A Day at Brearley

The School year at Brearley begins shortly after Labor Day and ends in early June. All regular school days begin at 8:10 a.m. for everyone.

Lower School students take classes in forty-minute blocks, with a mid-morning snack, communal lunch and recess. The day ends with a transitional “quiet” period. Lower School dismissal times vary by grade, but the Lower School academic day ends for all students at 12:30 p.m. on Friday.

The Middle School maintains the framework of the Lower School academic day, beginning with a homeroom period three days a week and including a mid-morning snack, a full hour for lunch three times a week and a once-weekly advisory period.

The Upper School day defies easy description, because each course and discipline has a unique configuration of classes in a week. While some courses, especially in Class IX and X, meet in the traditional pattern of four forty-minute periods a week, other courses operate on a pattern of mingled forty-, sixty- or eighty-minute periods.

The academic day for Middle and Upper School students ends at around 3:00, depending on the day. Each week has an assembly period as well as more informal weekly gatherings for announcements and for sharing.

Brearley carefully regulates homework by grade level and division.

• In the Lower School, we ask families to read aloud with girls from Kindergarten on, and ask girls to read to themselves once they have the skills. As each girl advances through Brearley, the amount of time devoted to homework increases.
• By Class VII in the Middle School, girls can have as many as four assignments per day, although many complete some of their homework in supervised study halls.
• In the Upper School, the number of assignments a student takes home varies both according to the number of classes she has in a day and according to how she budgets her time.