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BCSIS Elementary

Boulder Community School of Integrated Studies is a focus school that opened in the fall of 1996. Our school features an Arts Integrated curriculum in which creative expression acts as a vehicle for academic engagement and learning. Our teachers and students honor many modes of expression and celebrate cultural diversity. The BCSIS focus program integrates the arts into a rich, meaningful academic curriculum. Our staff also implements Waldorf-inspired practices to further enhance our classroom environments. Teachers use stories, songs, movement, art, and music from around the world as tools for teaching math, language arts, science, and social studies. We emphasize the development of children’s sensitivity to the natural world and aesthetic beauty. Our science curriculum supports an understanding of sustainable practices, incorporating our school’s Garden-to-Table and Green Team programs. Seasonal festivals create a framework for celebrating the growth and development of each child.

Program Characteristics

  • The instructional philosophy at BCSIS is inspired by the work of several leading educators and a variety of methods including: Arts Integration, the Multiple Intelligences of Howard Gardner, Waldorf Education and Rudolph Steiner, Integrated Day, and Traditional Western Education.

  • We utilize the arts as an interwoven, intentional strategy for strengthening imagination, deepening academic comprehension and meaning, and promoting self-expression and individual creative style. In addition, we also offer an English as a Second Language Program for those BCSIS students who are learning English. Our ESL Program will be fully integrated into our Arts-Focus Curriculum.

  • Our program integrates the arts into a rich, authentic curriculum. Teachers use stories, songs, movement, art, and music from around the world as tools for teaching math, literacy, science, and social studies. The school emphasizes the development of children’s sensitivity to the natural world. To that end, classrooms are equipped with materials from nature rather than synthetic materials, and children work with natural fibers such as wool, silk, and cotton. They also sculpt, paint, knit, sing, and learn to play musical instruments, beginning with the recorder in 1st grade. Seasonal festivals create a framework for celebrating the growth and development of each child. These festivals include: a fall evening Lantern Walk, a winter festival of stories and music, a spring festival of May Pole dancing and planting.

  • In order to build strong and bonded classroom communities, as well as deep connections between home and school, the children remain with the same teacher from kindergarten through first grade, then a new teacher for second and third and finally,  students then receive a different teacher to take them through grades four and five.