BILINGUISMO

We offer multiple exemplar instruction that utilizes the interaction of English & Portuguese
 
The methodology Affinity has adopted was inspired on the teaching models “Dual Language Program” and “Content Language Integrated Learning”.
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The program promotes an immersive environment in the second language (English for Brazilians and Portuguese for foreigners) with more focus on construction than on instruction, developing communicative proficiency in both languages.

Bilingual development is supported in an efficient manner when the language is used as a means of teaching.​ The cognitive and linguistic junction provides motivation and opportunity for significant communication.

MusicalizaTION

Musicalization is the heart of Affinity Arts!

Daily classes are based the internationally renowned studies of Zoltán Kodaly and Jacques-Dalcroze. The purpose of offering music is to improve coordination between eyes, ears, mind and body, emphasizing melodic and harmonic awareness, seeking to keep the children's interest active through creativity and playfulness, and encouraging, experimentation, creativity and expression.

The school has a grand piano and Musicalization classes are conducted by educators, who are also professional musicians (a classical pianist and jazz pianist). Beyond the exercises of solfeggio, the students sing, dance, and represent stories. The conductors utilize figures or puppets to interact with the students during the songs.
 
Scientific studies, like recent research from the University of California, Irvine, show the fundamental importance of musical education in the development of the brain during early child years, not only in areas of space and time that affect mathematical comprehension, but also verify that adolescents who did not have the opportunity to develop rhythmic and intonation (high) capacities, demonstrated difficulties with reading.
 
Music class, beyond awakening holistic mental processes between the two hemispheres of the brain (bilaterally), helps children naturally develop focus, skills in math & science, creativity, motor skills coordination, spatial & temporal perception, memory, body expression, linguistic development, cultural background, and a series of concepts that are essential for integral growth.

Music is present in all of the ambients of Affinity Arts and, as shown by current studies, augments cerebral activity, making more neural connections possible.

MAKING ART

Teaching artistic techniques to children is not an attitude that needs to have as its main goal the idea of creating a new artist. The idea of an education fomented in sensible vision is to form subjects that are able to look subjectively which is inherent in being human. Art is an important educational tool, because it seeks, beyond the individual tendencies, to mature the formation of taste, stimulate intelligence, and contribute in the formation of personality.

At Affinity Arts, art classes occur every day. These classes allow the capacity to mold, modify, restructure, and give significance to the more diverse materials in the attempt to conceive and disseminate feelings and ideas. It is important to consider that the arts promote the integral development of the individual: intellectually, emotionally, socially, perceptively, physically, aesthetically, and creatively. All of these aspects are developed through the actions of the students.
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For this reason, the teaching of the visual arts is an important means through which the students can understand themselves and others, understand their own reality, the expression of their feelings, emotions, desires, and projects, and their personal and social autonomy. The contact of the children with art happens in a playful and enjoyable form, provoking the desire to discover, manual flexibility, dexterity, creativity, production, and reflection. As they design, paint, make collages, manipulate, and mold clay, the children are liberating their emotions, their fantasies, and establishing a change in themselves, with others, and with the world.

A GIVING AND HUMANITARIAN EDUCATION

Supported in the manner that the virtues of acquisition and development are inherent in the proposal of life and the world that surrounds us, we share the vision that education of ethics at Affinity Arts does not consist of an isolated discipline, but teachings, development of capacities, and important vital practices that integrate and permeate the education and the community culture as with everything.
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As such, ethics is present in the diverse activities and contexts.
 
It is worked in the art classes and can be seen in the expositions that occur throughout the school year: in the dramatizations presented every semester, in the story-telling, the songs of the music classes, and in the use of citations that transmit universal values.