Calendar

Click here to view the Greybrook Online Calendar

Greybrook operates on a balanced calendar. This means that, while we begin with most other schools in early September, our school year extends to the end of July.

Greybrook's calendar is designed to maintain students' optimum learning capacity by dividing the academic year into five terms of roughly 8 weeks, with breaks of 1-2 weeks between each. We have found that by the end of eight weeks, most students' ability to absorb and make valuable use of new information begins to decline dramatically; a week or two break appears sufficient to restore and rejuvenate both staff and students. We are careful to overlap spring and winter breaks with the school calendar used by the majority of local schools, allowing our students to participate in traditional school holiday activities at these times.

The most distinct feature of our calendar is that we are in session through the month of July.  We tend to focus on outdoor and environmental themes during this time, to take advantage of the summer weather.  Our summer holiday is restricted to the month of August – approximately five weeks – in order to maintain the students' work habits, routines, and understanding.  This reinforces our belief that education is something constant and lifelong rather than something that starts in September and ends in June. The result of this balanced calendar is greater academic retention from one school year to the next, as well as evenly-paced learning throughout the academic year.

Our experience with our balanced calendar has consistently reinforced our motivation for adopting it:  we've found that our students maintain both their ability to focus and their enthusiasm far better than in traditional school calendars.  There are virtually no "down times" in the balanced calendar structure, and overall we have found that our calendar is one of the features that stands out as being solidly supportive of student learning.