Students arrive to school, entering Chope Commons, an open and welcoming space, where they are greeted by their teachers and mingle with friends. They head to their classrooms, unpack their backpacks, store their lunches, and get ready for the day. At 7:55am, they gather in Chope Commons where the Lower School Dean welcomes them for a community meeting. From there, the day might begin with a warm-up activity, a general announcement or a class meeting, where students discuss important non-academic topics and attend to the social/emotional realm of the classroom.
Our Lower School students enjoy subjects taught by their homeroom teachers such as the Reading and Writing Workshop, Singapore Math, and the rich humanities curriculum. In addition, students learn from specialist teachers for Spanish, science, health/P.E., music, library, technology, and art.
If you were to stroll through the Lower School and peer into classrooms, you might see any of the following:
- Fourth-graders collaborating on a social studies project that includes creating 3-D maps and developing a multi-media presentation on the country they are studying.
- Third-graders sprinkled about their room working in pairs to complete the first draft of an original story based on a small moment of their own.
- Smocked first-graders in the art room draping strips of orange paper dipped into glue onto inflated balloons to create fall pumpkins.
- Second-graders, armed with clipboards and lots of questions from their research, boarding a bus to visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum as part of their study of New England's whaling industry.
- Fifth-graders carrying out experiments in the Lower School science lab as part of the NASA program designed to prepare them for a mock flight to Mars at the Christa McAuliffe Center in Framingham.
- Kindergarteners singing as classmates take turns playing the xylophone, the drums, or the rhythm sticks.
- Students conversing in Spanish in the brightly decorated Spanish classroom.