All-Girls Lower School
 

The pre-Connecting experience is one of joyful learning for girls entering pre-K. Our teachers strive to create a space that is safe, warm, and welcoming to all students—a home away from home. We take full advantage of our spacious, light-filled rooms to create a play-based learning environment that strikes a balance between skill-building activities, project work, and plain old fun. We encourage our students to express themselves through dramatic play, block-building, drawing and painting, dance, sculpture, storytelling, and writing. We also take full advantage of our outdoor environment, which includes a courtyard and garden beds, a soccer field and playground, marshland and forest. And while PC girls love to connect with our CC neighbors, on the grounds and bike paths and the bus up to the big campus, they also build a bond that is uniquely their own.

Connecting Class is a year of social and academic exploration for kindergarten-aged girls. Our goal is to guide each girl in her character and intellectual development while providing a nurturing and safe environment in which students take risks and develop curiosity and a love for learning. We complement a strong emphasis on structured academic time with play-based learning, and CC lessons extend far beyond classroom walls. Whether the girls are exploring the nature trail system of our beautiful campus or simply romping on the playground, outdoor time is essential. An academic CC highlight is the culminating box project, a weeks-long in-class science assignment that has girls constructing an animal and its habitat, while researching, writing, and illustrating a booklet to accompany the display. By encouraging students to learn, explore, and grow together in a private girls’ kindergarten class, Greenwich Academy provides them with the foundation for a lifelong passion for learning and success.

In Group I, learning and doing are the complementary, inextricable strands forming the DNA of student life. In our tinkering curriculum, for example, girls think, build, test, re-think, and build again, learning and problem-solving in groups and on their own. And fortifying every endeavor is an awareness of relationships—within the community (the Big Sister program with Group IV is a highlight), the world (another highlight: the Flat Stanley global geography/performance project), and most importantly, with herself.

Building, exploring, and risk-taking are the keys to learning in Group II. From our hands-on math stations and engineering challenges, to reading adventures and creative written works, the girls in Group II construct their own understanding. A year of growth in terms of independence and responsibility translates into proud accomplishments. While girls celebrate their achievements, they also learn the value of mistakes as an interesting and essential part of the learning process. 

Serving as the bridge year between lower and upper elementary grades, in Group III students develop the organizational and study skills that they’ll use for the rest of their school days. At the same time, we continue to value collaboration, which is woven throughout the Group III curriculum. America is a particular academic focus, and more than just facts and treaties, girls study how history gets made, how it changes, and how perspective plays a part. A particular highlight of the year is Into the Wild, when gils spend spring Fridays exploring and investigating outdoors.

Group IV is the senior class of the Lower School, and our girls own that. Our through line is leadership. They take an actual leadership class, taught by a variety of GA educators, from the Head of School to the school counselor, and covering public speaking, financial literacy and responsibility, team-building, and what it takes to be a leader. They put on the Famous Women Wax Museum, a hallmark combination research and performance project celebrating influential women from past and present. And through it all, they are big sisters to their Group I little sisters, building them custom toys in the Engineering & Design Lab and cultivating a bond that will continue to grow for years to come.