learn to express themselves with the steady support of technique demonstrations and the cultural context of art in history. We have embarked on several field trips to art museums and galleries, and we have even rented out the local movie theater for grand slide presentations of ancient art!

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Integrated Arts and Humanities Studio

Sparhawk students have been learning ways to integrate music, movement, speech, art, and drama into their academic studies through individual integrated arts presentations and group projects in our newly formed Humanities Studio.

Recently, teams of students worked together to produce presentations based on an animated sequence in the movie Fantasia depicting the origin of the Earth. These presentations were informed by scientific research, and employed fine and performing arts skills to create musical, oral, and visual components with the goal of enhancing understanding and transfer of the material. Presentations were performed in front of an audience and a panel of judges evaluated these performances in response to assigned criteria. From writing plays to composing soundtracks to designing sets, costumes, and puppets, these performances became opportunities to fully integrate the arts with our thematic curriculum.