Lower School

Dear Families,

 

Welcome to Dwight-Englewood’s Lower School, where learning is more than just a series of lessons - it’s a journey of discovery and growth. That journey is guided by our mission statement, to help students cultivate the “skills, values, and courage to meet the challenges of a changing world and make it better.” It means that children are developing fundamental content knowledge and skills, while also tapping into their unique interests and shaping their sense of purpose. Every day, our exceptional faculty and staff work to ensure students are supported and have the resources they need to thrive now and into the future.

 

Serving children of ages 3 - 11, our Lower School programs are anchored in essential skill-building and well-rounded experiences that prioritize the cognitive, social, physical and ethical development of children. Students are engaged in a wide variety of learning experiences where they are perennially expanding their horizons. On any given day, you may observe:

 

What makes all of this possible at D-E is that educators, too, are students. We are students of how children learn best and what they need in order to thrive. Teachers regularly reflect on their instruction and stay current with evidence-based practices to directly impact learning outcomes. This approach allows us to respond thoughtfully to each child - helping them cultivate their confidence, resilience, and a love of learning that endures. And along every step of a child’s journey, we embrace ongoing and open communication with families, trusting that students are likely to be at their best when the adults in their lives - both at home and at school - are supporting them in tandem.

You can always view what’s current in news from the Lower School on our LS Notes eNewsletter.  

 

Truly, there’s no better way to understand what makes our learning community so unique than to see our students in action - listening to their questions, witnessing their curiosity, and observing the way they make meaning of the world around them. To that end, I hope you’ll visit us to observe firsthand how we nurture the whole child as we help children think deeply, act with purpose, and lead with compassion and courage!

 

 

Sincerely,

James Choi

Lower School Principal

                                               

During that year, I relished the chance to learn. I took time to process - to sit with and reflect on new learnings. For me, that experience prompted a perennial question of how we might build good fires - both for ourselves and our children - by paying attention to the spaces we intentionally create between the logs. This can admittedly feel counterintuitive to our culture of doing. As a society, we’ve normalized the idea that more is better - more homework, more advanced classes, more clubs/activities, and more projects at work. But what if the opposite were true? What if we did less and focused on quality instead?

 

According to some researchers, it is said that by the age of somewhere around 8 to 10, that children today will have multiple times the amount of input in their lives than children of generations ago. The ubiquity of technology, increase in structured activities, and corresponding decrease in unstructured time has led to a shift toward what some researchers refer to as “modern childhood.”