By Donita Bell
Assistant Head of Primary and PYP Coordinator
The inquiry-based teaching on the Primary Years Programme (PYP) means asking effective questions that underpin how we nurture students to be life-long learners and support our students to understand how they learn. The IB advocates several ways families can support their children as PYP Learners.
Parents and carers can:
Be inquirers themselves:
- Model that they are a learner too
- Inquire together to find out
- Ask questions
- Reply to your child’s questions with a question: “how can we find out?”
Support your student to be independent and have ‘agency’:
- Encourage them to express themselves
- Support their choices
- Allow their curiosity to prompt their investigations and follow what they are interested in
Reflect upon things they do with questions:
“How do you know?”
“What makes you think that?”
“Is there any other way you could do that?”
“What did you find easy or challenging?”
Give feedback to your child to nudge their curiosity?
“Where to next with your questions?”
“After you do that, what might you do next?”
Support learning through asking conceptual questions:
“What did that make you think of?”
“Why did you do that?”
“How did you work it out?”
Your role as families is crucial in the learning of our children. What you do at home is the consolidation of the importance of learning in everything we do. If you are interested in learning more about the PYP, please lock it in on your calendar for Friday 22 September in the Hub Room.
We will further continue to explain how the Primary Years Programme is so crucial in the development of skills and dispositions that will make our children create a future full of problem solvers, designers, creators and caring humans who value the world around them.
When people think about leadership, what often comes to mind are the concepts of power, decision making, delegating and innovation. Seldom does one think about care, empathy, kindness, and generosity – however these traits that highlight the emotional skills for successful and effective leadership, including by students at Northbridge International School Cambodia, are just as important.
What are the Primary Arts all about? Is it just a load of fun and messing around? It is fun, which is why we love it but there is so much more to the programme than some people might think.
Take a visit to our early learning spaces at Northbridge International School Cambodia, both inside and out, and you will observe a wealth of play activities happening. Students are interacting in playing on their own (solo play), playing with the same thing or in the same space (mirrored play) or sharing together (collaborative play).
