Lower School

Arts

At five years old, they're already taking the stage

Most schools wait to introduce the arts. We start the moment your child walks in the door. In Highland's Lower School, every student paints, sings, sculpts, and performs, not as a break from real learning, but as part of it. This is where small hands and big imaginations discover what they're capable of.

Class plays: one month, one big leap

Every year, from Kindergarten through Grade 4, your child becomes a performer.

It starts a full month before the opening night of their class play. Students memorize lines. They learn songs. They practice their jokes until the timing lands. Then, on the day of the show, they step onto the stage in the Arundel gym and perform in front of classmates, teachers, and a room full of proud parents.

Here's what surprises families most: it isn't easy, and that's the point. The nerves, the rehearsals, the moment of standing up and delivering. All of it teaches a child something powerful. I can do hard things. That confidence doesn't stay on the stage. It walks back into the classroom and follows them for years.

Real art, real studio, real range

Once a week, your child heads to our dedicated art studio and makes something new.

At Highland, Lower School artists don't color inside the lines and call it a day. They explore painting, drawing, heraldry, and ceramics. They experience a genuine range of styles and mediums guided by an experienced teacher who's spent a career helping young students fall in love with making things.

And the studio reaches well beyond Warrenton. Through art, students explore cultures around the world, including a meaningful connection to our sister school, Enkijape, in Kenya. A paintbrush becomes a passport. A clay project becomes a window into how people live and create across the globe.

In the Lower School, music is everywhere

Walk through our Lower School, and you'll hear it. Kids are singing in their classrooms, voices rising in chorus, the careful notes of a beginner's violin.

Music isn't a once-a-week event here. It's woven into the day. Students sing in class and in weekly assemblies. Those who want to go further pick up an instrument in our dedicated music classrooms. And when it's time to perform, they step in front of a real audience in Chilton Commons, at assemblies, and at end-of-year celebrations that are filled with proud families and excited classmates and friends.

For a young child, standing up and sharing a song is no small thing. It's where a unique voice, and the courage to use it, begins.

Why we start this young

We believe the arts aren't reserved for older students. They're essential from day one.

As our Artistic Director Michael Hughes puts it: "The soul is not complete without the fine and performing arts."

That conviction shapes everything we do in the Lower School. We're not filling time between math and reading. We're building the whole child, confident, expressive, curious, and unafraid to create. The skills and courage your child develops here will follow them into Middle School, Upper School, and far beyond.

Come see where it all begins

The best way to understand what the arts mean to our youngest students is to enter the studio, hear the music in the hallways, and feel the energy of a class play rehearsal in full swing. Come visit, meet our teachers, and imagine your child taking that first step onto the stage and along their own journey.