Lower School Overview

Your child's educational experience starts in the Lower School where we emphasize successful beginnings. Students who feel good about their earliest experiences in school more easily establish a pattern of lifelong learning. Our classrooms are colorful, comfortable, and alive with activities-a setting that is at once both flexible and structured.

Your child is assigned to a class where two teachers plan students' lessons and activities. Country Day teachers inspire curiosity, self-discipline and the ability to solve problems. Working individually and in groups, children learn academic subjects along with independence, tolerance, and cooperation.

You will find that the Country Day Lower School is unlike any other program in New Orleans. Based on the philosophy that young children learn best in a flexible but highly structured setting, the Lower School is designed in multi-grade classrooms, allowing teachers to create student groups according to abilities, interests, learning styles, and strengths. Kindergarten, first, and second grades learn together, as do the third and fourth grades. This system-utilized at Country Day for more than 30 years-has been widely accepted across the nation as a successful, stimulating approach to learning at the initial levels of formal schooling.

Children progress successfully at their own rate in a way that allows them to identify and pursue their individual talents and interests while developing core learning skills. They are challenged within the structure of the classroom to create a unique environment with their own personalities, needs, and strengths. The different groups learn cooperatively while receiving different assignments and daily responsibilities at each grade level. Older students help younger children in a way that enhances the learning of every child and honors each as a significant individual.

Walk into a multi-grade classroom and you will see an exciting mix of children working and learning together. This does not look like a traditional classroom. Children work at tables and move around the room, learning cooperatively through individual and teacher-directed activities in an environment that is effectively structured around the progress of the individual and the group.

Because academic and social needs become more distinct as children grow older, fifth graders in the Lower School are introduced to the experience of a departmentalized schedule. Specifically, they are taught in separate classes, by subject-specific teachers, as the students prepare for Middle School.