Student Life

Life After School

Language Schools - All ages

Language schools may organize extracurricular activities for their students. These may include cultural activities such as trips to museums or historical sites, movie nights or game nights, or physical activities such as hikes or ski trips. Often, these trips are part of the school's curriculum. The purpose behind such an activity is to see a larger part of Canada, learning about geography, culture and history, and to give the students the chance to interact with a larger English- or French-speaking community. This interaction is a great way to improve conversational language skills.

Students from public school through post-graduate studies may spend their leisure time playing organized sports including softball, baseball, ice hockey, basketball, soccer, or informal sports such as Frisbee®, road hockey, tag or hide and seek. They may also spend their non-schooling hours shopping, seeing movies, going to concerts or plays, attending amateur or professional sporting events, or socializing with friends at restaurants, bars or coffee shops. As well, people may be involved in activities stemming from their place of worship.

Homestay

In most cases when international students are coming to Canada to study, they need a place to live. A homestay offers a unique environment for a student to get to experience Canadian life while providing a place for a student to say while they study.

A homestay is generally a room in the home of a Canadian family that an international student will stay in while they attend school. Sometimes the student and the family will work out the cost and the details of the homestay between themselves, but most of the time, it is the school that will make arrangements with the family to have its students stay with them.

Homestays are especially popular with students coming to Canada to study English or French as a second language, where the course of study may only be a few weeks or months long. In this kind of situation, living in a residence dorm or trying to find an apartment to stay in would not be practical because of the short amount of time the student will be in Canada. The student who stays in a homestay has the advantage of being surrounded by Canadian culture and English or French while they are away from the school environment.

International students coming to study at a post-secondary schools do sometimes stay in homestays, but this is more rare. More often, they live in university residences or in apartments or houses off-campus.

A good resource to start looking for a place to live is www.Places4Students.com.

Many schools will have housing, homestay or residence offices and help students find places to live both on or off campus. If you know what school you want to go to, you may want to contact them to ask about where to live while you attend school.

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