Lower School

At Green Meadow, our students will become scientists and craftspeople, artists and musicians, writers and mathematicians, dancers and athletes, linguists and actors. They will receive a Renaissance education, with many skills and knowledge of a wide array of subjects. The broad and deep experiences developed at Green Meadow will give them the freedom to choose what they wish to pursue in college and beyond.

The Class Teacher often guides students through several years, potentially remaining a cohort’s class teacher for multiple grades. This long-term relationship benefits by seeing the children through a continuity of development, creating established routines, and providing stability for the students as they develop and transform. Class Teachers are supported by a constellation of expert subject teachers who share in shepherding the class through the years. Classes of students grow together from 1st through 12th Grades and form strong, familial bonds. These threads of relationship form a social and human foundation from which the education grows.

Beginning in 3rd grade, each class will go away on an overnight trip each year. After the 3rd grade farm trip, students in subsequent years will go on camping trips, where they will canoe, hike, raft, stargaze, and use survival skills. Classes in the upper grades will often take field trips to Boston; Washington, DC; and Philadelphia, focusing on the rich history of these cities. Teachers have the freedom to schedule trips that enrich the social fabric of the class, such as 8th and 1st graders ice skating together at Bear Mountain, or trips that deepen a classes study of the curriculum, such as trips to observe and draw the Hudson River in a study of local geography. We are privileged to take advantage of our close proximity to New York City: classes can tour the New York Botanical Gardens, hear Gregorian chants at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and visit many museums.