Curriculum

Celebrating Twenty-Two Years
1996 ~ 2018

In preparation for this year’s Easter Egg Hunt Nursery/Kindergarten students planted, watered and grew wheatgrass in baskets. The day before our egg hunt, they dyed eggs with all natural dyes to create different colors: cochineal dye (from the sack of insects) for pink, onion skins for brown, turmeric spice and marigold flowers for yellow, pansy flowers for lavender, and red cabbage for grey. Students used sticks and branches to create a large nest. This year’s Easter Egg Hunt took place on Thursday, March 29th. Middle School students hid the dyed eggs around the playground for the younger students to find. After hunting eggs and using their baskets to carry the load, students put the eggs in the nest. A game was played where each student was blindfold and picked out four eggs to take home. The "butterfly hatching" and other games were played. Parents, family and friends joined in and brought snacks to share.

Music Class Ms. Maddi encourages each student to learn the fundamentals of music as the foundation for a fruitful lifelong relationship with song and sound.

Hearthstone School offers an in-depth curriculum that brings academics to life through arts and the natural world, awakens the imagination, opens the heart, and engages the hands by developing each child's ability to think clearly, feel deeply and act purposefully. Hearthstone is an active partnership of students, teachers, families, and community members who create an atmosphere of safety, belonging, and mutual support. 

Hearthstone's arts-based, integrated curriculum is based on a holistic vision of the child. Respectful regard for the sanctity of the individual is taught. Expectations for learning are developmentally appropriate. The program draws on many models of educational research and draws special inspiration from the Waldorf approach to learning.

Parents are encouraged and expected to be involved in their children's education and in the life of the school. Every family contributes at least eight hours per month towards the work of the school. This is an essential element of our students' success. Admissions are by application.

Hearthstone was founded in 1996 as a parent cooperative for nursery / kindergarten through 12th grades. Hearthstone moved to its current site in 2000 and over the past five years has worked to renovate the lower school building for Nursery through Second Grades, the pottery studio and the main school building. Renovations to the first floor of the main school building were completed in 2004, and now house a large Community Room as well as several therapy offices which will become classrooms as the school continues to grow. Renovations to the lower level of the main school building were completed in the fall of 2005, and now houses the school administration office, classrooms, music room, arts and crafts room, library, kiln room and photography studio.

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Hearthstone is located in Sperryville, Virginia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains and adjacent to the Shenandoah National Park.

Our students are drawn from the surrounding six-county area of Rappahannock, Culpeper, Fauquier, Madison, Warren and Page.

Please call 540-987-9212 or email for more information or to arrange a visit.

Hearthstone School's mailing address is P.O. Box 247, Sperryville, VA 22740.

Hearthstone welcomes students of every race, color, gender, religion, ethnicity or national origin.