Our Mission
Sierra Canyon School is an academically excellent, college preparatory school committed to an empowering environment in which students realize their greatest creative, ethical, intellectual, and physical promise. We are defined by an energized, attentive, and diverse student-teacher culture. Sierra Canyon School is a special place to grow for the challenges of a fast-changing world.
Lower School / Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 6
toward adventurous achievement
Your child loves asking big questions, making new friends, and discovering how to make the world a better place.
So do we.
During these crucial early years, we help your child build a unique path to a life of joyful, meaningful learning.
On the exhilarating, sheltering green grounds of Sierra Canyon’s Lower Campus, imaginative teachers and eager classmates cultivate your child’s natural curiosity, exuberance, and empathy so each new day and every new experience is met with ever-growing confidence, capability, and compassion.
At Sierra Canyon, your child learns forward toward increasing intellectual and personal independence and lifelong success.
Our nurturing Early Learning program guides your child’s first years.
From Pre-Kindergarten through grade 2, our expert early childhood teachers foster your child’s intellectual and moral development in equal measure, paving the way to adventurous and meaningful achievement. Our Learning Forward philosophy means that our thoughtful teachers meet their students where they are today and provide the tools and encouragement to push themselves to the next level.
Teaching in small groups allows teachers to develop a deep relationship with each student. At the same time, through our intentional character education program, your child begins discovering how to be a kind and respectful community member. Learning and playing in a diverse, inclusive environment builds intellectual, emotional, and cultural agility to propel your child forward through the Lower School.
During their Lower School journey, your child develops an especially strong foundation for lifelong learning. Our liberal arts curriculum is steeped in rigorous academic standards. Teaching strategies are dynamic, creative, and varied to keep students engaged and maximize understanding. Differentiated learning in reading and math ensures each child is challenged and that learning is a joyful enterprise. Alongside classmates from uncommonly diverse backgrounds, your child builds confidence and poise through active questioning, real-world problem-solving, and thoughtful and challenging small-group work. In the globalized world we live in today, we believe that children’s education is a failure if it exposes them only to people like themselves and doesn’t prepare them to engage with people of different backgrounds and lived experiences. Whether in the classroom, at lunch, or on the playground, every moment at school also provides opportunities for character education. Classroom lessons, discussions, and assemblies contextualize what it means to be a person of good character. Caring, imaginative faculty members inspire, guide, and prepare students for sixth grade and the crucial transition to Middle School.
In grades 3-5, confidence and proficiency grow by leaps and bounds.
Grade 6 paves the way to the new world of Middle School.
Sixth grade marks an especially exciting time in your child’s Sierra Canyon journey. In the last year on our Lower Campus but the first year of Middle School, we continue to nurture your child’s intellect, values, and confidence—while building self-advocacy, leadership skills, and independence. Intensive, collaborative learning experiences broaden your child’s academic insight. During this tentative age and stage of development, we offer our 6th grade students a unique transitional program in which they learn how to navigate a Middle School schedule while benefiting from the confidence and leadership opportunities that being the oldest on campus provides. At the same time, the foundation is laid for social, emotional, and academic success in Middle and Upper School. At the end of this developmentally critical year, your child is ready to step out of our Lower Campus enclave and into our energizing Upper Campus.
