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Elementary School —> Program
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Elementary Curriculum
A Curriculum Creating Life-Long Learners
An integrated, interdisciplinary, standards-based curriculum
provides students with a strong educational foundation that leads to
college preparatory courses in the high school.
The NIS Elementary program focuses on three interrelated questions
when connecting philosophy with actual curriculum:
- What do we want to learn?
- How best will we learn?
- How will we know what we have learned?
What do we want young children to learn?
The NIS Elementary program seeks to help children
acquire specific social and emotional skills understood to be helpful
in creating lifelong learners. Our belief in best educational practices
encourages such learning to be directed by the child's interests and
readiness, and recognizes that learning arises through the child's
relationship with others. By carefully building an environment where
the child may create true relationships with those around him/her, each
teacher's first priority is to give each child the opportunity to
embrace knowledge. Teachers use cooperative and project-based learning
to accomplish this. The acquisition of new knowledge is activated by
prior knowledge, and by children's interests, experience and attempts
to construct meaning. Numeracy and literacy are developed authentically
in the context of the social and physical environment.
Our goal at NIS is to help children learn to be
inquirers, thinkers, communicators, risk-takers; knowledgeable,
principled, caring, open-minded and reflective. In planning for student
learning, teachers aspire to understand:
- the characteristics, capabilities and interests that are normal for
the age group,
- the different rates at which children learn
- the wide range of normal variation which can occur in an age
group,
- that learning is a balance between the intellectual, the social and
the personal; and
- that the maturity of each child depends on the sequence of
developmental stages the child has already gone through and the effects
of earlier positive and negative experiences
How Best Will Children Learn
The NIS Elementary program intends to support
children's efforts to construct meaning from the world around them by
drawing on their prior knowledge, providing learning through new
experiences, and providing time and opportunity for reflection and
consolidation with others. This social-constructivist approach respects
the child's developing ideas and understandings of the social and
natural world; it continually stimulates children's revision and
refinement of their models of how the world works. It implies a
pedagogy that is significantly, but not necessarily completely,
dependent on children's inquiry. For young children, inquiry is
demonstrated by wondering, exploring, investigating, synthesizing, and
theorizing. Their developing theories are applied and verified or
modified, by expressing their ideas in a variety of mediums, through
play and reflection. Contributions of the children in the development
of their knowledge are valued, and the belief that knowledge is
constructed with others directs the process of learning.
How will we know what young children have
learned?
The assessment of the development and learning of
NIS Elementary children is an essential component of the planning
process, and helps to further inform continued development, learning
and teaching. Children are observed in a variety of situations and a
wide range of assessment strategies are implemented. The teacher
observes the child in order to:
- build up a clear picture of the child and his/her interests
- identify what and how the child is thinking and learning
- assess the effectiveness of the environment on the child's
learning
- extend the child's learning by determining what next steps need to
be taken
As we observe and interpret the ideas and emotions
of each child, we hope to follow the process of the child's learning
and assess the value of that learning. Documentation is used as a
way to follow the development of relationships within the school,
relationships between the child and other children, and between the
child and other adults.
Assessment is central to the NIS Elementary program
goal of thoughtfully and effectively guiding students through the five
essential elements of learning: the understanding of concepts; the
mastering of skills; the development of attitudes; the decision to take
action, and the acquisition of knowledge. Both students and
teachers actively engage in assessing the student’s progress as part of
the development of their wider critical thinking and self-evaluation
skills.
Conclusion
The teacher, in developing each unit of study,
extracts from NISﾕ standards and benchmarks and ESLRs key concepts,
skills and behaviors to be learned, understood in depth and
demonstrated by each student. ”Essential Questions” which support the
learning of the key concepts, skills and behaviors are then generated
by the teacher and they drive inquiry and learning outcomes which form
the basis for assessment. The key concepts, skills and behaviors, and
essential questions form the basis with which inquiry is conducted into
significant content. In the course of this inquiry students acquire
essential knowledge and skills and engage in responsible action.
Assessment, which provides data on the learned curriculum, is integral
to these activities and focuses upon both the quality of the learning
process and that of the learning products.
NIS sees students, parents and teachers as partners
united by a spirit of inquiry and a commitment to continuous
improvement, working towards the common goal of providing every student
with an international education of the highest quality.
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