Ethel Walker School
MIDDLE SCHOOL ACADEMICS
Girls are at the center of our educational design
Girls thrive academically because our classrooms are intentionally designed to afford student agency and a platform where they develop their voices, while encouraged to take academic risks to further challenge and expand their intellectual capacity and curiosity.
Math, science, history, English, creative arts, and World Languages (Latin, Spanish, or French) are the core of the Walker’s Middle School curriculum. Hands-on learning is used extensively to build engagement and enhance skills. Alongside academics, our seminar and community partnerships programs are designed to further instill confidence and personal balance.
A Look Into Your Day
Explore the classes The Ethel Walker Middle School has to offer by clicking through offerings by grade level, or by taking a look through our more in-depth curriculum guide.
6th Grade Courses
Spanish 1A (Language placements may vary based on experience)
French 1A (Language placements may vary based on experience)
STEAM 6
Foundations of Math
Visual and Performing Arts
7th Grade Courses
Spanish 1B (Language placements may vary based on experience)
French 1B (Language placements may vary based on experience)
English
Pre-Algebra
STEAM 7
Visual and Performing Arts
8th Grade Courses
French 2 (Language placements may vary based on experience)
Spanish 2 (Language placements may vary based on experience)
Latin 1
English
Algebra 1
STEAM 8
Visual and Performing Arts
Speak Out Series: a culminating activity where students present an original speech to the Middle School community
Signature Trips
In Their Words
Since coming to Walker's in 6th grade, I feel more confident to try new things because the Walker's community supports me.
—McKenna B. '28
All-Middle School Retreat
This retreat kicks off our school year! In partnership with Empower Leadership, students participate in carefully designed programming for girls to bond, learn about themselves, and bolster one another.
8th Grade Retreat
This retreat takes place at the start of the school year, a ritual that honors our 8th grade students as new leaders in their Middle School. Students learn to explore, take healthy risks, and support one another.
Washington, DC Experience
Designed by our faculty, this trip is thoughtfully planned to complement the 8th grade curriculum. This trip to our nation’s capital is a wonderful learning experience and another opportunity for our students to bond.
Success Leadership Program
This program begins with a three-day conference in Vermont and works with our 7th grade students as they learn to become leaders within our School and the community. It concludes with a day of service with a nonprofit.
Middle School Seminars
Social Justice and Inclusion
At Walker’s we strive to create and sustain communities where each and every student can experience belonging. Students lend a crucial voice to shape and drive this work forward. Students are at the center of the Walker’s experience and their multiple social identities prepare them for full and intentional lives within and beyond our school.
In the Middle School specifically, Walker’s curriculum is designed to develop thoughtful and intentionally-engaged students committed to understanding the impact of identity and stereotypes. The exploration of identity and stereotypes allows our students to build self-awareness in an attempt to create social change and transformative impacts in our community and beyond. Our community’s identity is informed by empathy, culturally responsive teaching and reciprocal learning. We acknowledge the value of diversity within our community and weave Social Justice and Inclusion into the fabric of who we are and what we do. This work lives in our classrooms, in the dorms and on the fields, and it is central to our identity as a school.
Middle School Social Justice Seminar
Rooted in building communities of belonging, the Middle School Social Justice seminar explores identity and stereotypes through introspection and perspective. Students explore the many ways identity is formed by reflecting on their own identities, assumptions, and socialization in our community and the world.
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Day Program
A team of administrators, faculty, staff, and students come together each year to plan an all-school assembly followed by grade specific workshops. Middle School student topics have included Art and Justice Movements, Women of the Civil Rights Movement, and Young Activists from the Civil Rights Era and Today. Students focus their learning on young women of color and how their voices were used to create change rooted in racial justice.
Meet the Director
Elisa Del Valle
Assistant Head for Student Life, Director of Social Justice and Inclusion
Elisa serves as the Assistant Head for Student Life and Director of Social Justice and Inclusion. Prior to her arrival at Walker's in 2016, she spent 12 years working in higher education in residential life, student activities, leadership development, and new student orientation at Mount Holyoke College and Wesleyan University. While at Mount Holyoke, Elisa utilized her passion and graduate degree in Social Justice Education to design a more inclusive curriculum for the residential student experience.
Learn MoreLacuna
Lacuna (noun); a gap; an interval
Each winter, the entire Walker’s community engages in a series of unique and immersive classes during a school-wide Lacuna. Middle school students come together from across the grades to experience classes outside of the traditional classroom disciplines. Previous Middle School Lacuna class called Empanadas and Entrepreneurship: Designing a Latin American Food Truck, students studied cooking, multiculturalism, and business. The class culminated with an event where the girls market their empanadas to the community, calculate their profit and loss statements, and explore the origins of the dish through an examination of its history. Other students have taken the Lacuna class, “Storytelling for Social Justice” class, where they explored the power and voice of storytelling using poetry, essay, song, music, video, and the visual arts to tell their story about what moves and motivates them. At most schools, a gap in the schedule means a loss. At Walker’s, a lacuna —or gap —means a chance to dig deeper into new and relevant topics without the confines of a typical classroom experience.
Previous Middle School Lacuna class called Empanadas and Entrepreneurship: Designing a Latin American Food Truck, students studied cooking, multiculturalism, and business. The class culminated with an event where the girls market their empanadas to the community, calculate their profit and loss statements, and explore the origins of the dish through an examination of its history. Other students have taken the Lacuna class “Storytelling for Social Justice,” where they explored the power and voice of storytelling using poetry, essay, song, music, video, and the visual arts to tell their story about what moves and motivates them.
At most schools, a gap in the schedule means a loss. At Walker’s, a lacuna —or gap —means a chance to dig deeper into new and relevant topics without the confines of a typical classroom experience.
Community Partnerships
Our Community Partnerships program aims to develop students’ sense of empathy and explore what it means “to look beyond ourselves and recognize the needs of others,” a verse from our school meditation that guides us. In addition to providing service to the community, Walker’s Community Partnerships program allows our students to gain valuable skills while also serving others. Students begin participating in community partnership program in sixth grade and continue through the Upper School where they can create new partnerships based on their individual interests or serve as part of an established program.
Under the guidance of the Middle School Head of Community Partnerships, students participate in an array of activities including gardening and playing board games on the weekends at a local retirement community.
