Academics

Lower School

The Lower School Experience

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 Pre-K through Grade 5 classrooms are colorful, comfortable, and alive with activities, a setting that is at once both flexible and structured. Teachers strive to know not just what but how each student learns - intellectually, emotionally and behaviorally. You will find that the Country Day Lower School is unlike any other program in New Orleans.
Children learn through active exploration of their environment through children-initiated and teacher-selected activities. The program should provide numerous opportunities for students to explore materials and environment, engage in activities, interact with peers, interact with adults, and to construct knowledge about the world around them.”

- National Association of the Education of Young People
This standard is the cornerstone of our Pre-K program. Housed in Bart’s Cottage, students are provided with academic experiences that will help them get ready to read, write, count, and problem solve by providing them with rich exposure and practice with functional living, physical, social, emotional, cognitive, and communicative skills. While also preparing students for Kindergarten, our curriculum is guided by the belief that children learn best through play in a hands-on, stimulating, and nurturing environment.

Beginning in Kindergarten, 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.

Teachers strategically assemble student groups according to students' abilities, interests, learning styles, and strengths. These small groupings provide students of different skill levels in each of their subjects appropriate attention, and are an intellectual foundation of multiage classrooms. During the years in which children are developing at various rates, the students in multiage classrooms benefit from individualized curriculum and varied methods of teaching.

At the same time, teachers in our multiage classrooms look beyond scaffolding knowledge and skills to actively instill dispositions of intellectual curiosity, open-mindedness, empathy, and personal responsibility. Intellectual growth is not separate from social/emotional growth, and at Country Day, learning includes a deliberate focus on creating and maintaining a strong community of diverse thinkers. Students grow in their ability, inclination and engagement as they seek to master multiple subjects of interest; at the same time, they develop their sense of mindfulness, paying attention on purpose to creating, practicing, and strengthening their individual character under the active coaching and counsel of adults. Meaningful relationships and caring attitudes are so important to shaping who we are intellectually.

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 structured to their needs. Because academic and social needs become more distinct as children grow older, 5th 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.

Benefits of Multiage Classrooms

List of 7 items.

  • Yearly time restraints are removed

    Children are allowed to progress successfully at their own rate of development, not on a timetable set by a textbook.

  • Multiage curriculums challenge gifted students

    Students in single grade classrooms are assessed by what is considered acceptable performance for children at a given age. Multiage curriculum challenges talented children because "grade level" is no longer a place to stop while others catch up.

  • No lag time at the beginning of the year

    Meaningful instruction can begin on the first day since teachers already know the individual strengths of returning students. This can happen only in multi-grade classrooms.

  • Greater opportunities to get to know the parents

    The multi-grade class maximizes the working relationship and partnership between school and family over a longer period of time.

  • A shared sense of learning and community

    The teachers provide the structure for the classroom community, but the children create the unique environment with their own personalities, strengths, and needs. Behavior problems are minimized, and children feel a responsibility for their work. The majority of the class is already familiar with how the class works. Older students act as models for new students. In fact, older students develop independence as they take on the role of teacher and mentor. Students have friends of different ages.

  • Children progress rather than just pass

    Multi-grade classrooms allow teachers to consider the whole child, to work with your child over a period of two to three years rather than within a rigid, nine-month time frame. Students receive different assignments and daily responsibilities at each grade level. For example, while kindergartners learn to record daily temperatures and weather conditions, first graders are building rain gauges to measure rainfall. Second graders use their findings to compute monthly rainfall averages and share their findings with the younger students.

  • What the experts say

    In an article published recently in Educational Leadership, Professor Barbara Pavan reviewed sixty-four research studies on multi-grade classrooms. Pavan found that fifty-eight percent of students in multi-grade classes performed better than their peers on measures of academic achievement. She also found that students in multi-grade settings were "more likely than their peers to have positive self-concepts, high self esteem and good attitudes toward school." Parents are often concerned that older children in a multi-grade setting will not benefit as much as younger children. Research shows, however, that when older students teach information and skills to their younger classmates, their own academic performances dramatically improve.

Upcoming Events

List of 3 events.

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Curriculum

Lower School Videos

    • The Pre-K K/1/2 Experience - Come Inside!

Contacts

List of 5 members.

  • Mrs. Mimi Odem 

    Metairie Park Country Day School
    Lower School Principal
    504-849-3148

  • Mrs. Kelsey Beahm 

    Metairie Park Country Day School
    Lower School Assistant

  • Mrs. Emily West 

    Metairie Park Country Day School
    Assistant Principal of Lower School/Design Innovator for Lower School
    (504) 849-3155
    Loyola University, New Orleans - BA

  • Mrs. Julie Schneider 

    Grades 3 & 4 Team Leader, Grades 3 & 4 Teacher
    (504) 849-3139
    Newcomb College - BA
    University of New Orleans - MA

  • Mrs. Angela Beerman 

    Grade 5 Teacher and Team Leader (Room 15)
    (504) 838-3319
    University of New Orleans - B.A.
    University of New Orleans - M. Ed.
Each student has the opportunity to develop fully and confidently, at their own pace, on their own path to maturity.

--Lower School Principal, Lilian B. Mullane

Lower School News

List of 3 news stories.

  • Solving the Future's Problems

    In February, five Country Day students competed in the Global Issues Future Problem Solving state competition. Sharika Page, a 5th grader, competed in the individual category. Walker Gordillo, Pierce Hatheway, Sarah Heebe, all 5th graders, and 4th grader, Giana Elgarico participated in the group competition. Students worked for over two hours on solving potential future challenges related to 3-D printing. Competition booklets are now being evaluated and students will know by early March if they advance to the next level of competition.

  • Bones Found at Science and Engineering Construction Site

    "Lower School, can you help us?" That was the plea from Head of School Carolyn Chandler earlier this week as she shared the discovery of "real" bones in soil excavated from the Science and Engineering construction site. That soil was then taken to a site on Falcon Road where lower school students will work to uncover additional fossils. Stay tuned as this exciting project continues to unfold. 

  • Ready or not, here comes summer!

    Looking at the school calendar yesterday, I began to realize how full these last few weeks of school are, with celebrations and parties and special events. Roll on summer! Not sure, though, if I’m ready for it…Doesn’t it seem to be coming too fast on the heels of scrambling to buy start-of-school student supplies (was that really 9 months ago?).
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300 Park Road, Metairie, LA 70005 (504) 837-5204
Established in 1929, Metairie Park Country Day School is a coed private school for New Orleans area students in early childhood through Grade 12. From the elementary grades through upper school, the care and cultivation of each child comes to life in our exciting academic program, creative arts, and competitive athletic offerings.