STEAM

At Chartwell you will often hear faculty referring to strengths and stretches as qualities within our students. For example, students must stretch themselves and apply patience, tenacity, and hard work as they learn skills and strategies applied in subjects such as structured literacy and mathematics. While our faculty practice unique multidisciplinary and sensory methods teaching these subjects, they remain typically difficult areas for our students.

Our STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) programs exist to celebrate and grow the strengths and creative interests and potential of our students. These classes, units and cross-curricular activities are designed to leverage many of the inherent abilities within our students. Consider these characteristic shared among students with learning challenges at Chartwell, as shared within our Teacher Training Institute:

Enhanced spatial awareness, the ability to manipulate 3D shapes in one’s mind
Lateral processing, offering unique strategies to rapid problem solving
“Thinking in pictures” rather than words, identifying and remembering complex images
Ability to see how things connect to form complex systems, and to identify similarities among multiple things (pattern recognition)
Strong tendency towards entrepreneurship and creative advocacy or agency

Our faculty within the STEAM department prioritize these aspects of our Chartwell learners while designing powerful and stimulating experiences for students.

Our philosophy of creating engaging, purposeful, multi-sensory and hands-on learning is applied across all divisions.

Lower School

Middle School

Our middle school STEAM curriculum builds upon the foundational skills learned in SAT rotations. Students engage in challenge and project-based learning, often building artifacts to demonstrate their understanding of new material, similar to the themed units that they will experience in our high school.

While students in middle school do experience traditional lab experiments in our STEAM curricula, they are presented in ways that celebrate the students’ learning styles, strengths and stretches so as to prepare them to be confident and resourceful high school students. Our science curricula is founded on NGSS standards and leverages several developmentally appropriate curricular sources such as Amplify Science, Mystery Science, Maker Education, The Tech, and our neighboring Monterey Bay Aquarium.

High School

As students enter our high school division, they may choose among a growing number of courses offered to satisfy the A-G requirements for California and many other colleges and universities. Our offerings are wide in scope and follow the same philosophies of STEAM mentioned above and include Computer Science, Engineering, Marine Biology, Fine Art, Photography, Physics, Chemistry, and more. Learn more about our high school programming and Project-Based Learning approach here.

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Enrichment Opportunities

To supplement our students’ passions in STEAM, we offer many extracurricular programs and experiences for our community:

Competitive FIRST Robotics teams
Lower school clubs
Middle & high school STEAM electives
Field experiences in all divisions

Dedicated Learning Spaces

Our campus offers unique learning spaces that support our STEAM program, including:

60 acres of varied habitats on which to learn natural sciences, including coast live oak, coastal scrub, mixed annual and perennial grassland
Large school garden, along with an orchard and pollinator garden
Makerspace and Digital Lab, which include tools such as AR/VR devices, 3D printers, soldering and other fabrication tools, woodshop tools and more
Arts classroom and ceramics studio

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