Student Experience
Reach beyond conventional curriculum
Anticipate excitement
Our dedication to student engagement leads to extraordinary opportunities for students to grow, explore, and learn. Your child may run a business, create and perform a skit, publish a book, participate in a swim meet, re-design a city. Your child is unique – what will they come up with next?
Our learning philosophy
True growth and learning requires healthy risk-taking. This happens best within trusting, trusted community. We’ll work to understand and support your child. More than that, we foster a school culture of respect, goodwill, and courage. Honest reflection paired with firm and fair guidance frees our students to take worthy risks in learning and life.
Our curriculum
Our teachers commit to active curriculum development and creative planning.
Our commitment to inquiry, investigation, collaboration, and reflection to engage our students in active learning.
An integrated approach
Elementary Theme Study inquiry allows seamless access to content that traditional models teach in isolation.
Intentional integration of subjects continues in Middle School, but students have a conventional timetable beginning in Grade 7.
High expectations
We work to create a culture that honours trying even more than it honours excelling.
We actively avoid making learning and growth competitive.
We maintain high standards for participation, behaviour, and effort, but reject high pressure as an acceptable motivator for students.
Our standard
Our core programme includes subjects and activities that your child might not seek out independently. This is intentional, and participation is mandatory.
Beyond the classroom
Theatre
At every age and stage, our students perform.
Theatre is a seasonal core experience for all students.
Throughout Elementary, students take progressively more substantial on-stage roles in our multi-age “all in” productions, and contribute to storyboards, playwriting, as well as prop development and production.
Each year’s Grade 7 class brings one of Shakespeare’s comedies to life for us, and our Grade 9s take on modern classics.
Our students benefit from the support of professional lighting and sound technicians at local live theatre venues.
Community, local to global
We encourage children of all grade levels to feel part of the wider community and contribute to positive change. Our students respond to local needs or causes through fundraising, education and advocacy, and active service. We work to support informed, meaningful student action.
Multi-age experiences
Our students extend their social connections and develop valuable leadership, communication, and modelling/mentoring skills in mixed-age classrooms and activities. Whole-school activities are among our students’ warmest memories of collaborative effort, shared laughter, and warm community.
The journey from pre-primary to grade 9
In our lab school’s earliest days, our students (Primary to Grade 4) came up with names to mark student milestones while avoiding traditional divisions between age groups and grades. The names stuck! They connect us to our tradition of whole-school meetings and reflect a learner-centred community.