Cascade Canyon

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 within a K-1 setting in order to offer a multi-age experience to even our youngest students at school and  to enable first grade students to benefit from being with Peggy for a second year and having the opportunity to become leaders and mentors in the class to the incoming Kindergarteners. Because of our unique small class size, all students are able to receive the attention they need to thrive socially, emotionally and intellectually in their first and second year of school. The K-1 class and stand-alone Kindergarten class, when it is offered, are both capped at 10 students.

K-1 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 K-1 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 K-1 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 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, and 7-8 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 K-1 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-First Grade experience at Cascade Canyon School is becoming a part of the warm, loving K-8 Cascade Canyon School student community. Kindergarteners and first graders 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, 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 2009-2010 Kindergarten class in January: come visit our school at our fall Open House, scheduled for November 8th, our winter Open House scheduled for January 30th, 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 K-1 again, or return to a stand-alone Kindergarten 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.