Welcome to VGS
Our mission: Vashon Green School is a learning community, rooted in emotional literacy, environmental awareness, and social justice. We provide young people with the raw material to build a strong foundation.
Our aim is to provide a learning environment where:
• children’s unique ways of knowing are honored
• connections to each other, humanity and the natural world deepen
• sustainable solutions grow
• engaged global citizens are inspired.
Vashon Green School embraces sustainable, progressive, ground-breaking educational opportunities. We offer an elementary academic curriculum rooted in the theory of multiple intelligences—recognizing each individual possesses a unique blend of different ways of thinking, learning, sensing and expressing. VGS engages each child’s unique gifts and seeks to identify and incorporate different learning modality strengths. When children feel empowered in their strengths they gain the courage and confidence to embrace challenges.
During years of teaching diverse populations of students, Dana Schuerholz, lead instructor at VGS observed that more conventional learners, those who excel at linguistic and logical intelligence, thrive in a collaborative living classroom. And students who excel primarily in non-conventional learning environments are empowered in ways that uniquely meet their needs and creativity.
Amy Mercer, a certified dyslexia specialist and diagnostician, is the Vashon Green School reading and writing specialist. She works with each student individually twice a week.
As a multi-age, independent primary school for students ages 5–11 (K-5), Vashon Green School creates a vibrant, lively, forum for students to discover, invent, create, learn and teach. On 7 acres of farm and woodland, the multitude of learning environments inside around tables as well as outside “classrooms” include: math while seeding, planting, and harvesting in the field and greenhouse, science around wetlands with the ducks and macro-invertebrates, art and poetry in the pasture with chickens and sheep, anatomy and micro-biomes in the barn with the goats and perma-culture design projects with plants. A small teacher/student ratio and broad range of thematic activities integrates visual, auditory, kinesthetic, logical and linguistic learning modalities.
We begin the school day with Opening Circle, a time for gratitude, singing, movement. Each child holds a direction around our circle where we begin and end each day, eat lunch and gather for community celebrations.
Chores bring us into relationship to the animals and plants we tend and provide opportunities for cooperation and big muscle movement. Daily stewardship builds awareness of our impacts on the more than human beings with whom we share this place
Morning Lessons, which includes humanities, math, writing, reading, and illustration, brings us into the “Lookout”(a covered open-air classroom). Humanities lessons follow six-week unit themes with social justice, ecological awareness, and emotional literacy at the core.
Afternoon classes explore the current lesson theme through group and individual hands-on activities that include the Arts, Permaculture/Farming, Building, Land Stewardship, and Sensory Awareness Games,
Closing circle is a time for children’s reflections of something sweet, something not so sweet, and a kind act from the day. We wrap the day together with spirited singing and a closing verse.
Weekly Field Trips every Thursday include volunteering and partnering with community organizations as part of the civic service component of our curriculum.
"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and eat and sleep with the earth." - Walt Whitman
lessons around the fire circle