Few things build trust between new classmates faster than building a fire together or racing through a game of capture the flag.

On September 6, Metro Prep opened the 2024-2025 school year with a trip to the Kortright Centre for Conservation in Woodbridge, where students spent the day practicing the skills that would carry them through the year ahead.

Split into house teams, students moved through a series of hands-on challenges centred on collaboration and problem-solving. Fire building tested patience. Capture the flag tested strategy. A rotation of smaller challenges filled out the day, pushing students to organize themselves quickly and figure out who was good at what, usually without anyone assigning those roles ahead of time.

None of it happened at a desk, and none of it needed to. That’s the point of grouping students by house rather than homeroom or grade: it puts kids who might not otherwise cross paths side by side, working through the same problems together.

By the end of the day, house spirit was building, and so were the early friendships that would carry into the year ahead.