Page 4 August 5, 2021 EL SEGUNDO HERALD
Burkley Brandlin
BBS & Swatik LLP
LAW
AT T O R N E Y S AT L AW
The Jewelry Source
337 Main St. El Segundo. 310-322-7110
www.jewelrysourceUSA.com
©2007
Lobe her tender,
lobe her true.
Kimberly Bredberg from front page
to experiment with homeschooling.
Her methods appealed to many parents going
through similar struggles with their children. So
about twenty years ago, she began developing
Waterhouse Guild, a micro-school program
with roots in homeschooling based here in El
Segundo. The idea was to individualize education
while still requiring rigorous academics,
all based around the humanities.
Kimberley Bredberg, Founder and Director Emeritus (center), with Waterhouse parents Josette Murphy (left) and Christa Engelskirch (right).
Though all academic fields are studied in the
program, Bredberg specifically wanted to focus
on reading, writing, and critical thinking. Along
with her other business, a publishing company,
Bredberg and her team developed their own
language arts curriculum. Class periods are in
longer blocks to encourage focus and allow
subjects to be fully explored. Teachers are
experts in their field, be it chemistry or art, or
music. “I think one of the sad things happening
in our culture is that we seem to think that
children have short attention spans when they
really don’t. I sometimes feel like two hours for
science isn’t enough,” Bredberg laments, explain-
ing her choice to go with longer learning periods.
Of Bredberg’s multiple degrees, she has
a particular love of science, in which she
obtained a degree. Because of her experience
in the field, she sought to find a way to make
science more integrated and taught with context
so that each subject wouldn’t be taught in a
vacuum with no relation to other courses or
real-world application. She uses the human
body as an example, explaining that it isn’t
only related to biology but also to chemistry,
physics, and electricity. When a child comes
out of school and into the working world, she
says, science isn’t segmented and separate like
it was in school. So to her, it’s important to
teach children from a young age the way they’ll
be interacting with subjects outside of school.
Parent Josette Murphy describes her child’s
experience with math at Waterhouse Guild.
Having gone to public school for a few years,
her daughter was doing relatively okay in math
but struggled to switch over to the Waterhouse
method. Her teachers immediately saw the
holes that needed to be repaired in her understanding
of mathematics and asked that
she stay an hour extra a week to work one on
one with them. After going back and getting a
firm understanding of past ideas and how they
correlate with current lessons, her daughter felt
comfortable moving on to the next level. This
kind of individualized help to ensure a complete
understanding before leveling up came from
Bredberg’s own experience in math.
Despite having a background in science,
Bredberg describes math as her “arch-enemy”
all the way up into high school. In the traditional
system, students are required to finish
each math level, but this doesn’t always give
them a firm grasp of all the concepts. Bredberg
finally went to a teacher and just started
crying because she couldn’t understand what
she was missing. This teacher sat down with
her and figured out where the holes were, and
worked with her until she could not only finish
but understand the work required to pass her
current course. This experience led to extremely
considerate math teaching in her program.
Another Waterhouse parent, Christa Engelskirch,
also describes the soft skills side of
the school. One of the things she loves about
this alternative teaching style is the focus on
practicing compassion and mastering empathy.
“We can offer opportunities for children to
problem-solve on their own, and not have to feel
bad just because there is a squabble going on in
the corner of a playground,” she says, “Whether
it’s an error in judgment or their emotional
maturity is just not quite there yet, it’s not
a punishable offense. It’s a teaching situation.”
Bredberg built her school on a three-prong
system: the spiritual (it’s a non-denominational
Christian-based school), the intellectual, and
the social-emotional. She wants every child
learning under her program to be cognitively
present and recognize their value as a human
being. She leaves on a hopeful note: “If I have
any goal for Waterhouse Guild, it’s that we
can look at Waterhouse and we can change
people’s minds about the potential of education
for younger children. And I think that we
can, because we’ve already been doing it.” •
Lifetime El Segundo Residents
Living Trusts/Wills, Probate, Employment Law, Personal Injury
Trust and Estates Litigation, Business Litigation, Civil Litigation
310-540-6000
*AV Rated (Highest) Martindale - Hubbell / **Certified Specialist Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law, State Bar of California, Board of Legal Specialization