Merrimac Community School offers place-based education to enhance the learning experience. The education of students is integrated in home, neighborhood and community settings. A multi-age delivery encourages creativity, originality and natural development of leadership skills and is presented in a manner that best suits the abilities of each student. 

Merrimac Community School follows a vision of combining placed-based education with project-based learning in a multi-age teaching environment. Very simply, this means that our school:

• Connects educational programming to local culture and community values (Place-Based Education)

• Increases student interest and participation in their own learning as each takes responsibility to develop and research projects (Project-Based Learning)

With placed-based education, the school, parents and community collaborate to create and support an exciting environment which maximizes each student’s learning potential. Students are part of an environment that encourages learning about and contributing back to the place in which they live. They also learn their individual value in the community.  Some of the benefits of placed-based education are:

• Student learning is enhanced as education finds application in home, neighborhood and community settings

• Excitement is generated among parents and community, encouraging involvement in projects, field trips and activities

• Children learn from their teachers as well as from peers, neighbors and community members

• Creates opportunities for students to give back to the community as education and community stewardship work together

Project-based education is framed within experimentation. Problems and challenges are presented without a pre-determined solution. Students design a process for finding a solution, engage themselves in the process and generate final results. Students construct their own knowledge and do not rely on their teacher as the sole source for answers. The teacher becomes a facilitator of the learning process, helping the students develop the skills to learn and construct their understanding. With project-based learning, students are engaged in the learning process which increases knowledge retention rates and results in effective and meaningful teaching.

Multi-age learning experiences combine students from 2 or more grade levels into one classroom with one teacher. Now that the school has grown to having one teacher per grade we see this most in grades four and five when those classes are mixed for social studies, science and specials.

Reading buddies are pairs of "olders" from grades 3-6 with "youngers" from grades 5K-2. The pairs read together weekly on Fridays and are often paired together for field trips or special events.