Experiential Learning
Community Service
Our Student Life programs include a school-wide Service Learning curriculum that is designed to foster a culture of stewardship with respect to our school community and the many other communities of which our students are a part. Service Learning at Curtis is a continuum that builds toward complete student ownership of service initiatives at the highest grade levels.
The program is designed to introduce service to the youngest students (DK-2) by exploring the concept of community, what it means to help others, and different ways to be helpful. In the middle grades (3-4), students begin to exercise their own voice in choosing the direction of their service. In the oldest grades (5-6), students are asked to come up with their own ideas for projects and activities that will have a positive impact on school, neighborhood, our country, and the world. Student-driven projects teach the students that their ideas are valuable and vital to the health of our global community.
Lunchtime community service clubs called Seedlings (DK-2), Buds (3-4), and Roots and Shoots (5-6) support the goal of giving students full ownership of developing a plan, creating a strategy, seeing the plan through, and evaluating the effectiveness of their collaboration. Teachers and parents/guardians are partners, not leaders, in these activities.
Here is a partial list of some of the community service projects and activities that Curtis's student service groups have accomplished in past years:
Annually, the 6th grade classes make numerous visits to both St. Joseph Center and Westside Children's Center, where they help in many capacities. They partner with a local community school to build bicycles for St. Joseph Center, and they bake several hundred pumpkin bread loaves for the Center's clients each fall. On their culminating Service Day, the 6th grade students perform a collective service at a designated site.
Our entire school community (faculty, staff, parents/guardians, and students) contributes its collective time and talents to selected service projects in the Los Angeles community. These have included Martin Luther King, Jr., Service Day and events organized by Big Sunday.
Our entire school community (faculty, staff, parents/guardians, and students) contributes its collective time and talents to selected service projects in the Los Angeles community. These have included Martin Luther King, Jr., Service Day and events organized by Big Sunday.
