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Dear Prep Families,

We started the day today with the annual Blue Ties Breakfast! Thank you to all the fathers, mothers, grandparents, mentors and friends who attended! The opportunity to come together to celebrate community, friendship, and tradition is a special one. Mr. McKinney and Ms. Fleming participated — for the first time — in the tie exchange, and Ms. Fleming is proud to be wearing Mr. McKinney’s tie for the rest of the day!  We would like to extend our gratitude to all the parent volunteers who support bringing events like this to our community.  

Once again, thank you for your support and dedication to UCC. Your involvement truly enriches the educational experience for all our students.

Your partners in learning,

Sarah Fleming, David Girard and Gareth Evans

The Prep Leadership Team

Update | SK

It’s hard to believe we’re nearing the end of Senior Kindergarten with this incredible group of thoughtful inquirers! We have greatly enjoyed our time together and will be cherishing the learning moments that lead us to the end of the school year. 

We have been deep in our ‘How the World Works’ unit, busily investigating our central idea: “being an inquirer helps me to understand my world.” The SKs have demonstrated a growing sense of empowerment as they learned processes to investigate and find answers to their own curiosities through observation and research. As a bridge between this unit and our next unit, “Sharing the Planet”, each student will independently follow the inquiry cycle to discover more about a self-selected animal. Using various research strategies, they will find answers to their questions, write their conclusions in their own nonfiction book, and share their books with others. We’re looking forward to this next big project! 

Our ‘Sharing the Planet’ unit explores the central idea: Living things are all connected and have needs to support growth. As our final inquiry unit of the year, we’ll be approaching this concept in a variety of ways over the remaining weeks. SKs will observe the life cycles of plants and butterflies firsthand, continue observing the life cycle of red-tailed hawks via live cam, and reflect on their own growth as they experience the human life cycle. 

The SKs are continuing to grow as readers and writers as well! As readers, we continue to follow the Really Great Reading program, and the SKs have been especially enthusiastic about learning digraphs. Ask your child if they can explain what a digraph is (two letters that make one sound!) and which ones they’ve learned so far. As writers, their work is getting more detailed and thorough, and evidence of their blossoming phonics knowledge continues to shine through their phonetic attempts. We invite you to encourage writing at home by finding authentic opportunities to incorporate writing in your child’s play (e.g. “That sounds like it would make a great story! Can I help you make a book?”). 

In our math program, we launched our exploration of measurement, and will be exploring various measurable attributes, such as length, height, and weight. The students will use various materials as nonstandard units of measurement. This experience will transfer to their explorations of plant growth as they measure how tall they grow throughout observation periods. Please enjoy a few photos of their early measurement investigations above! We have also been investigating number bonds and their relationship with addition and subtraction, and will consolidate these foundational number sense skills to close out the year. 

Thank you, once again, for all you are doing to support our SK learners as they grow through this year. We could not do this without you! 

Anna Crawford and Pina Porto
SK Teachers

Update | SK–Year 4 French

In SK, we are wrapping up our unit on farm animals! This fun and engaging unit has been filled with songs, interactive readings of “Ours brun, dis-moi”, and a variety of games such as tic-tac-toe, bingo, and snakes and ladders—all designed to support listening skills and vocabulary development.

Each student also made a class presentation, helping to build their speaking and communication skills. Currently, students are working on creating a short movie in which they recreate the sounds of animals they previously drew. Once completed, the movie will be posted on Seesaw for you to enjoy.

As a final touch, each student will bring home a handmade farm animal booklet to share their learning with you.

Next, we will be starting a fun new unit all about patterns and rhyming!

Through it all, it has been wonderful to watch the students grow and develop their communication skills.

In Year 1 we have just wrapped up our La Poule Maboule unit and are now getting ready to begin a new focus on building foundational vocabulary. This next phase of learning will help students grow their word knowledge and continue to develop spontaneous oral expression. It will also introduce important language concepts such as gender and sentence structure in positive, negative, and question forms. 

Helping students build self-confidence and strong oral communication skills through choral speaking activities continues to be a key priority in Year 1 French.

This unit will lead us into our next story—The Three Little Pigs—a familiar tale with plenty of opportunities for fun and learning!

Year 2 students are currently working on a project centred around humour and storytelling. Using Book Creator, they are crafting their own collection of French jokes and thoroughly enjoying every stage of the project. They are expressing their creativity through drawings while also demonstrating their understanding of written material.

Fine-tuning pronunciation is another key focus, as students are working hard to make high-quality audio recordings of their jokes.

Next, we will embark on the adventures of a little cat named Napoléon. Through Napoléon’s escapades, our students will encounter surprises at every turn, enriching their vocabulary, enhancing their oral expression, and reinforcing language conventions.

Year 3 students are currently exploring the world of Marc Dubé's family, a francophone family in Northern Ontario. Throughout this unit, we will explore a series of stories set in various Ontario French-speaking communities. As we progress through several of the 12 available readers, the complexity of the texts will gradually increase. Our focus will be on developing reading comprehension strategies and enhancing writing skills.

We are delighted to see Year 3 students making great strides in vocabulary acquisition while deepening their understanding of sentence structures, including positive, negative, and interrogative forms.

Students will also continue to reinforce their oral communication skills through more episodes of our audiovisual program, Rémi.

In Year 4 new characters are about to enter the scene, adding complexity to the plot of our seven-scene play "Un Frère Pénible", and students are drawing closer to the final twist of a storyline that many can relate to in one way or another.

Students have been actively developing various language skills, including writing story summaries with a partner using provided keywords and responding to both closed-ended and open-ended questions, all while applying proper language conventions.

In addition, they have continued exploring the adventures of Julien Sirois through our reader Le Voleur and are eagerly anticipating new episodes of Rémi, our audiovisual program.

In our French class, we maintain a strong focus on an immersion approach to every activity, with the development of communication skills remaining at the heart of everything we do.

Guillaume Dupre
SK–Y4 French Specialist

Update | Mathematics

Curriculum: Students in Year 6 are in the process of exploring their fourth unit involving Number Sense using Comparing Quantities. Year 7 students are in the middle of their unit on Geometry and Measurement; they will explore the Pythagorean theorem, surface area and volume of 3D shapes and build their understanding in working with circles. Recently, Year 7 students partnered with SK students engaged in a geometry fair; students completed several tasks involving estimating, nets of cubes, building 3D shapes, creating patterns and reflecting on their learning.

Math contests at the Prep:

Math League: In February, Years 6 and 7 students wrote the Canadian National Math League. All students including top performers were recognized at a recent assembly. Years 4 and 5 students also wrote the math league contest last week and will be recognized at next week’s assembly.

Upcoming contests: On May 14, registered students in years 6 and 7 will write the Gauss Contest facilitated by the University of Waterloo; students will be recognized at a future assembly.  

Riyaz Ismail
Subject Learning Leader for Mathematics

Register | Blue Bash

Blue Bash is one week away!

Blue Bash is a big party for the boys, celebrating an amazing school year with games, prizes, music, inflatables and food!  We encourage everyone — students and parents — to wear their house colours and get into the spirit! This is a completely free event for all Prep families, and we hope that you will join us. 

When: Friday, May 2, 3:30–5:30 p.m.

Where: Upper School, Hewitt Athletic Centre

Please RSVP through the registration page so we can account for numbers.

Lastly, we are going to need lots of parent volunteers to help make this event a success. Please consider volunteering for a shift — we promise it will be fun! Sign up here.

We can’t wait to celebrate with the whole Prep Community!

Blue Bash Committee

Claire MacNamara, Anika Mehta and Hendrie Wallace

Register | Community Reads PPO/PO Book Club

We are looking forward to another Community Reads session on Thursday, May 8, from 6–7 p.m. This event will take place in the Macintosh Library at the Upper School. Please register here.

A PO and PPO initiative, we are encouraging any and all UCC parents/guardians to pick up a copy of The Tech Solution by Canadian Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Shimi Kang.

Dr. Kang is an expert in the area of technology and psychology and shares many useful insights for parenting in the digital age in her book. The book is available at Indigo or online from Dr. Kang. We look forward to seeing you there for a rich and meaningful discussion!

Donate | Staff Appreciation Lunch

We need your support to make this year’s Staff Appreciation Lunch a success!

A time-honoured tradition at UCC, the Staff Appreciation Lunch is our school community’s way of thanking all the different staff who help make our students’ experience at the College so remarkable. This includes teachers, administration, arena staff, housekeeping, food services and support staff. Approximately 350 staff will attend the lunch on Wednesday, May 28, in the Foster Hewitt Foundation Lounge.

The Staff Appreciation Lunch is fully funded by parent donations, so please contribute to this wonderful event for all of our UCC staff by donating here. 

Thank you so much for your support! 

Save the date | Generations Day

Grandparents and special guests are invited to visit the Prep School on Friday, May 30 for an opportunity to attend a special assembly, explore classrooms, check out fantastic student artwork and enjoy light refreshments in the Bitove Lounge.

9–11 a.m. Year 6 and 7 families

1–3 p.m. SK–Year 5 families

A registration form will be coming soon but please save the date and share with your special guests.