The International Baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect. The IB Programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.
The IB offers high-quality programmes of international education that share a powerful vision. An IB education:
• focuses on learners – the IB’s student-centred programmes promote healthy relationships, ethical responsibility and personal challenge
• develops effective approaches to teaching and learning – IB Programmes help students to develop the attitudes and skills they need for both academic and personal success
• works within global contexts – IB programmes increase understanding of languages and cultures, and explore globally significant ideas and issues
• explores significant content – IB programmes offer a curriculum that is broad and balanced, conceptual and connected.
Informed by values described in the learner profile, IB learners strive to become inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-takers, balanced, and reflective. These attributes represent a broad range of human capacities and responsibilities that go beyond intellectual development and academic success.
What is the Primary Years Programme?
The IB Primary Years Programme, for students aged 3 to 12, focuses on the development of the whole child as an inquirer, both in the classroom and in the world outside. It is a framework guided by six transdisciplinary themes of global significance, explored using knowledge and skills derived from six subjects areas, as well as transdisciplinary skills, with a powerful emphasis on inquiry.
The Written Curriculum
The most significant and distinctive feature of the IB Primary Years Programme are the six transdisciplinary themes as follows:
· Who we are
· Where we are in place and time
· How we express ourselves
· How the world works
· How we organize ourselves
· Sharing the planet
Each theme is addressed each year by all students. (Students aged 3 to 5 engage with four of the themes each year.)
These themes address issues that have meaning for, and are important to, all of us. The programme offers a balance between learning about or through the subject areas, and learning beyond them. The six themes of global significance create a transdisciplinary framework that allows students to “step up” beyond the confines of learning within subject areas.
The Taught Curriculum
The six transdisciplinary themes help teachers to develop a programme of inquiry, in-depth investigations into important ideas, identified by teachers, and requiring a high level of involvement on the part of the students. These inquiries are substantial, in-depth and usually last for several weeks.
The Assessed Curriculum
Assessment is an important part of each unit of inquiry as it both enhances learning and provides opportunities for students to reflect on what they know, understand and can do. The teachers’ feedback to the students provides guidance and the tools and the incentives for them to become more competent, more skillful and better at understanding how to learn.
The Exhibition
The Exhibition is an important part of the PYP for all students. In the final year of the programme, students undertake a collaborative, transdisciplinary inquiry process that involves them in identifying, investigating and offering solutions to real-life issues or problems. As the culminating experience of the PYP, the Exhibition offers students an exciting opportunity to demonstrate independence and responsibility for their own learning.
