Fine Arts

Music as a Core Subject

At Stonehaven it is our goal to train our students to praise the Lord in music often and with skill. We begin every day in song and in prayer to our great God. Though we believe every child is called to sing praises to our God during times of worship, our music instruction is not limited to those times. A walk down the halls at Stonehaven will bring songs of various kinds to your ears. We sing about grammar, Latin, vegetables, astronomy, and our history timeline to name a few. Our desire is to be a singing school: a place where we fill the cracks of our day with song.

Let the word of Christ dwell among you richly," the Apostle Paul exhorts God's people in Colossians 3:16. As a Christian community at The Stonehaven School, we strive to have the truth of God filling our discussion and instruction. Paul continues to explain that the word of Christ dwells in us richly as we are "singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God." With this beautiful vision in mind and thankfulness in our hearts, we teach and train our children to sing from Kindergraten through 12th grade. We begin each day with singing during our morning meeting and end every day with song.

God created our universe and our ability to create, and He generously gave us an image of Himself in the form of Christ.

As imitators of the Image and the Creator, Christians have a unique responsibility to understand God's aspects as both Creator and Image. As a visual expression of the Godhead on earth, Christ taught us the importance of bearing witness to God and the importance of striving to imitate God's love in all we do. As creators, we must strive to understand God, who is the Good, the True and the Beautiful. When we reflect His goodness, truth, and beauty by creating, we draw on our God-given nature.

The twenty-first century Christian is, in many ways, no different from man at the dawn of time, during the Roman era, in the midst of Renaissance, or any other historical period. Man has made images as a means of exalting people and activities of worldly significance, in thanksgiving for abundance, and as prayers to the divine throughout all ages of history. In today's culture, this manifests itself when man makes images that praise celebrities and applaud a materialistic lifestyle. Many artists also use image as a means for social and political commentary, highlighting the problems of our world without offering hope. Learning to embrace the basic human activity of image-making and align image-making with the pursuit of glorifying God is an important task for today's Christians. The image is a powerful vehicle for the communication of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. Extracting these gems of truth from art of the past is an essential part of playing an informed and productive role in today's increasingly visual culture. Understanding our spiritual and historical foundation in the arts enables us to more effectively communicate Goodness, Truth, and Beauty to today's society.

Enduring Goodness, Truth, and Beauty exist in the content and technique of the art of many masters who have preceded us. The Stonehaven School provides students with an artistic foundation within the academic tradition. Grammar school art focuses on establishing basic drawing skills. Students learn how to produce realistic drawings by focusing on the elements of shape, basic principles of design and composition, using visual reference materials, and incorporating artistic license. Stonehaven seeks to give every student the basic skills of representational drawing before they graduate into the Logic stage of the curriculum, while integrating those skills into both the general curriculum and an art historical context. " . . . because the image of the Trinity was made in man, that in this way man should be the image of the one true God." - St. Augustine, On the Trinity