Burgundy Farm Country Day School

Burgundy Farm Country Day School is a progressive independent school on a 25 acre campus in Alexandria, Virginia, and convert|500|acre|km2 in West Virginia. It serves 284 students in grades Junior Kindergarten through Eighth Grade. The school's primary campus is located on a former dairy farm just outside the Washington, DC/Northern Virginia beltway.

The school opened in 1946 having been founded and guided by (among others) noted broadcast journalist Eric Sevareid. In 1950, Burgundy became the first school in the Commonwealth of Virginia to racially integrate.

In the spirit of its parent cooperative roots, Burgundy provides an innovative, collaborative, diverse, and hands-on learning environment in which teachers, students, and parents engage together as partners. Burgundy’s nurturing, creative school culture cultivates a love of learning and teaches students how to learn. The school instills respect for diversity and teaches responsibility for self, for other people, and for the natural world.

Burgundy’s philosophy of education honors the individual student by honoring the whole child – the social, emotional, and physical sides as well as the academic. Burgundy’s approach to learning rarely relies exclusively on the traditional text book; instead learning is an active, student-centered, and usually cooperative enterprise. The Burgundy teacher aims to facilitate learning using an integrated curriculum that emphasizes the connectedness of ideas and people and encourages students to construct their own understandings and solutions to real-life questions.

Burgundy teachers strive to differentiate instruction and assessment in order to respect and nurture each student, while helping students to begin to understand themselves as learners. Burgundy teachers and students are fortunate to have a twenty-five acre Alexandria campus that includes a barn with goats, sheep, and chickens, a pond, woods and trails, extensive arts spaces, a large field, an outdoor pool, and classrooms that open to the outdoors.

Burgundy's second campus, a wildlife preserve in the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia called BCWS (Burgundy Center for Wildlife Studies), is commonly referred to as "the Cove." All classes, beginning with first grade, twice a year for three days at a time, visit the Cove for intensive study in science and natural history.

Notable alumni

* Alex Albrecht
* Robert C. Michelson, '65 — Principal Research Engineer Emeritus, Georgia Institute of Technology; Recipient of the 2001 Pirelli Award and the first €25,000 Top Pirelli Prize; progenitor of the field of aerial robotics [cite web|url=http://avdil.gtri.gatech.edu/RCM/RCM/MICHELSON.bio.html|title=About Robert C. Michelson|publisher=Georgia Tech Research Institute|accessdate=2007-03-07] [cite news|url=http://www.pirelliaward.com/ed6_edf.html
title=Education Section and Pirelli Top Prize|date=2002-05-10|accessdate=2007-10-18] [cite news|url=http://www.roboticstrends.com/displayarticle438.html?POSTNUKESID=025929d4e6331e17f5ca6c4539cf92fa
title=Robotics Guru Saw Uses Early On|work=The Atlanta Journal-Constitution|date=2004-07-26|accessdate=2007-10-18] [cite news|first=Jason|last=Laday|url=http://www.theinstitute.ieee.org/portal/site/tionline/menuitem.130a3558587d56e8fb2275875bac26c8/index.jsp?&pName=institute_level1_article&TheCat=2201&article=tionline/legacy/inst2006/oct06/fstudents.xml&|title=No Pilots, No Problem: Students Build Autonomous Aircraft|work=The Institute (IEEE)|date=2007-10-07|accessdate=2007-10-18] [cite news|title=AUVSI Honors Industry Leaders: Pioneer Award-Robert Michelson|work=Unmanned Systems (the Magazine of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International)|date=Summer 1998, Volume 16, No. 3, page 22]

External links

* [http://www.burgundyfarm.org/ Burgundy Farm Country Day School website]