Our programs serve families who seek a child-centered, challenging,and reflective education for their children. Our core beliefs steer our approach to teaching and learning for all children. These themes are expressed daily in each classroom, and form the foundation on which our program is built:

 

Learning
We believe that learning should be joyful, active, open-ended, project-based, and collaborative in order to foster children’s independence, accountability, intrinsic motivation, and intellectual curiosity.
 

Engaging
We believe in cultivating a community of civically-active learners, where everyone’s voice can be heard, as decisions are democratically determined through discourse
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Unfolding
We believe in allowing the time, patience and unpressured environment necessary to support the individual developmental unfolding of each child – academically, socially, and emotionally.

 

Curricular Overview
In addition to our core beliefs, our curriculum is designed to mirror the developmental learning needs of children as they grow. At The Children’s School, curriculum is a fluid, responsive entity. Within a framework of important skills and ideas at each developmental level, teachers enjoy the freedom to mold the specifics of their curriculum to meet the needs of the unique group of children before them.
 

As our world grows ever more complex, we believe that the focus of education must be on how to think rather than on memorizing a large number of specific facts. Thus in many instances the specific content of the curriculum is less important than the larger ideas embedded in the topic. For example, in studying Ancient China, one child might research the homes people lived in, while another might study the ancient Chinese language. These two students will each end up with a different set of factual knowledge (houses versus language), but they will both engage in the writing, reading, analyzing, and presenting that are essential to our project approach. Furthermore, each child will participate in discussions about how cultures are shaped by geographic, political, and economic forces and about how ancient Chinese culture compares and contrasts with our own.