The Killarney Challenge Week trip brings together two seemingly contrasting activities: camping and painting. An inherent challenge of creating art in the great outdoors is how to bring your studio with you into the wilderness. A new set of easels has proven to be an invaluable tool in overcoming this problem. The new easels are light, portable, durable, and adjustable, allowing students to capture moments of inspiration on the fly.

Pottery Pugmill
As an art form, pottery involves a literal and figurative connection to the earth. Unfortunately, the scraps of clay that it produces as waste usually wind up in a landfill — not great for the earth, nor for our school budget. Our new pugmill has single-handedly solved this issue. The machine recycles clay scraps, turning them back into usable material for future projects instead of being tossed in the garbage.

Chemistry is a subject that requires the utmost precision. One wrong measurement or contaminated solution could ruin your experiment — or even create something dangerous. Water is commonly used in many chemistry activities, but normal tap water contains many unwanted chemicals and minerals. Pure or distilled water can be purchased by the bottle, but our new distiller allows us to make our own. This saves on cost, reduces waste, and helps ensure a steady supply of pure water even when there are shortages or supply chain issues.

Equipment 

When Josh Asano decided to start a school Table Tennis Club, the then–Grade 12 student could not have anticipated the interest it would generate. The club quickly ballooned to over 50 students, but with just one table on campus, it became clear that a major upgrade was in order. The addition of two tables, along with more paddles and balls, ensures that any interested students will be able to take their turn on the table during lunch hour for years to come.

Little Shop of Horrors Puppet
The York School values the arts and we have high standards for our theatrical performances. We knew our 2022–2023 Grade 6–12 musical Little Shop of Horrors wouldn’t be complete without a major set piece: a giant carnivorous plant puppet! The puppet allowed our student actors to immerse themselves in their performances and provided a dramatic spectacle for audiences, who witnessed the plant change four times over the course of the musical.

The newly elected 2023–2024 Senior School Student Council was eager to start working together — so much so that a one-day retreat was planned for June to the Outward Bound Urban Campus at Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto. The retreat gave students an early opportunity to collaborate as a team, get to know one another, and begin building a vision for the work to come. After participating in team-building activities like a ropes challenge course, the students began planning for how to make the next school year even more fun and memorable than the last.

This past spring, drama students and teachers attended the Conference of Independent Schools’ Drama Festival in Stratford for the first time since before the pandemic. Finding the means to get there and back was worth every penny, as students were able to participate in three theatre workshops led by professional Stratford Company actors, attend performances of King Lear and Rent, and meet drama students from seven other independent schools. Our students were thrilled to perform their own piece on the Stratford studio stage and excited to applaud the acting talents of students from the other schools.

iPads and Digital Pencils 

We want to ensure that our students have the technology they need to tackle every challenge and opportunity we give them. That’s why we purchased 25 iPads and Apple pencils for the Schad Art and Design Lab. These new tools will allow students in our Middle and Senior School art and design programs to take their creativity to the next level by using applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and Procreate. We look forward to seeing the drawings, paintings, photographs and videos our digital artists create. These tools will also help students to document their projects’ progression and to build their portfolios.

Empowering our youngest students to be enthusiastic, motivated and proficient readers is a top priority for teachers in the Junior School. This year, we’ll be supporting these readers by purchasing new books for the understocked and outdated libraries in our Grade 1 classrooms. In keeping with our research-based Science of Reading approach to teaching reading skills, we’ll refresh the bookshelves with instructional sets of decodable books for guided reading. We’ll also purchase anchor texts for new units of math and inquiry, and fiction and non-fiction titles that will appeal to a variety of interests.