Grades 3 - 5

At The Children’s School, we believe that children learn best in a child-centered, unpressured environment that allows each child’s development to unfold at its own pace. In elementary school, that means play-based learning evolves to incorporate more project-based learning as the child's curiosity about the world around them grows.

 

Children learn through play and through their interactions with the world around them. They learn best by doing rather than just listening to explanations of how to do something. Our teachers are guides who offer patient, thoughtful scaffolding – revisiting essential ideas over time and at different developmental levels in order to help the students build new layers of complexity onto their existing knowledge.

 

Our students are active participants in their own learning. It is the teacher’s role to guide their curiosity and help them find meaning through intrinsic motivation. At times, the teacher will direct the learning activity, and at other times, the children are given opportunities to choose from a selection of activities. Through the course of a day, students may work on revising their stories, solving a problem in their math journals, researching a topic of interest, and working with other students to build a model for a group project.

 

As children grow, they embrace their responsibilities and learn to manage their own work. Teachers intersperse skill development into thematic investigations to assure the proper scaffolding of student growth in a given area of study. For example, during a twelve-week project on rocks and minerals, a teacher at The Children’s School would integrate skill development in research, reading, writing, math, science, art, and social studies by guiding the children’s natural excitement and curiosity about the natural world.