Primary Years Programme (PYP)
The PYP provides children with a learning framework that promotes the development of their knowledge, understanding, and skills.
Through the PYP, Northbridge offers a world class balanced curriculum programme for your child that not only focuses on acquiring significant knowledge, but also develops the essential skills, conceptual understanding, and positive attitudes needed to succeed in the world today while at the same time encouraging students to take meaningful action.
Our teachers use a wide range of assessments to set children targets, which are ambitious by design to encourage students to push themselves and achieve the best results they can.
The PYP encourages a collaborative approach to teaching and learning, allowing educators to design learning experiences, lessons, and programmes to meet your child's individual academic, social, physical, emotional, and cultural needs.
These learning experiences transcend the classroom and engage students within communities in a local, national, and global context. The PYP emphasizes a student-centred approach to learning, thus making it responsive to the needs of all students regardless of ability, nationality, or educational background.
One of the most significant and distinctive features of the IB Primary Years Programme is the way it is structured around six transdisciplinary themes. These themes are about 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 your child to "step up" beyond the confines of learning within subject areas. They are:
- Who we are
- Where we are in place and time
- How we express ourselves
- How the world works
- How we organise ourselves
- Sharing the planet
The curriculum is arranged and taught through large, cross-curricular units of study known as Units of Inquiry (UoI). These grade specific units of inquiry are arranged under the six transdisciplinary themes to develop a programme of inquiry for the year. Each grade has one unit of inquiry for each transdisciplinary theme each year.
The units allow for in-depth investigations into important ideas, identified by the teachers, and require a high level of involvement on the part of the students. These substantial inquiries usually last for six weeks. All of the units of inquiry which the students learn about are collectively known as the Programme of Inquiry.
All curriculum areas are integrated where appropriate, however single subject teaching also occurs separately. The class teacher takes responsibility for teaching most of the subjects, however your child will also attend specialist lessons for Visual Arts, Music, Theatre Arts, Physical Education, and Languages.
Assessment is an important part of each unit of inquiry as it both enhances learning and provides opportunities for your child to reflect on what they know, understand, and can do.
The teacher's feedback to the students provides the guidance, the tools, and the incentive for them to become more competent, more skilful and better at understanding how to learn.
Academic reports help teachers communicate with parents about their child’s academic and social development, and list targets for them to focus on in each subject before the next report.
Our teachers hold regular parent consultations during the school year, but parents may organise extra meetings outside these dates if they wish.