By the time kids reach elementary school, most parents already have strong opinions about what matters: academic rigor, class size, how attentive the teachers are, the whole philosophy behind the curriculum. Families looking at a private elementary school in Van Nuys are usually weighing all of it at once.
A solid elementary program, grades one through five, should run on a real curriculum in reading, writing, math, and science. But it should be delivered in classes small enough that a teacher can actually adjust pacing per kid. The child who needs more time with fractions gets it. The one who's ready to move faster doesn't sit and wait. That's the difference between rigor on paper and rigor that actually reaches each student.
Music, art, PE, these shouldn't be treated as recess from real learning. At a strong elementary school they're built into the regular day, not bolted on as extras. Kids need more than one way to think and more than one way to show what they know.
Ask whether the curriculum is actually mapped across all five grades. It matters more than it sounds: teachers who know exactly what a class learned last year, and what they'll need next year, cut out the repeated review and awkward gaps that show up when curriculum isn't coordinated. That's what gives you a clear read on where your child is headed, not just where they are right now.
First graders and fifth graders shouldn't have the same homework expectations, and a good elementary program treats that as obvious rather than an afterthought. Ask how homework load changes year to year, and whether the goal is reinforcing the day's lesson or building independent study habits ahead of middle school. By fifth grade, a student should be managing a planner, working somewhat independently, and asking for help before falling behind, not after. That shift doesn't happen on its own; it has to be built into the curriculum on purpose.
Ask how often you'll actually hear from your child's teacher beyond the twice-a-year conference. Some elementary schools rely almost entirely on report cards; others send regular notes home or use a parent portal for ongoing updates. Neither approach is inherently better, but you should know which one you're signing up for. If your child struggles with a subject mid-year, you want to hear about it in October, not in June when the report card arrives and there's no time left to fix it.
There's a difference between a small class and a small school, and it's worth asking about both separately. A school with only a few hundred students total can still run twenty-five kids per classroom if enrollment happens to be uneven across grades, so the overall size alone doesn't guarantee the ratio that matters day to day. Ask for actual numbers: students per grade, students per class, and how that balance holds as kids move from first grade up through fifth. A school that's small overall and keeps a genuinely low student-teacher ratio in every classroom gives you both benefits at once, a tight, familiar community and real individual attention, instead of trading one for the other. It's also worth asking how sections are split when a grade grows large enough to need two classrooms rather than one, since that's often where ratios quietly slip if a school isn't paying close attention.
Valley School's elementary curriculum works exactly this way, mapped straight across grades one through five, with small classes and enrichment folded into every day instead of tacked on. Ask us for the curriculum guide, or better yet, come see grades one through five in session.
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