Cascade Canyon School has offered an outstanding, developmental
Kindergarten program for the past twenty-five years, taught by Peggy
Tunder, an expert in primary education and "magician" in the clasroom
when it comes to creating a love of learning, a kind and caring
community, and inspiring children's creativity. Peggy has taught the
Kindergarten program as a stand-alone Kindergarten class and as a
multli-age class, in keeping with the multi-age philosophy of our
school. Peggy is also a former co-director of Cascade Canyon.
Peggy currently delivers our Kindergarten program as a straight Kindergarten class in
order to provide our youngest students an extra special welcome into the school. Because of our
uniquely small Kindergarten class size, capped at 10 students, all students are able to receive the attention
they need to thrive socially, emotionally and academically in their
first year of school.
 Kindergarten
students at Cascade Canyon spend the mornings in Peggy's homeroom
classroom, integrating cooperative play, Sign Language, the arts and
kinesthetic movement with core academic studies in math, language
arts, and social studies (community and world studies). The
Kindergarten students participate in our reading and writing workshop program along
with the older students in the school, and they begin our Math
Expressions math program, supplemented with Marilyn Burns' hands-on,
problem solving curriculum, which continue through fourth grade.
In the afternoons, our Kindergarten students enjoy being a part of our rich specialist program,
with teachers who are specialists in the fields of art, music, science
and nature, theater, Spanish, and physical education. Aside from
offering a balanced curriculum, and addressing the needs and interests
of the whole child, another perk of our specialist program is that our
students get to know and work with their future first through eighth grade
teachers: just as their core teacher, Peggy, teaches specialist subjects
to the rest of the school in the afternoons (theater and Sign
Language), the other core teachers also teach specialist subjects to the Kindergrarten students in the afternoons. This staffing model builds cohesiveness
in the students' experience from year to year and fosters close-knit
student-teacher community.
 A
special added component of the Kindergarten experience at
Cascade
Canyon School is becoming a part of the warm, loving K-8 Cascade Canyon
School student community. Kindergarteners form special
relationships with the older students in the school through cross-age
reading buddies, weekly whole school community meetings, whole school
morning recess and lunch, school-wide performances and events, and traveling together on our overnight and
day trips. It is not uncommon to see our youngest children sitting on
our oldest children's laps during morning meeting, or to witness an
exuberant lunchtime soccer game with children of all ages playing
together.
If you are interested in enrolling your child in Kindergarten at Cascade
Canyon for the upcoming school year, please call our school office at
459-3464 or download an application from the "Latest News" section on
our Home Page. We begin accepting applications for our Kindergarten class in January: come visit our school at our fall Open
House, scheduled for November 6th, our winter Open House scheduled for
January 29th, or call the office to sign up for a Thursday morning tour.
Priority admission deadline is February 5th. Students who apply
before February 5th will be notified of their acceptance status in
March, after their school visit. The decision to offer a stand-alone Kindergarten classroom or a K-1 multi-age classroom, both of which have been
highly successful, is typically announced in late March/early April, and
is based on the best configuration of students across grades K-2.
A detailed description of the Kindergarten curriculum follows.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Our Program 
