The Winchester School

The Winchester School was founded in 1970, and its purpose remains today what it was initially: to create an environment for children within which each child is able to feel safe, respected, and loved and in which he is encouraged and helped to begin the life-long process of acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge, the values and traditions of our culture. We believe that we are an extension of what good families have already begun. At the same time, we believe that school should be a special place in which a child steps outside his family to experience the companionship of other children, the nurturing of his teachers, and the excitement of expanding his world through learning.

If the nurturing and education of the child are the reasons for the existence of the school, the teachers are the movers and shakers within its walls.

Each child who comes to Winchester School brings his personal uniqueness: a genetic endowment, a particular family history and home environment, a basic temperament already recognizable all of these in combination spell blessing or burden to the child. We believe at Winchester that each child comes through the door with a potential and a desire to learn. Our responsibilities lie in using the wisdom of our experience in exerting our very best creative effort to reach each child as he comes to us. We cannot always make it happen to the degree we would like, but the opportunity to allow it to happen and to help it to happen in accordance with each childs potential is always present in our school.

Our general methods of instruction and types of learning activities are based on age-appropriate, logically organized and sequential learning programs within eight basic areas: the language arts; mathematics; science; social studies; Spanish; art; music; play and physical education. Teaching within these areas combines group instruction based on age with a high degree of individualized teaching within each age group. To augment the book and paper and pencil learning, hands-on materials and activities as well as a great variety of manipulative materials are present in all of the learning centers. Both in-house and away from school field trips further stimulate the child and enhance his learning at Winchester School.

If the nurturing and education of the child are the reasons for the existence of the school, the teachers are the movers and shakers within its walls. Their combined intellect, experience, and love are the single most important factor in the creation of an environment and the promotion of an educational program which will be of the greatest benefit to every child. Inspired teaching is an art form of the highest order and as such the very soul of an excellent school. It is the teacher who carries on the academic tradition, who sets the moral and ethical tone of the school, and who serves as an essential adjunct to the childs family.

Only to the degree that we are able to bring together the child and his family with the teachers, the atmosphere, and the program of the school are we successful. We aspire to make the Winchester School experience one in which a child experiences acceptance but also the discipline to change or to do better; develops self-awareness but also has empathy for others; learns to use his mind to think and to create but also to judge and to reject; and continues his acquisition of skills and knowledge and of a sense of values and of priorities that will serve him throughout the rest of his life.