Fine Arts Specialists
With dedicated Fine Arts Specialists in both the Lower and Upper Schools, students are happy to visit the Art Room to work with materials that include watercolor, tempera, and acrylic paints, ink, pastels, chalk, wire, and clay. Students are taught art techniques in a variety of media, studying specific artists throughout history. Students learn to recognize works by major artists, and gain a solid foundation that will lead them to support, appreciate, and create art itself.

The Art of the Classroom
Whether painting fresh fish to make Japanese fish prints, crafting a corn husk doll, sculpting the state of California on a painted clay relief map, drawing your name in hieroglyphics, or designing a personalized NASA logo, individual expression is celebrated within every Carlthorp School classroom. Even a basic assignment like a fantasy book report is reinvented when the student is assigned to create a map of a fantasy world, or reinterpret the book as a comic strip.

Afterschool Arts
Elective arts opportunities abound in the Afterschool Program, where children may choose to enroll in a variety of classes such as puppetry, sculpture, drawing, beading, illustration, and cartooning.

Performing Arts
A Music Specialist exposes students to a variety of musical styles, giving students the opportunity to explore and experience different kinds of music through singing and playing assorted instruments, recordings, and live performances. The fundamentals of music, and a knowledge of major composers, musicians, and eras, are explored and reinforced at each grade level. In kindergarten, second, and third grades, children perform as a class before an audience of parents and friends. When relevant, students will attend performances; during a jazz unit, the first grade classrooms are visited by a jazz musician. As third graders study the history of the musical, they will attend a musical at the Dorothy Chandler.

Chorus
Chorus also meets after school. The Carlthorp School Chorus typically performs at the winter holidays, as well as at "Grandparents' and Special Friend's Day" and the Santa Monica Rotary Club. The Chorus also performs at the annual lighting of the Christmas Tree and Menorah in downtown Los Angeles.

Orchestra
The Carlthorp School instrumental program includes violin for all children K-2 and a choice of a wind instrument for all 3-6 graders which is part of the Children's Music Workshop. The Orchestra meets on campus. Several Carlthorp School students have gone on to audition for and participate in the Pasadena Children's Choir, and the Colburn School Concert Band. Many of our alumni now play in the concert bands and symphonies of secondary schools throughout Los Angeles.

The Talent Show
The annual "Talent Show," in the Multi-Purpose Room, is one of the most beloved of all springtime traditions at our school. Whether acting out a silly skit with a host of classmates, performing a classical sonata, or singing a solo from "Wicked," Carlthorp School students are always encouraged to brave the stage.

Love Art
Love Art was a special community-building event hosted by Carlthorp School for its parent body in the Fall of 2005. Celebrating an evening of the arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Carlthorp School parents had the unique opportunity to enjoy a school-wide art exhibition, and then explore the greater museum itself. The entire student body busily prepared hundreds of art pieces for the event, which was an amazing recognition of the arts at our school. After 2005 Love Art evolved into a yearly celebration of our childrens artwork culminating with a campus gallery show for students, parents, and community members to view.