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Elementary

 

 

Our elementary program strives to continue to build an environment where students feel safe, challenged, and engaged with various experiences.  Our teaching and assessments are standards-based, data-driven, and purposeful to ensure whole child development by maximizing learning opportunities for all students.  Our elementary program is designed to:

  • Directly teach our students in a fully accessible language

  • Allow students to communicate directly with everyone on the campus, giving them a language-rich learning environment

  • Ensure high-quality instruction in the best learning environments for our students, including small class sizes and a strong focus on the learning needs of every child.

We strongly believe in ASL/English bilingual approach to instruction and celebrate both languages.  Ensuring full access to both languages in a school environment allows students to build their critical thinking skills, independence, and advocacy skills.  Following the Minnesota State Standards, our students will be given plenty of opportunities for learning experiences in signing, viewing, reading, and writing in both languages.  For our students to become fully bilingual, they need to have full access to both languages at all times here at school.

Our philosophy of instruction is to maximize student learning and a critical mass of learning.  Our student groupings within lower elementary and upper elementary are structured to ensure high-quality instruction and equitable class sizes for each student.  Some classes have co-teaching teams, and for language arts and math, we use various data to determine flexible grouping based on the needs of the students. 

Our teachers collaborate closely with a team of student support staff, including the PBIS coordinator, counselors, speech-language pathologists, and ASL specialists, to ensure every child receives the support they need to succeed as a person both in the classroom and out of the classroom.  Our teachers also work closely with occupational therapist and physical therapist to provide support when needed.

We value the importance of working closely together with our students’ families to promote the whole child approach. Families help teach our children values and character. The school’s role is to reinforce the values, character, work ethic, and soft skills that children learn and develop at home and school.