First Fridays are a chance for PCS families to join us every month for an all-community gathering, followed by informal visits to classrooms to check out our learning in progress.

We talk so much about the approaches and practices that we think make a school stand out. But what makes a school really special is when it’s the place where children meet their favorite teachers.

This fall, we’re profiling our PCS facilitators: the wise, passionate and engaging teachers who hear what your child is really saying, who speak their language, and who arrive at PCS each day ready to meet your child right where they are.

What an exciting new feature of our weekly all-school morning gatherings — UP does the news!! UP students are hand-selecting and rewriting national news stories to present to their younger peers. Today, we heard about the 2019 Climate Summit, Hurricane Dorian and Tropical Storm Imelda, Firespotting and the Fire Service, the perils of screen use, and the 80th anniversary of Batman!

The International Day of Peace, September 21st of each year, was established by the United Nations in 1981 as day devoted to “commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace.” At PCS it’s a day for students to compose and share their understandings and hopes of peace.

The early days of school are such a dance -- of connection and compromise, finding rhythms and making space, reaching out and looking in – and at PCS we are all about slowing down during these first weeks and embracing the transition into a new school year.

Loose parts are a vitally important and hugely popular resource at PCS: they are a choice time staple, a STEAM essential, and an indispensable material for project-based learning.

We’re thrilled to debut a new video about what makes a PCS education so unique. Watch above!

New for Fall 2019/20: Flexible Schedule Options for Early Childhood!

Peconic Community School brings down the house during a Spring Music Performance. Open to watch!

Take a virtual tour of PCS’s first annual Invention Convention! View the prototypes and processes that PCS inventors created using a problem-research-design-revise invention framework.

Invited to share at our weekly all-school gathering, Upper Primary students decided to compose and perform a skit to share a concern with PCS students.

Announcing: The First Ever PCS Invention Convention

PCS students will share inventions, as well as the processes that lead to their creation, in our first ever PCS Invention Convention, May 30th, in the Community Room at PCS from 2 to 3pm.

Our fourth annual PCS Maker Fair and Food Truck Rally was a huge success: we saw more than 500 people; we floated boats, built robots, faced ourselves, ate tacos, potted, painted faces, wobbled bots, constructed cardboard ...

Updates and observations of project based learning at PCS..

During this trimester’s Integrated Studies Unit students are approaching the work of "Telling Our Stories" from a variety of angles and perspectives. Students are thinking about what stories we have to tell: what stories do we share? how are our stories different? where do our stories begin? how do they bring us to where we are? how do these stories make us who we are? how do we tell our stories?

PCS’s youngest learners in Early Childhood spent three months exploring space and our Solar System through play, story, song, art and construction.

Our Solar System is vast, complex and difficult to observe directly; the motions and forces that govern the Universe, while incredibly influential in our daily lives here on Earth, are often invisible. So, how do we guide children to connect astrophysical concepts with their daily experiences with the sun, moon, stars, seasons, day, night, light, dark, distance, proximity, and their own sense of their place in the world? 

Lower Primary’s study during the Astronomy Integrated Unit was led by the children’s imaginations, curiosity and inquiry. Asked at the start of the unit “what do you want to know about Astronomy?” students spent the trimester answering “everything!” as their evolving questions and explorations guided us from topic to topic.

Middle Primary focused on the realities and possibilities of galactic space travel and sustainable human communities on Mars during this trimester’s Astronomy Integrated Studies Unit.