A Hands-On Learning Environment, Featuring the Environment

The Elementary Learning Center serves The Island School’s youngest learners in a multi-age classroom. The ELC uses a blend of the best evidence-based practices in early childhood education, while following the same educational principles as the overall organization — learning and growing in an environment that values hands-on, place-based education.

Through challenging learning activities both in and out of the classroom, students dive deeply — and enthusiastically! — into learning. With a strong emphasis on the natural environment, our classroom extends to the outdoors. Working with staff and educators at The Island School including researchers and engineers from Cape Eleuthera Institute, our students can regularly be found exploring our campus farm, wet lab, the surrounding mangroves and forests, or the blue-sea habitats of turtles, lobsters, and crabs.

At the ELC, students from a wide range of ages come together to learn and grow. Older students become natural leaders, reading to the younger students, helping them through challenges, and holding their hands when they venture into the forest or to the beach. Younger students keep the older students rooted in the excitement and joy of new discoveries.

Ours is a caring, nurturing approach to an experiential education, where students develop respect by learning to care for themselves, each other, and the world around them.

We at the ELC know that parents are the students first and most important educators, and so we believe that building a strong relationship with our families is key to our students’ educational success. We maintain an open-door policy with open lines of communication, and we invite all parents who have completed a background check to participate in field trips. We also strive to have multiple opportunities for parents to visit our campus for musical performances and demonstrations of learning throughout the year.