Each year, the lower school faculty chooses a broad curricular theme that drives the content of our studies, every day, campus wide, throughout the year. While each class is encouraged to explore this theme through age-appropriate lenses, we also establish a foundation of understanding for all our learners, regardless of age, that creates a common experience amongst them: Community Time.

Whether they are time-traveling to meet famous inventors or historic figures from the past; constructing a mini trans-continental railroad; collectively writing an epic; adding dance and percussion to a beloved Aesop’s fable; debating Australia’s famed Bunyip; pounding walnut shells and measuring ingredients to make ink; flipping flapjacks over a campfire; or visiting Anasazi, keeper of the stories, Community Time is experiential learning at its best. Utilizing the Multiple Intelligences in our planning, results in curriculum that is accessible and memorable. 

Community Time is our venue for breathing life into our theme, as we conjure up other worlds and pretend to be part of them.  Students and teachers, alike, look forward to this special time when the entire Lower School community delves into topics that support and enrich our thematic studies.

Community Time experience, in turn, provides shared ingredients for our students to savor and revisit in their free play outdoors as well as in their classrooms.