Every child deserves work that is challenging—but not discouraging. At 探索学院, we do not ask whether a child has an official “gifted” label. Most gifted programs begin with a gate. An assessment, a score, a waiting list. In Ontario that gate is the IPRC process, and any parent who has been through it knows how long it can take to get a child permission to work harder.
We don’t have a gate. No identification requirement, no label. We don’t select, we lift.
How the program works?
We start from entrance testing. Our program has 5 levels of difficulties.
What “five levels” actually looks like?
Grade 8, properties of rational exponents. Same topic, same lesson, same room.
| Problem | What it asks of the student | |
| Level A | √25 | Recognize a perfect square |
| Level E | ∛(√32) | Compose two roots — the answer stays in exponential form: 25/6 |
A student at Level A is doing the question that is currently at the edge of his ability. The students does it well, feels himself confident and is ready for level B.
The levels are not fixed and they are not a ranking. There is no “ average child” at Discovery Academy. Each student is at properly selected level and is moving to the next one. From level to level, we move toward depth and complexity. It works in any subject if a teacher prepared the resources.
Resources are among the most important factors.
What we use?
Math —five levels of difficulty in mathematics, from foundational to AP Calculus AB — equivalent to one semester of first-year university calculus, Waterloo’s CEMC, Canadian Open Mathematics Challenge and Math Kangaroo.
A person behind every idea.
Every lesson includes a short story about a scientist. Not encyclopedia facts — a person, who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, working on a hard question, sometimes getting it wrong, sometimes finding something we still use today.
Children who know that mathematics was made by people are less frightened of it.
Science —There is no recommended sources for science. Teacher has to build most of it by himself. We did it based on idea of Richard Rusczyk, a former MATHCOUNTS champion: discovery comes before explanation.
Our science lessons begin with the experiment, not the explanation.
Students run it, record results, argue about what the results mean, and reach a conclusion. The teacher guides the discussion but does not give the answer first — the answer arrives after the students have built it. This takes longer than telling them. It’s also the only version they remember in June.
English — there are some good resources for high school and we use them. Resources for elementary and middle school use Vocabulary for gifted and Grammar for Gifted – a collection of rules and different texts.
We built ourselves Reading Detectives: Adventures in Nature and Language
A series of twelve booklets per grade for Grades 2, 3 and 4, written by our teachers.
The teacher is Professor Owl. Students learn English grammar while making their way through a night forest and read about different animals’ life. The booklets cover the Ontario curriculum expectations in full — but a child experiences it as a story, not a list of rules.
Advanced vocabulary is built into the narrative rather than assigned. New words arrive because the story needs them, return on a spiral through later booklets, and are practiced in games written for each lesson. Children remember words they used; they forget words they were given.
My child is not gifted. Is this programme right for him?
This is the question we’re asked most often, and I think the real question underneath it is different from the one parents say out loud.
What most parents actually want to know is: will my child sit next to the strong ones and feel disappointed?
That’s a fair fear, and here is the honest answer.
In a five-level classroom there is nothing to compare. Children aren’t working through the same problems at different speeds — they’re working on different problems. There’s no visible ordering, no page everyone else has finished, no moment where your child is the one still on question four.
Compare that with a class of thirty taught at one level. A child who is behind sits through an explanation pitched above their head, and knows it. That is where children learn to say “I’m bad at math.” It happens by Grade 4, and it lasts.
The levels move. They’re set by topic, not by child, and they change through the year. A child who needed Level B for fractions may be at Level D for geometry a month later.
What we require isn’t talent. It’s showing up, working, and being willing to compete with yourself. That’s a habit, and habits can be taught.
What we won’t promise. This is slow. A child does not move three levels in a term, and any school that tells you otherwise is selling something. What we can tell you, after twenty years of our experience, is that children who stay and work move up — not all at the same rate, and not all to the same place, but up. That’s the honest version, and the result we can guarantee.
Come and see it
First, last name, email, grade you are interested in
Sit in a classroom. Look at the five levels on a real worksheet, not in a brochure. Read a Reading Detectives booklet. Ask the teachers anything you like.
No payment, no obligation.
Discovery Academy · 安大略省列治文山市央街10030号，L4C 1T8 · 416-302-4085 · discoveryacademy.ca