Community & Traditions

Students and Parents Value the Belmont Day Community

We often hear from families and alumni how our vibrant, welcoming community helps students develop as lifelong learners and leaders. This is because the processes of education and personal growth are most effective within a context of strong relationships. Our community strength is evident in:

• the deep appreciation of children at all stages of development
• the shared goal of excellence in all educational matters
• the commitment to equity and inclusion in our community
• the centrality of our six shared values
• the nurturing relationships
• the focus on teamwork over competition

Traditions Emphasize Connection and Opportunity

At Belmont Day School, we devote thoughtful planning to every aspect of school life. Our traditions illustrate how we implement the school’s mission and integrate our six core values to create a multidimensional educational experience. It’s simply what we do.

Cross-graded Partnerships
We expand each student’s sense of community with cross-graded partnerships that are developed through structured activities, as well as informal high-fives in the hallways. Each grade is paired with another: pre-kindergarten with eighth grade; kindergarten with sixth grade; first with fourth grade; second with fifth grade; and third with seventh grade.

Community Service
In every grade, students and faculty conceive of and carry out countless meaningful and thoughtful projects that reflect our core value of caring. Each grade level takes on one or more projects connected with a current event, the curriculum, a family, or an outside organization allowing for collaboration and teamwork. Each May, grades team up for a school-wide Community Service Day.

Contiguous Grade Bonding
From family-style lunch together to playing tag at recess, students have many opportunities to spend time with students in other grades. Suddenly the everyday community of each cohort expands to include grades on either side.

Greening and the Garden
Responsibility. It’s one of our core values and applies not just to how we conduct ourselves in our day-to-day interactions but to our relationships with the world around us as well. We strive to instill the ideals set out in our environmental mission statement in each community member. Central to our efforts is the Belmont Day Garden. Here students can get their hands dirty and understand firsthand the connection between themselves and the greater world that sustains them.

Sharing Assembly
In this quintessential Belmont Day School experience, all grades gather to share something they have been working on. Sharing Assemblies encourage us to look at the world through one another’s eyes and recognize that everyone is a learner here.

Grandparents’ and Special Friends’ Day
Being proud of their work and community, our students naturally want to share their efforts with important people in their lives. Each year, students invite grandparents, aunts, uncles, and special friends to attend a morning of classroom time and a special Sharing Assembly.

Field Day
Red, blue, yellow, purple, and gray—colors rule the day as students in every grade are divided into teams to work together and cheer each other on for a morning of fun games and challenges. 

Moving Up
Held the day before eighth grade graduation, this ceremony acknowledges the work of all younger students as they bid farewell to the year just finished and step into the year to come.