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WELCOME TO
APPLE ORCHARD
A Letter from Our Director
Welcome to Apple Orchard School! At the heart of our school is a belief that children need to be engaged in movement and play-based learning while immersed in nature. Since we are a school on a working farm, we spend a substantial amount of time outside running in grass fields, learning about farm production, climbing on puddingstone rocks, observing turtles and ducks on the pond, building with rocks, sticks and branches, sledding, and stomping in puddles. Mud is plentiful and one of our favorite materials to stimulate our creativity and engage our senses.
We are delighted to introduce you to our wonderful teachers and unique program. Apple Orchard School is an independent school founded by Lee Albright in 1971, to provide a dozen children a place to explore the farm around them, while learning about each other. We have grown in size, but our goals and values remain the same. We are a school of 98 children ages 2.9 years to 6 years located in a renovated barn on Allandale Farm in Brookline.
While the website provides a great deal of information, we urge you to schedule a tour of our school to experience the buzzing activity of our classrooms and see our children and teachers in action outdoors. We are committed to play and learning through movement but also embrace evidence-based literacy and math programs that we adapt to our nature focused environment. Inside the school you may see children climbing into a loft space with friends to play an imaginary game, children painting with broccoli stalks, a small group making a chopped salad with lettuce from our fields, children in small groups working on literacy skills, a circle time focused on math skills, a child learning about how to create a map of the school, or a music class with all the children curled up as turtles on the floor.
If you look outside, you may see children pressing apple cider in the fall, or piling into a hay wagon with their teachers for a tractor ride, building stick forts, walking with one of our goats or gathered in a circle outdoors drawing a letter S with a stick in the sand and and learning about the sound of that letter. The children delight in feeding our chickens on the playground and climbing on our wooden train in the woods.
As a community we are committed to every family feeling welcome and connected and every child feeling unique and valued. Thank you for your interest in Apple Orchard School. We look forward to welcoming you!
Warmly,
Martina Albright, Ph.D.
Director
HISTORY OF
APPLE ORCHARD
A Letter from Our Founder
The beginnings of Apple Orchard trace back to 1971. My husband and I returned from Washington, D.C. where he had been at the National Institutes of Health. Our two daughters were just two and three years old. Looking for preschools in January proved much more daunting than I imagined. Spaces were filled at any of the nearby schools that I liked.
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We were renovating an old farmhouse on Allandale Farm and saw the basement as a possible place for a small group of children. Having completed the Teacher’s Program at Shady Hill School, I said to my friends with small children – “Let’s do this.” So we gathered together a group of other parents who also wanted the farm, animals, trees and fields to be central subjects of their childrens' school.
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We looked around and saw the apple trees and decided to call the school Apple Orchard. Some wonderful teachers came to work with the children and we moved into a larger space in the barn. We then were given a pig, a donkey, a horse and two goats for the children. We continue to thrive here enjoying the children and the farm where we see the children grow.
Lee Albright
Founder
Apple Orchard School