Why Maple Bear?

There are currently more than 42.858 students in 550 Maple Bear Early Childhood, Elementary, and High School?

At Maple Bear students become:

CURIOUS: Passionate about knowledge and learning.

CONFIDENT: Deeply aware of their talents and potential.

INDEPENDENT: Prepared to lead their own lives, and decide their own paths and destiny.

ANALYTICAL: Able to think freely & shape their own beliefs.

FLEXIBLE: Adaptable in a world where change is the only constant.

CREATIVE: Always motivated and enthusiastic about asking “what if?”

PREPARED: In possession of the knowledge and tools necessary for an outstanding performance at college, at work and in life, in their home country or abroad.

GLOBAL: Bilingual and culturally literate for a global future.

Benefits of a bilingual education

Bilingual education is the use of two different languages in the classroom instruction of academic content. At Maple Bear, students study all academic subjects in either their native language or English, depending on the subject and grade level.

Students don’t just memorize vocabulary in a Maple Bear classroom. This is a key difference between the programs offered at Maple Bear and the ESL training offered at other schools claiming to offer a bilingual education. Furthermore, at Maple Bear, students begin learning English in pre-school using a student-focussed English immersion learning system based on Canadian educational pedagogy and best practices.

There have been concerns that teaching children two languages at once only confuses them. Fortunately, there has been much research—much of it conducted by Canadians—which shows that far from handicapping children, bilingual education can offer benefits from infancy to old age.

So what are the benefits of bilingual education for young learners?

For a start, it’s very good for English-language development, a goal of many of our parents who chose Maple Bear for their children. Young learners have also been shown to have: Young learners have also been shown to have:

  • Better concentration, analytical skills and multi-tasking capabilities;
  • They learn to read sooner than monolingual students;
  • They have an increased sense of self-worth and identity;
  • They have the ability to live abroad and learn other foreign languages later in life;
  • Enjoy exposure to more than one culture which leads to a global perspective.

Numerous studies have confirmed that being bilingual actually makes a person smarter as it has a profound effect on the brain, improving cognitive skills and sharpening memory.

How is Maple Bear different from an international school?

Besides the obvious wide gap in the price of tuition at a Maple Bear school compared to an international one, Maple Bear conforms to local education regulations, offering fully articulated local curricula in addition to the Canadian program.

This opens up many more educational options for Maple Bear students: they are prepared and capable of moving easily between the Canadian system offered by Maple Bear and their own country’s system and can do so at any time during the K-12 years. They are also prepared for entry into a university at home as well as abroad if they so choose and are not tied to just one system.

Elementary & Middle Years Core Currriculum

Maple Bear has developed an excellent, hands on, rigorous and relevant elementary curriculum in each subject area based on the highly successful Canadian approach to learning and instruction. Maple Bear encourages the development of the child’s basic skill in literacy, numeracy, science, technology, analysis, problem solving, information processing and computing, Critical and creative thinking skills are promoted and encouraged so that children can be successful in today’s world. Critical and creative thinking skills are promoted and encouraged so that children can be successful in today’s world. The Elementary Program is designed to educate the whole child – physically, intellectually, emotionally, and socially.

The Maple Bear Elementary and Middle Years Programs require a minimum of 50% instruction in English. The remaining portion of the program is conducted in the home language. Subjects taught in English include English Language Arts, Mathematics and Science. Instruction in the home language, History, Geography, Physical Education, the Arts, and other subjects is conducted in the students’ first language.

English Language Arts
At all grades, the focus is on acquiring language and literacy skills through listening, speaking, reading and writing. Students learn to read and produce a wide range of texts, including media, transactional (letters, e-mails, etc.), and tertiary texts. The level of sophistication grows with the advancing grade levels. All classrooms must be literacy-rich environments.

Mathematics
The themes of number sense and numeration, measurement, geometry and spatial sense, patterning and algebra, data management and probability are developed in increasing complexity at each grade level. The program emphasizes problem solving, understanding concepts, application of procedures and communication about mathematics.

Science
The science program emphasizes enquiry and the use of the scientific method in science classes. At each grade level increasingly complex topics are studied from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry and environmental science. The emphasis is on experimentation and application rather than memorization.

Why choose Canadian education?

Canada’s education system consistently ranks among the best in the world.

In 2018, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) ranked Canada #1 in the English-speaking world in science, math and reading. As in 2012, 2015, and again in 2018, Canada maintained strong performance and outperformed other English-speaking countries in all three evaluations.

According to the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Canada consistently out ranks the United States and the United Kingdom, often by significant margins.

In fact, Canada ranks ahead of the systems in the US and the UK because the OECD measures an entire country’s system, not just hot spots of excellence which are not accessible to all due to geography or cost. In the vast Canadian public system, every child has access to quality schools. Canada excels not only in studies in the English language, but is also a world leader in bilingual education.