We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
“Nostos” by Louise Glück
Our Values
The magic of childhood - its boundless curiosity and special sweetness - are what The Field School nurtures and celebrates. Caring educators, immense natural beauty, and rich Mediterranean culture are the foundation of our offering and approach.
Children see the world as it is: a great cathedral of staggering complexity and joy. What they feel and love at this time sets the horizon for all later exploration. Doors sealed in childhood may stay closed forever.
Through our curriculum, children look, wonder, and look again at this inexhaustible world. From the realms of science, math, art, and the humanities, they amplify their natural propensity for awe.
This program is not “summer school.” Rather than propelling children towards certain learning milestones - an essential, but exhausting function of normal school - our program cultivates the desire to learn, activating the multiple benefits that children draw from time spent in nature, collaborative play, and creative pursuits. There are no worksheets, no textbooks, and no screens.
Program Overview
Schedule
The Field School offers 35 hours per week of child enrichment. It is a drop-off program, beginning at 2pm and ending at 9pm, Monday through Friday, in the summer months. Dinner is included.
We choose this unusual schedule to align with island rhythms of life while still meeting families’ needs. The atmosphere that emerges after sundown on Hvar is an essential pleasure of summers here. Our schedule allows families to enjoy later nights with slower mornings. This PM format also offers at least partial support to parents working on both EU/UK and American time zones.
In the fall session, the program runs from 10am-5pm, Monday through Friday. Lunch is included.
Friday evenings are family beach night in the summer, with pizza included, and will transition to campfire nights in the fall. Saturdays will be our primary day for optional family service opportunities, such as grape and olive harvest or trail restoration. Read more about our whole-family activities in Community.
Themes
The 2025 season offers children over the age of six a choice between two tracks: the Sea or the Land. Both tracks integrate child leadership, the outdoors, practical skills, and academic learning. Young creators will gravitate towards the Land track, a bucolic exploration of sustainable food and craft. Explorers will love boating, boatmaking, and fishing in the Sea track. Children in both tracks will use their skills on camping trips with their age peers, and both tracks will have multiple cultural outings. More details of each track are provided below.
The Journal
At the outset of each session, children receive a journal, a place to work out their scientific observations, favorite quotes or poems, calculations and plans, doodles, and inspiration. Parents, children, and educators review the journals together, and it serves as a memento to the countless thoughts and experiences that children have in their time with us.
Meals
Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse and Edible Schoolyard Garden wrote: “Teaching children how to cook is giving them power and control over their own well-being.”
All children in our program are patiently supported in cooking their own dinners from local ingredients. In the Kinder and Land programs, children also grow or gather much of what winds up on their plate. In the Sea track, children will fish for part of their dinners (or try to!).
Age Groups & Ratios
The Field School of Hvar serves five age groups: Toddler (1-3), Kinder (4-6), Grammar (7-9), Middle (10-13), and Teen (14-17).
Our typical student-to-teacher ratio is 7:1. In instructional moments, we often subdivide groups for a 3:1 ratio, drawing on the best practices of “high impact tutoring.” Kinder has a maximum ratio of 6:1, Teen has a ratio of 10:1, and Toddler generally has six pairs of parents and children per educator.
Three-year-olds may attend the Kinder program so long as they are out of diapers and a parent is prepared to move the child to the Toddler group and attend with them if the child is unable to manage drop-off by the end of the first week.
The Teen program is only available in Sessions 2 and 3, June 28-July 19 and July 19-August 9.
Location
The Field School mostly takes place outside. Across from our coworking office within the Fontana Resort (see more about accommodations), we also have a 220sm classroom with a wraparound terrace overlooking the sea. Families are welcome to use this space as a playroom outside of program hours, and it serves as a home base for lessons, materials, and a hideout from occasional bad weather.
Field-to-fork cooking in the Land and Kinder program takes place in a private courtyard garden in the historic town of Stari Grad between the belltower of St. Stephen’s Cathedral and the turret of our local monastery. The food program is led by a professional restaurateur and food educator.
Thematic Tracks
Young Children
Toddler, one through three
The Field School is excited to offer a series of nature-based play, learning games, and craft workshops for toddlers and parents to attend together, providing a rare opportunity for families with small children to enjoy richly stimulating, stress-free, and social travel alongside their little ones.
Unlike our other programs for kids, our Toddler program runs for twenty hours per week, starting at 4pm after children typically wake from their naps and ending at 9pm like other programs.
Kinder, four through six
Through immersion in nature, peer relationships, and safe risk-taking, the Kinder program at The Field School of Hvar guides young children to navigate emotions and their rocketing new capabilities.
Each day begins on the water with a bite-size version of our Sea program - including little kayaks! The late afternoon is spent gardening, cooking, crafting, and wandering through nature in a Kinder version of our Land track. An hour of natural math and phonics games are sprinkled throughout the day, as well as many thematically linked children’s books.
After framing the day’s endeavor, children will have Workshop, a chance for them to create cosmetics, ceramics, textiles, and other products. Younger children will build skills by following recipes while older children will have more space to experiment at the intersection of their interests, materials, and market.
Usually the afternoon will include a swim, followed by Dinner, with cooking, reading, and conversation. The day ends with an Excursion: service, gardening, foraging, or a cultural outing.
Every session will also include an overnight camping trip with peers from the Sea track.
Key Outcomes: Children who complete the Land track should emerge with (1) a more intuitive understanding of math and science, (2) an empowered perspective on nutrition, self-care, and sustainability, (3) enhanced ability to translate ideas and interests into viable plans.
How far and deep children go into artisanship and its attendant skills will depend upon the duration of the session they are attending.
The Land
The Land track centers on zero-kilometer food and craft entrepreneurship - an unforgettable immersion in the groves, gardens, and traditions that have shaped Mediterranean life and culture for millennia.
Each day will begin with an all school meeting, followed by Context, a tutorial for 3-7 children previewing the days activities and providing necessary academic facts and skills. Grammar group children will review fractions for use in the kitchen, for example. Teens might apply chemistry to understand why mordants fix natural pigments. A day on entrepreneurship will feature market math for younger kids and lifecycle design for teens.
Every session will also include an overnight camping trip with peers from the Land track.
Key Outcomes: Children who complete the Land track should emerge with: (1) a more intuitive understanding of math and science; (2) self-confidence and maturity to handle challenges; (3) an indelible relationship with the outdoors.
How far and deep children go into boating and its attendant skills and knowledge will depend upon the duration of the session they are attending.
The Sea
Discover independence, skills, a love of nature, and a world of stories by experiencing the life of a seafarer in the Adriatic.
Each day begins with an all school meeting, followed by Context, a tutorial for 3-7 children preparing for the day’s activities with knowledge and skills. Grammar group children will study habits and anatomy of marine life, for example, before going fishing. Teens will preview physics by studying buoyancy in boatbuilding.
After framing the day’s endeavor, children will go out on the water to learn Boating skills, including safety, planning, and navigation. We will probably spend most of our time with kayaks and canoes - more details to come on that front. Later in the afternoon, children will fish and prepare a camp-style dinner, followed by tales of the sea. In the evening, children will build full-size traditional wooden boats from pre-cut parts, which they will later sail.