Lower School
Middle Years (Grade 6–8)
Grades 6–8 are critical preparation for the transition to high school. With caring teachers, well-structured academic programs, and wide-ranging extracurricular activities, students can build solid study habits while exploring new interests and making great friends.
Smaller class sizes allow students to regularly seek feedback from their teachers and receive differentiated instruction.
Academic enrichment – going deeper into the curriculum, rather than accelerating – challenges students as they master concepts and engage critical thinking skills across every subject area. Saxon Math covers advanced topics, and our well-scaffolded literacy program centres novel studies and extended, structured writing. Alongside regular grammar and vocabulary-building exercises, students learn the steps involved in analyzing a text, researching and citing secondary sources, and drafting, editing and polishing essays, creative writing, and lab reports.
Students’ academic and social-emotional skills are developed with intentional mentorship and guidance on organizational strategies, executive functioning skills, effective communication, and community service.
Our in-house kitchen provides healthy, home-style hot lunches prepared from scratch every day. Each meal includes an entree selection with a side of vegetables, salad, or fruit alongside optional beverages. Families receive a new menu each month and select which daily meals to order online.
Students receive daily homework, with 10 minutes of assigned work for each grade level – a Grade 6 student, for example, can count on around an hour of homework each day. Teachers offer after-school homework sessions twice every week for students to get one-on-one help.
Assessments are designed to inform instructional strategies and provide students with regular feedback and exposure to different formats; these include routine quizzes and one-off tests like UWaterloo Math contests. Students in Grade 3–8 complete the Canadian Test of Basic Skills each fall for an external benchmark of individual and grade-level academic progress, and there are end-of-year exams for Grade 7 and 8 students to build and refine essential study habits.
As part of preparing students for high school, Middle School students receive direct instruction in and modelling of academic skills (note-taking, research, presenting, formal writing), executive function skills like self-reflection, organization and planning, and communication strategies for self-advocacy and collaboration.
They also participate in community service, take a leadership role in school routines and events, and learn to balance their extracurricular, family and social responsibilities alongside academic assignments.