Fayerweather is an independent PreK-8 school in Cambridge where children are taken seriously — as thinkers, as individuals, as people whose presence in the world already matters. Children here learn by doing real things in real places for real reasons. 

THE FAYERWEATHER DIFFERENCE

Every child is taken seriously.

Your child will be known here — by name, by temperament, by what makes them light up. Our small classes and our weekly faculty practice of sustained attention to individual children mean that every child is seen, understood, and carried forward across years.

Curiosity is where learning begins.

Our teachers design lessons, projects, and whole years around the questions children bring and around the questions we know how to help them ask. They hold students to real standards while keeping their thinking and curiosity alive.

Learning by doing real things for real reasons.

Letters get sent. Research gets presented. Plays get performed. Maps get hung. Students at Fayerweather come to understand, over years, that what they make is worth making well and that the world will receive it.

Place as curriculum.

Our city is one of the richest educational resources our children have. They study its watershed, its history, its civic life, its neighborhoods. They meet the people who run it. They write to its officials. They study the place they live as context and then extend that learning into the world beyond the classroom.

A person becomes themselves in community.

A Fayerweather education is the slow work of growing up, alongside the same peers and adults, in a school small enough to hold every child in view. Our students leave knowing how to think, how to make, how to lead, and how to belong to something larger than themselves.

COME SEE WHAT LEARNING IS LIKE HERE

A school is a community before it's anything else, and the only way to know whether ours is right for your family is to come see it.

Walk our hallways. Meet our teachers. Watch our students learning. Then tell us what you think.

FAYERWEATHER IN ACTION

Grades 5/6

The Petitioner's Project 

Seventh and eighth graders partner with Revolutionary Spaces to research the people who fought unjust laws without the legal standing to do so — enslaved people, free African Americans, Native communities, women, working-class colonists — and tell their stories. The project culminates in oral storytelling performances at The Old South Meeting House, where students speak the names of their petitioners in the same place that kind of civic courage once echoed.