DMABig questions, deep dives.
Elementary students meet the Great Lessons: five stories about the universe, life on earth, human beings, writing and numbers. Everything else in the curriculum hangs from them.
The room
First through fifth graders work in mixed-age rooms where the material gets more abstract as the child does. Long division on the checkerboard, grammar with the symbol boxes, botany with real plants, and research projects the children choose and present themselves.
Told with experiments and charts at the start of each year. The Coming of the Universe, the Coming of Life, the Coming of Humans, the Story of Writing, the Story of Numbers.
The bead cabinet, the stamp game, the checkerboard, the racks and tubes. Operations into the millions, fractions, geometry, and then the move to paper.
Grammar symbols, sentence analysis, word study, and a lot of writing: reports, stories, letters, and the research paper that ends the upper elementary years.
Geography, history and the timeline of life, botany, zoology, and physical science taught with lab-style experiments.
When a question outgrows the classroom, the students plan the trip: the phone call, the route, the questions to ask.
Spanish runs through the school day. STEAM projects and studio art have their own time each week.
What a morning looks like.
- 7:30Doors open; free breakfast for early arrivals
- 8:30Morning circle on the rug
- 8:45Three-hour work cycle with individual and small-group lessons
- 11:45Lunch and recess
- 12:45Cultural studies, Spanish, STEAM or art
- 3:00Dismissal (2:00 PM on Fridays); aftercare until 5:30
1 through 5, ages 6 to 11.
Monday to Thursday 8:30 AM to 3:00 PM. Fridays 8:30 AM to 2:00 PM.
Progress is tracked by mastery and observation. Ask about our testing philosophy at your tour.
Purposeful and short. Reading every night; projects when they mean something.
Primary
The Primary classroom, sometimes called the Children's House, is where a four-year-old learns to pour, to sort, to trace…
See the programGrades 6 – 12 · Ages 11 – 18Preparatory
Adolescents want work that matters and adults who take them seriously. Our middle and high school gives them both: a rig…
See the program