My students come to kindergarten extremely well prepared. Sixty percent of them enter kindergarten with literacy skills well above district norms. Still, as in any classroom, they have a wide range of instructional needs because of their differing abilities, stages of development, interests and values. I have five students in my room who are bilingual, with English not being their primary language. Literacy abilities at the beginning of this school year ranged from a child reading at the fourth grade level to several children who had acquired few (less than five) concepts of print and did not know even the letters in their own name. Therefore, I use a variety of learning experiences in my classroom that provide multiple paths to learning.

This school also houses the self-contained highly gifted classes for the school district. Due to the state of Colorado's free choice plan, about half of the students in the school come from the neighborhood; the other half of the students come from other schools within our district and from other surrounding districts.