Chapin's richly textured curriculum is driven by the commitment to develop curious, lifelong learners.  It balances intellectual rigor with exposure to a wide variety of academic and cultural experiences.  It is our goal to develop independent thinking and sound learning and reasoning skills so that our students will be prepared to move confidently forward in their academic endeavors.

Chapin’s Lower School, consisting of grades Pre-Kindergarten through four, serves our children through six years of dramatic growth.  Our program is designed to meet a range of developmental needs, from those of our youngest primary students to our more independent fourth graders.  A typical day might find our very youngest students tossing a bean bag at an outline on the floor to determine a letter sequence in a "mystery word," while our fourth graders might be nose deep into a novel that takes them to the height of the Andes Mountains in Peru.  Meanwhile, second graders could be enjoying a special pasta luncheon with their eighth grade buddies. Everywhere in between one finds children actively engaged in the learning process.

Despite a variety of individual lessons and lesson objectives on any given day, however, one also finds a common purpose among all the classrooms.  It is clear that the goal of any of these experiences is to create a lifelong love of learning in our children and to develop in them those skills necessary for this pursuit.  Another common thread is the integration of Chapin’s Character Development Program into all facets of a child’s day, so that Respect, Responsibility, Honesty, Kindness and Perseverance are experienced and practiced.

Further "peeks" into our Lower School classrooms might find some children drilling the basics, the four-times table, for example, while others might be forming cooperative groups to apply the four-times table to a problem-solving situation.  Our faculty take cues from what is rooted in the past and which they know to be educationally sound, and then infuse this with the further knowledge gleaned from current studies about how children learn. Our goal is to keep children moving along their own paths to further learning.  Keeping the whole child in mind, our program includes special areas like Computers, Foreign Language, Art, Music, Library and Physical Education.  Our teachers combine the science, the art, and the "heart" of teaching to create stimulating learning environments that successfully meet our goals for all of our students.

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