Throughout their school experience, children join with staff and parents to help build a caring community. Together we celebrate the power of shared group purpose, and also honor and protect individual visions and differences. We all share responsibility for each others’ safety and thriving. Students emerge from this community with practiced, second-nature skills for social sustainability.

Literacy and Mathematics are the essential skills for human communication. To gain power, skill and fluency, students meet daily in small literacy and math groups. They treasure regular opportunities for silent reading, for the shared experience of daily group read-alouds, and for work with real-life mathematical problems. Specialists help to support these key areas of learning.

Touchstone students spend plenty of time outdoors in all seasons, for recess breaks, for gardening time, and in directed outdoor education projects across the curriculum. Students learn to care for particular places and for the wider environment by developing intuitive connections, and by coming to understand ecology and systems thinking. 

In Project Blocks, mixed-age groups meet over several weeks to explore chosen topics together, try new activities, and develop new skills. These projects feature the visual, performing, and literary arts, and also science and technology. At the end of a series, groups share poems or woodworking projects or experiments with their families and the rest of the community. 

Choosing books to read, stories to write, project topics to explore, and games to play (just as examples) children learn how to be faithful to their own choices (and also when and how to change their minds.) Making choices helps students engage with their learning, find the learning paths that work for them, observe each others’ paths, and become their own best teachers.

Guiding questions provide both grounding and structure for the integration of the sciences, social studies, applied math and literacy. These interdisciplinary cross-fertilizations deepen our explorations of what’s important, what resonates for different people. Some typical guiding questions: How do we create a sustainable community? How do we predict the weather? What does it mean to be heroic?

Every student’s day includes play: active play in groups and teams; discovery play like the damming of sandbox streams; make-believe that grows from 5-year-olds acting out each others’ dictated stories, to 14-year-olds writing video scripts. Play nurtures imagination, creativity, social skills, and emotional strength, and supports healthy brains and bodies.

We practice problem solving through empathetic listening, and by collecting and sharing data and information, designing models and prototypes, testing possibilities, and reflecting on process. These approaches are practiced in many areas across the curriculum, nurturing both confidence and reliability.  

The arts help us transcend boundaries of all kinds. Visual, performing, and literary arts weave their magic throughout the curriculum and the day, providing deeply-rooted ways of pursuing questions, shaping understanding, and sharing meaning. The arts help us create strong inclusive communities that bridge ages and roles.