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If an 8-year-old were given the task of designing a school curriculum, it might end up looking something like the Summer Program for West Berkeley’s Black Pine Circle private school. 

A small K-8 school known for its passionate conviction that students well-versed in artistic expression are better prepared to excel in traditional academic subjects like math and history, Black Pine Circle school lives in a few cozy buildings clustered around the corner of Seventh and Addison streets. 

This year K-5 students signing up for the school’s two week summer courses, which meet in the mornings and afternoons for two and half hours and cost parents $200 a piece, chose from: The Canine Class, the “Imaginary Road Trip” class, Tea Pots and Tea Parties, Puppetry, Kids in Space, Decorating Chairs, and Dragons, Dragons, Dragons! 

The teapot class, not surprisingly, was a big hit with the girls. And no one enjoyed it more than the teacher herself, Black Pine Circle Art teacher Maria Palmer.  

“I’m just like so into this I can’t stop,” Palmer said Thursday, as she hurriedly went about the work of transforming an ordinary paper grocery bag into an outsized hat, covered with layers of mismatched fabric and a wild tangle of ribbons. 

All around her the tables were covered with tea pots and cups of every size, shape and color – the product of the students’ labors over the last two weeks. Some were made with papier maché, others with clay. A shelf full of decorative tea pots were fashioned from pieces of junk – a juice can, a wine cork, a compact disc – glued and sculpted together and then spray painted silver. Scattered here and there were ceramic tiles bearing images of the students’ tea pots.  

The grocery bag hats would be required attire for the last day of class, when all the students artistic output be joined together in one fantastic tea party worthy of Lewis Carroll’s “Wonderland.” 

“For this assignment, they can just be completely wild,” Palmer said. “In fact, they’re required to be wild.” 

Black Pine Circle administrator Laura Wolff, who heads the schools K-5 programs, said part of the rationale behind starting the summer school five years ago was to give teachers a chance to teach things of interest to them that might not fit neatly into the regular school year’s curriculum.  

Wolff teaches the “road trip” class, where students study U.S. geography by planning dream vacations. She has traveled much of the country herself. She shares her stories and photo albums with the kids. By the end of the class, students, she said, “can name everything to see or not to bother seeing” across the whole United States. 

Some Black Pine Circle School’s summer courses are designed to improve students’ proficiency in key subject areas, helping them prepare for the coming school year. Others gives students some tantalizing bits of information about subjects they are sure to like – and then sit back and watch as students’ imaginations run wild. 

Black Pine Circle fourth grader Max Plog-Horowitz had a rudimentary understanding of dragons before he ever signed up for the Dragons, Dragons, Dragons! class, for example. 

As he put it, “I knew that they were big and that they could take up this room and that if I sat on one it wouldn’t work.” 

But, after studying dragon myths in both western and eastern culture, Plog-Horowitz developed enough expertise to render a stirring three-dimensional scene of dragon life – complete with several of the monsters themselves, sculpted in clay. In Plog-Horowitz’s vision, the principal dragon is lying near the entrance to a medieval tower, trying to work up an appetite for the “captured damsel” imprisoned inside.  

Asked what the outcome will be, Plog-Horowitz said, “He hasn’t decided yet.” 

Over in the school’s recently refurbished theater – a building that dates back to 1879 and once served as Berkeley’s Town Hall – students are rehearsing for a play that the have put together in a two-week drama course. On the last day of class they will perform for all the other students in the summer session.  

Theatrical productions have been a focus of the Black Pine Circle Education since the schools founding in 1968. All K-8 students participate in three or four productions a year. 

“Within a week you can take people from nowhere to a production if you know what you’re doing,” said Black Pine Circle School Director Lawrence James, who is himself a member of a professional theater group in Berkeley. “You get the students so involved in it that they’re working flat out.” 

Black Pine Circle summer courses for 6th to 8th graders include a poetry writing class and a wilderness survival class that ends with camping trip in the high Sierras.  

“Parents like that they kids are learning something and that they’re having fun - that it is not strictly academic, but it is not strictly play time either,” Wolff said.