Academics at the children's school
Click here to download our Academic Guide in PDF format.
OUR BELIEF
At The Children’s School, we believe an excellent education is one that inspires and challenges students academically, socially, artistically and physically and prepares them for a lifetime of learning. We believe learning must have real world applications and extend far beyond recitation of facts and figures. While we know that students must master basic, foundational skills, we believe that these skills provide students with the knowledge and confidence to reach for deeper levels of understanding.
OUR APPROACH
The school’s curriculum and educational philosophy are based upon the increasing support of the latest cognitive research, drawing inspiration from educators and scholars such as John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, Lev Vygotsky and Howard Gardner. We assume that each child is different—that each child learns at a different rate, has different kinds of intelligences, and learns in different ways. These assumptions mean that our educators design education with an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning, and they teach to create understanding through experience.
OUR METHODOLOGY
Our approach to education attends to the intellectual, emotional and social growth of students as individuals and as members of a larger society. We teach through doing and discovery, not dry dissemination of information. The goal of our curriculum is to develop students’ capacities to think in depth rather than to memorize facts. At The Children’s School, classrooms are purposeful, focused settings where opportunities abound for active, engaged learning with the teacher acting as facilitator and guide. Our students are not afraid to ask—and answer—the hard questions as they develop essential critical thinking skills.
OUR CURRICULUM
Our rich and innovative curriculum encompasses the core subjects of language arts, mathematics, social studies and science, but we don’t stop there. We enrich the curriculum with specialty classes that include performing arts such as dance and music, visual arts that include painting, clay and digital art, Spanish and physical education. Subjects are integrated, providing practice and application of knowledge around topics and big ideas. In addition, technology supports our curriculum across all subject areas and is integrated at age-appropriate levels, providing teachers and students with access to tools and resources that take learning to the next level.
The curriculum at The Children’s School is:
- Rigorous and developmentally appropriate
- Challenging and reassuring
- Embracing and engaging
- Skill driven and concept driven
- Broad and deep
- Active, innovative, hands-on and quieter, reflective, focused
- Collaborative and individual
At The Children’s School we are dedicated to the strong scientific evidence that children learn best through active, hands-on learning. We are constantly revisiting how we teach and why we teach the way we do with the same spirit and passion that we hope to convey to our students—that learning is a life-long, joyful process.
