Learning at PC

Pickering College offers a dynamic, nurturing, and positive learning environment where a child’s curiosity is stimulated, leadership skills are cultivated, and fun-filled interactive learning is meaningful and focused. A low teacher-student ratio and small class sizes (approximately 14-20 students per class) provide an ideal environment for learning.

Outdoor Education

Our Outdoor Education Program engages students in activities that enrich their curricular understanding, present a multitude of benefits from exploring and enjoying our natural heritage, to inspiring them to be active stewards of the environment.

Outdoor education supports a key component of Pickering College’s Global Leadership Program as it is experiential in nature and embraces the school’s values. Students are offered a wide range of opportunities that align with the program’s 10 demonstrations of global leadership where they learn to experience, lead and act.

Experiential learning through outdoor education helps build perseverance and resilience, offering students an opportunity to push themselves outside of their comfort zones and to challenge their physical and mental capabilities.

Through our access to Blue & Silver Farm, the school’s outdoor education property, and a series of progressively more challenging off-campus trips and excursions, our program encourages intellectual, emotional and social development, leadership as well as age-appropriate risk taking within a safe learning environment.

Community Service

The Community Service Program at Pickering College is fundamental to the delivery of the Global Leadership Program and to the development of responsible and engaged students. From Kindergarten to Grade 12, students are provided with opportunities to engage and learn with community members in meaningful ways, both within and beyond the classroom walls. Building connections between the curriculum and what is happening in the world at large, is essential to the PC vision of developing courageous agents of ethical and positive change, true to Quaker values.

Throughout the year, there are many opportunities for students to become involved in community service options. All Grade 9-12 students must complete their 40 hours of service that is required by the Ontario Ministry of Education to complete an Ontario Secondary School Diploma. Our students engage actively with the community around them and advocate for important causes. 

Volunteer options are available both on and off campus. On-campus options can include After Care with Pickering College Junior School students, supporting the annual Pickering College Holiday Home Tour, helping to facilitate Springfest, and scorekeeping games. For off-campus activities, some past examples include students volunteering as a spirit squad at The Terry Fox Run, assistant coaching for the Special Olympics swim team, being a Reading Buddy at the Newmarket Public Library, and supporting the elderly at various seniors’ residences.

STEM

STEM learning at Pickering College, or combined learning in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, provides students with an enriched curriculum and a deep interdisciplinary learning experience. Our program integrates thinking and technical approaches from the arts and the social sciences. This approach links learning through all three divisions in our school, and benefits each of our students from JK through to Grade 12. Integrated into our academic programming, STEM learning at PC provides students with a wide variety of opportunities to connect skills and knowledge across academic disciplines, apply them to real-world contexts at the school, community and at the global level. Through these experiences, our students develop competencies in experimentation and creative thinking, resilience and teamwork, design and prototyping as well as the application of technology as they take a critical approach to problem-solving. They will become deep and adaptive thinkers as they innovate and collaborate in tackling the most pressing challenges facing our world.