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IN AT LEAST ONE OF OUR NINE ATHLETIC OFFERINGS

Good Shepherd Episcopal School is an outreach of The Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd and enjoys a healthy and fruitful relationship with the church. As an Episcopal school, we have a reverence for faith and reason along with a sense of duty to serve others rooted in the Episcopalian tenets, but inclusive of all beliefs and backgrounds.

The connection of our spirituality is Chapel, a place, program, and sanctuary for students, faculty, and staff of all beliefs and backgrounds.

Chapel is where our entire community comes together to nurture the spiritual beings we are and to encourage one another on our journeys of faith.

Our Christian faith and values explain why we do some of the things we do - not just why we start our day with prayer or have chapel, but why we try to forge a meaningful community or take on acts of service and social justice. All of that comes out of our understanding of what it means to be God’s people in the world. And those tenets we share with other faith traditions include our belief that:

• Everyone has inherent worth as a creation of God.

• Every individual shares responsibility for the community to put their best effort forward in all areas.

• Individual moral integrity and a core of common values are essential to every community.

• Mutual respect among people of varied backgrounds and perspectives leads to positive, beneficial relationships.

• Individuals thrive in a safe, nurturing environment where they can be comfortable in taking risks and where they can develop their talents.

Episcopal Tenets

1. Common Prayer

2. Intellectual Discipline

3. Welcoming Community

4. Respect for Others

5. Compassionate Service

While many schools have STEM labs, Good Shepherd went in a totally different direction with the creation of SPARQ (Solving Problems, Asking RealWorld Questions) - a unique learning space where students at all grade levels use the latest advances in technology to enhance projects or create and gain new skills from leap motion, 3D modeling and printing, robotics, coding and circuitry, to rapid prototyping and film making.

Child by child, we harness technology to customize effective teaching for a multitude of learning styles.

Hundreds of grade-level applications are supported by our educational technologists who know how to use them to enhance learning. They give our teachers a framework through which each child can engage in individualized and self-directed ways.

Our Classroom of the Earth (COE) program is outdoor education in a class of its own. It’s the original. It’s groundbreaking. The wilderness gets wilder as our students get older. Nature hikes in pre-K through first grade give way to a ten-day hiking/camping adventure in the Colorado Rocky Mountains in eighth grade. During their time at Good Shepherd, students will cumulatively hike over 50 miles, travel over 5,000 miles, canoe 10 miles, and raft 11 miles. You’ll be amazed at the places your children will go!

COE teaches our students that the world extends way beyond the “walls” of our everyday lives. Students not only learn about themselves, but about how their individual efforts impact the success of their peers. This is truly real world education, and nobody does it better than we do.

Our Spanish curriculum is creative, ambitious, and designed to go way beyond merely learning to speak the language. Because students start Spanish in pre-K, our Spanish curriculum is designed to dig deeper into cultural backgrounds, advanced sentence structure, and real world stories. Native speakers from South America visit our classes to tell all about their language and their lives. Due to our students’ comprehensive preparation, they are both conversationally proficient and culturally knowledgeable. Most of our graduates are placed in second-year Spanish or beyond in their first year of high school. A summer immersion program in Costa Rica is available for older students.

What happens at the crossroads of creative expression, academic freedom, and ample time? In a word, art, the way it’s done at Good Shepherd. We give generously to the arts here, with art and music classes alternating every day, starting in first grade. Creativity is free to blossom, and being creative becomes a habit without ever being mundane.

Orff Schulwerk is a process of teaching music that has been around for over one hundred years. It is beautiful in its simplicity. Based on things all children like to do - like clap, dance, sing, and keep a beat - music is made without constraint or convention. The Orff process is proven to make music relevant to children at all grade levels in a personal way, which can fuel their creativity as they grow and develop as artists.

Visual art class is held twice a week, every week of every year, at Good Shepherd. Beginning in lower school, students study painting, drawing, and sculpture. They learn principles of line, shape, form, color, texture, contrast, pattern, rhythm, and space. By middle school, we explore broader subjects, including two-and threedimensional design and printmaking.