The lower school is dedicated to providing a stimulating learning environment which is child-centered and well-balanced and which aims to develop each student’s knowledge, skills and awareness to face future challenges successfully.

Fall is our time to welcome new and returning families and to celebrate our multi-cultural community with our annual International Fair.  Our parents transform our school halls and pods into amazing market areas, with stalls from all over the world.  It is a true celebration and sharing of cultures, enjoyed by all.

Celebrating and sharing our own multi-cultural community leads into our fall DUCK Week (Developing Understanding, Caring and Kindness).  DUCK Week is a fund raising event that raises money for carefully selected causes and raises our student’s awareness of others’ needs, developing their sense of social responsibility.  Each grade level is in charge of its own fund raising project.

Fall curricular issues are to continue our work on formalizing the use of reading continuums in order to analyse reading strengths and weakness and to form and teach guided reading groups.  In math, we will be streamlining the home links and communicating students’ progress on unit assessments in tandem with our Everyday Math series.  We are also examining the alignment of our science and social studies topics from Kindergarten to grade 12 to ensure a well-articulated program that helps students achieve our standards and benchmarks.  As part of the science program, we will introduce an environmental study at each grade level.

Fall is the time to build new and renew old relationships with parents.  We consider parents to be their child’s first teachers and the family the foundation upon which we build a strong home-school partnership.  This shared responsibility is the most important work we undertake as educators and parents.