Academics

Middle School

The Middle School Experience

The Hamden Hall Experience starts with academic excellence as enhanced by our dynamic learning environment and fostered by our esteemed faculty. Our core values - excellence, support, participation, accountability, and respect - are interwoven in that overarching experience and are integral to the academic growth and success of every student. While rigorous academics underscore all we do, we also care about the people our graduates become and pride ourselves on our socially considerate atmosphere. 

Our Middle School balances real academic rigor with a nurturing approach to each individual child in appreciation of the rapid developmental changes taking place at this age. Moreover, the unbridled curiosity of our seventh and eighth graders is carefully managed by experienced educators who know how to inspire excellence while cultivating personal connections.

Experience A Day In Middle School

Throughout the year, seventh graders broaden their ability to think critically and analytically through in-depth classroom instruction and multiple academic avenues including project-based learning, elective rotations, advisory groups, and more that inspire creativity and challenging projects and experiences.

Purposeful Halls

Project-Based Learning allows the Middle School to provide authentic, real-world learning through in-depth, extensive projects. From mock trials, to fictional memoirs, creating geometric structures, and our capstone short story and declamation projects, we believe students learn as much - or even more - from the high level of engagement engendered by these rigorous initiatives.
    • Marbled Tinkering

      Eighth-grade students put their engineering and design skills to the ultimate test in the Marble Maze Challenge, an annual hands-on learning project that starts in our MakerSpace Design Lab.

    • Authentic Learning

      Our Middle School division-wide experiential learning project immerses students in various topical thematic content such as climate change and sustainability. Authenticity is at the heart of this initiative in that it’s meaningful and offers students the ability to build out life skills.

    • Earth Tones

      Earth Day is an annual occasion that gets our students out of the classroom and into real-world scenarios where they learn about - and help maintain - the watershed, nature preserves, and community gardens.

Brian Christman, Director of Middle School

By getting to know every student well, and partnering with parents to ensure successful academic habits, we are able to help each child reach their potential. Life in the Middle School is filled with dynamic and engaging programs and activities.

Campus Happenings

Hamden Hall Country Day School, located less than two miles from Yale University, is one of the best private schools in Connecticut to enroll elementary, middle, and high school students. Our nurturing and inclusive community provides a dynamic learning environment that promotes academic excellence by understanding each child and fostering their individual growth.