Baldwin Academy has been serving the Pacific Beach community for over four decades. We take pride in serving our families by maintaining high academic standards and guiding our students to be life-long learners. Through our Gentle Earth Curriculum ® we strive to integrate a Green School Initiative where we expose our students to various natural treasures and help them begin to develop a connection with our Earth from a tender age. Our aim is to instill in our little ones a love for the world so we can all be better stewards of this precious resource.
Our Curriculum
A GREEN SCHOOL INITIATIVE
The Gentle Earth Curriculum ® introduces our students to different elements of our Earth through an exploratory and experimental spiraled program. These “Green Studies” are taught alongside academics and both are often combined when appropriate. The program begins with one element, water. Our one year olds will focus on this element throughout their time as Parakeets. Our Canaries, or two year olds, will continue learning about water, but they will focus on land and begin to understand how water and land are connected. The Robins, three year olds, will learn about air, and of course, will explore different cycles to understand how water, land, and air work together to provide important resources for the world. Our Big Nesters, four and five year- olds, will learn all about recycling through the four R’s which are reducing, reusing, recycling and repairing, along with analyzing water, land and air.Through the Gentle Earth Curriculum ® our goal is to develop in each student a sense of love and responsibility for the Earth, helping them grow and become responsible citizens and guardians of our world .
Dr. Jonie Kipling is our Green Studies expert who worked with us to create and implement our Gentle Earth Curriculum. Miss Jonie was a teacher in New York for twenty seven years working with a variety of levels throughout her career. Over the years, she has worked with preschool, elementary, middle school, and high school classes, and she taught methods courses at Hofstra University. Along with coordinating our environmental program, Miss Jonie also helped us implement our school garden. The goal of our garden is to get children actively involved in growing food that they will eat in the classroom, which we call our seed-to-table activities. Promoting a love for the environment and enjoying nutritional food are two things Mrs. Jonie feels very passionate about. . Although other family responsibilities have obliged her to be absent from our campus we will continue to be grateful for all her wonderful contributions.
