Lower School (K-5th grade)
Welcome to our Lower School Division
A Message from the Director of Lower & Middle School
Director of Lower & Middle School
Your child's academic journey begins at The Colorado Springs School, where we educate and value each child as a unique individual. Our passionate and dedicated faculty offer a highly interactive, hands-on curriculum that is both challenging and supporting for young learners, as they strive to find their voice, discover who they are, and determine the unique roles they wish to play in this ever-changing world.
We encourage opportunities to learn and grow as a community through activities such as Book Buddies, during which older students partner with younger ones to participate in weekly reading activities. This strengthens the education experience for students of all ages.
Our rigorous curriculum is deepened through experiential learning in the classroom and beyond. While focused on core subjects of reading, writing, mathematics,
science, and history, we also value co-curricular subjects such as band, music, Spanish, library, physical education, creative dramatics, and visual arts. Our teachers strive to bring hands-on experiences into everyday learning. Utilizing an integrated, interdisciplinary approach, dynamic Themes of Study immerse students in a particular subject area.
These lessons build character, resilience, and independence and promote the ability of our students to recognize, appreciate, and accept the differences of others. We encourage you to discover CSS and see for yourself how we prepare children for a dynamic world.
Curriculum - What to Expect
We are excited to announce that the Lower and Middle Schools have officially adopted the EL Education K-8 Language Arts Curriculum for the 2024-2025 school year. This comprehensive, evidence-based balanced literacy program is focused on higher-order thinking skills and encouraging students to make relevant connections. These skills are modeled and practiced until students demonstrate independent mastery through a variety of assessment and performance tasks.
EL is differentiated by scaffolding for students needing additional support and our interventionists will work closely with classroom teachers to enhance this curriculum during intervention times. Lesson activities address multi-dimensional learning through various modalities and module topics allow students to build background, increasing readiness for reading and writing. All of these features of the curriculum ensure success for all students. The EL curriculum gives students opportunities to make choices, practice established protocols to enhance classroom routines, and develop habits of character that are vertically aligned from K-8.
Best practices for curriculum adoption include thorough professional development for the educators who are implementing it. All CSS K-8 teachers have participated in a training program and will collaborate throughout the year with colleagues to ensure a successful implementation.
Here are the following resources to learn more:
Additional Resources EL Curriculum:
In addition to our new ELA curriculum for language arts, we will embark on our second year with Bridges in Mathematics in Lower School. Student growth and achievement are our priorities and we continue to focus forward in order to plan for and provide the best instruction, and interventions when needed, for our young mathematicians. To learn more about the curriculum, please visit the following resources below and look for communication from classroom teachers at the start of each unit outlining topics and objectives:
Additional Resources Bridges in Mathematics:
