At ICS, we are passionate about helping guide students into being well-balanced individuals, challenging them to strive for their best and teaching them how to make a difference with the gifts that God has given them. Our unique junior high program enables teenagers to learn in a supportive community, grow in their faith, and reach toward their potential.
Junior high students are known for asking challenging and thoughtful questions about their beliefs, the past, or a theme in a book they just read. At ICS students have the freedom to question, wonder, and explore in all subject areas. Teachers work to equip students to take responsibility for their own learning and to make students aware of how all subjects are applicable to everyday life. Toward that end, each class has daily devotions and prayer time throughout the day and all subjects are taught as windows into God and His world.
Our teachers strive to see our students succeed in all areas of life. This involves pressing toward a high academic standard while endeavouring to teach each at their own academic level. As much as possible, teachers differentiate lesson plans to reach all types of learners. Students are encouraged to develop a deep sense of curiosity and a love of learning and discovery. Students are guided socially, training them to put others’ needs above their own and cultivating willing, generous hearts, teaching them manners and how to interact appropriately with each other. And perhaps most importantly, our teachers care deeply about each student and our students know that they are in a loving and supportive environment.
Math – Saxon Math – excellent, focused, math curriculum puts our students about 1 year ahead of the average public school curriculum.
English – Ongoing study and engagement with poetry; real world non-fiction texts to develop critical thinking and analysis, and to respond to with their own thoughts about trends, current events, historical figures, innovators; Shakespeare – study and prepare/perform a play every other year.
Science – Includes astronomy, flight, structures, genetics, cell structure, disease, taxonomy and other topics as interest arises. We have participated in the Future Cities competition and the PEI Engineers’ Bridge Building Contest.
Social Studies curriculum includes study of Ancient Greece, Middle Ages, Reformation, Renaissance, Canadian history from pioneers to Confederation, and participation in an annual Heritage Fair.
Bible – Curriculum includes church history, overview of the biblical story, the spiritual disciplines, ongoing Bible memory work.
Interactive French class, Music, Art, and Physical Education
From our Grade 8 teacher Joanne Mawhinney:
“I spend a lot of my time in my job as Grade 8 Teacher at ICS walking kids through problem-solving, and volume-calculating, and essay-revising, poem-composing, and the differences among the stars, and how the planets go, and where to put the apostrophe, and why some bridges stay up while others fall down, and Paul’s interesting vocabulary in Philippians, and why and how epidemics begin or end, and discussing the pros and cons and ethics of driverless cars, and how the events of the early church led to their own experience of faith today, and what Mr. Shakespeare meant by all that.
But that’s only the part that you see. The most important part of my job is the part that you don’t see: it is to shepherd my students from the relative stability and safety of their childhood worldviews into a world that is much wider, much longer, much deeper, much more full of people, moments, places, and especially ideas than they ever could have imagined, to walk them up to the threshold of that world, and equip them with the tools they need to encounter, think about, respond to and influence that world with confidence, with joy, and with wonder. I love my job.”
