The Woods Academy: Where Students from Age 3 to Grade 8 Learn to Lead Lives of Significance

The Woods Academy is an inclusive Catholic school that promotes academic and personal achievement for students in preschool through Grade 8. We offer a range of creative, innovative programs in academics, religion, STEAM, athletics, the Arts —including music—and world language. You’ll learn quickly that it’s our faculty and our teachers, as well as our students and their families, that make us who we are, as a school, a community, and a family.

What Makes The Woods Different?

Our preschool through Grade 8 program allows children to remain children for as long as possible.

Students who begin as our first-year Montessori students will spend more time with us than they will in high school, college, and graduate school combined. These eleven years will be the most significant years of their education. To ensure we meet their needs, we provide an extensive formal education, preparing them for what lies ahead, while ensuring they get to stay kids just a little longer. Here, they learn, play, and experience life, through age-appropriate curriculum and activities.

We are one of the few private schools in the Bethesda area with both a preschool through Grade 8 population and a daily world language program.

The study of world languages –we focus on Spanish and French– should be a priority for children, especially if we want them to become responsible, global citizens. We don’t believe language study is important just because students learn to speak another language. In addition to developing a greater openness to other cultures, research shows that students who learn another language at a young age perform better on basic skills assessments and demonstrate greater mental flexibility and creativity, outperforming their peers.

Through our faith-based education, students develop respect for family, each other, faculty, staff, and administrators, as well as those in their local community and in the world around them.

From this experience comes a lasting desire to care for those around them, people they may or may not know. While not all students who come to Catholic schools are Catholic, all who come to The Woods Academy share basic values, and we encourage our students to do what they can to become better people in tomorrow’s world.

Our STEAM education encompasses the best of all worlds and best prepares students for what lies ahead.

STEM? STEAM? What’s the right path for our children? STEM initiatives are a wonderful start to exploring and understanding the technology that runs our world. But, we also believe that the 21st century economy requires knowing how to apply that technology, create it, and find new ways of working. We address this in our program, and go further by integrating numerous aspects of the Arts into our curriculum. Our STEAM program gives students the capacity to wonder, critique, inquire, and innovate. They express their curiosity about how things work and become confident in their ability to have an impact.