IDS is located just south of Middletown, CT. The school campus is within a half-hour of Hartford and New Haven, making us easily reached by families via Route 91 and 9. Though accessible to the urban centers of CT, our 29-acre campus of rolling hills, a pond, and a nature trail offer a pastoral setting in which children and families thrive.
We believe that learning occurs in every part of a child's day, so we actively seek ways in which our location and campus and even our buildings can serve as rich curricula for all of our students.
The IDS Community Garden is a school-wide resource. It teaches children how to live sustainably; in addition to the ecologic principles taught from growing a garden children learn to appreciate the value of locally grown food. Some of the projects underway include:
- Kindergarten & First Grade students planted a Butterfly Garden to participate in the Nationwide Monarch Watch program;
- Second and Third grade students planted food for a community service project called the Empty Bowls Soup Project. After growing the food themselves, they will prepare a soup dinner for families to raise money for the local food bank;
- Across the curriculum the students grow and harvest food for the Connecticut Food Banks "Plant a Row for the Hungry" program. So far we have harvested 7 lbs. of green beans and summer squash and donated the produce to the Amazing Grace Kitchen in Middletown.
- Students learn about closing the loop on waste as they study soil management and composting.
The eighth-grade Social Studies Seminar employs neighboring Middletown as text for student learning. Students work on individual and group projects to learn how to pose questions and conduct research to answer them as historians do. The course makes use of regularly scheduled expeditions to significant buildings and structures, libraries and historical sites to activate, enrich and deepen student learning.