- Preschool
- Kindergarten
- Primary Circle
- Main Circle
- Oldest Group
- Art
- Technology
- Library
- Music
- Science
- Woodshop
- Service Learning
- Mini Courses
- Sports
- Afternoons Program

Classrooms

Welcome to our classrooms. These sites represent a sample of the student activities in our classrooms over a few years. They have been created by teachers and students to give you a glimpse into their day at SRV. Some classrooms use their sites as teaching tools and the child-centered creative process is clearly visible. Each site has its own personality. The sites are evolving and content may vary depending on what is happening in each classroom. These sites represent a sample of the student activities in our classrooms over a few years. Enjoy!

» View the Sights and Sounds of SRV video

Why Our Classrooms are Multi-Age

The Principal's Perspective

I am often asked why we have multi-age classrooms. It is a complex and intriguing question. Our learning environments respect individual progressions and regression along the road to growth and discovery. Children can take a giant step in the areas of their strength and smaller steps in their areas of need. They can even jog in place as they find something particularly challenging or for which they lack the necessary physical maturity or intellectual development. We have built-in peer role models and mentors, knowing that what the child can do in cooperation today, he/she can do alone tomorrow. There is a high level of both interdependence and independence in our multi-age rooms. Each time I walk into a classroom I am reminded of the wisdom of the school's founders. These concerned parents studied child development and progressive educational theory and then went about creating a school based on those ideas. They were daring enough to buck the prevailing mode of segregating age mates by a calendar year; a practice based on an industrialized model, which had no basis in theory or pedagogy. Instead they created a one-room schoolhouse where children of all ages learned, played and worked together. This was consistent with knowledge about child development and what was best for educating children. While we have grown past that one room, we have maintained diverse age groupings of children. What was wise in 1929 remains so today.

Caryle Nelson-Major
Principal

A Teacher's Perspective

One of the best parts about my job, and something unique to the way children are grouped at SRV, is that each and every day I have the opportunity to watch children teach and support one another, from the tying of a shoe to the sounding out of a word. If you walk into any of our multi-age classrooms you will see amazing teaching and learning experiences in progress that do not involve the adults in the room. In the Primary Circle, children teach each other constantly, and not just the older ones teaching the younger ones. Each time a child explains the rules of a game or shows a friend how to build with geoblocks they are bringing their thinking to a conscious and articulated level. They are also learning to be kind, compassionate, and helpful members of a community.

The School in Rose Valley has been committed to groups of children of varying ages working, learning and playing together from its founding in 1929. Though the names may have changed (olders and youngers, first year and second years), the idea that children develop at their own pace still informs our teaching today.

In any classroom, whether it is multi-aged or unit-level graded, there will be a diversity of learners, a range of needs and abilities. A vertically-grouped classroom eliminates the assumption that chronological age dictates ability. It turns a year of schooling into a process, part of a continuous whole, rather than a product with a set outcome. I feel so lucky to be an intimate party to this process for children.

A Primary Circle Teacher