GOAL TWO: REIMAGINING TIME AND SPACE

Our goal is to reexamine our schedule to empower student learning and enable coordination across schools. Our aim is for the daily and weekly schedules to allow us to specifically focus our attention on student, faculty, and staff wellbeing. As part of our effort in this area, the Middle School has a committee that is researching the purpose of our home form model and best practices to enhance what we currently do. We also have a College-wide timetable committee that is examining the timetable and researching best practices to allow for more flexibility, better alignment across schools, and more purposeful collaborative time.

To exemplify environmental sustainability in our practice and design and use of spaces, we have installed Naturalpod furniture in some of our Junior School classrooms and created a living wall. In addition, as we have recognized the enormous impact of outdoor learning on student and faculty wellbeing and achievement, we have installed doors in the Junior and Montessori Schools that take students directly from classroom spaces to the outdoors, and we have created a new outdoor learning area in Early Education.

As an Eco-Schools Platinum School for the past two years, we are well on our way to making HSC a leader in Canadian education concerning practicing, learning and teaching environmental sustainability. This December, we hosted a successful Biodiversity EXPO where Grade 6 students presented their ideas about improving the biodiversity of our campus to many experts and visitors. Students have re-established three vermicomposting hotels and hope to add the green bin contents from the Middle School to keep them going. The goal is to feed our aquaponic turtles with extra worms from these systems to close the circle and link the two systems together. In the Junior School, the entire science curriculum has been redesigned to teach the curriculum content through a lens of gardening. Students have received the gardening curriculum well and are excited to learn about seeds, soil, planting, vermicomposting, and much more.