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WISS Parents Go Back to School
By WISS Admin | June 18, 2009
Are schools solely for students? Not the case at WISS. Recently, over forty parents converged at WISS, attending a workshop about the IB Primary Years Program (PYP). WISS has been running a stream of Parent Info Sessions since last September, covering various areas such as Early Literacy, English as an Additional Language (EAL), Get Reading Right, Assessment and Student Empowerment in the PYP.
This workshop, organized by WISS PYP Coordinator Rachel McLeod, aimed to provide parents with an insight into mathematics in the PYP and WISS’s approach to teaching mathematics. Rachel unmasked this session with an introductory video of everyday classroom situations at WISS, revealing an extensive array of maths resources, displays and engaging learning activities. The video also highlighted the changes that have occurred in maths teaching and learning. Compared with traditional rote learning which is focused on textbooks and worksheets, at schools like WISS, an increasing emphasis has been placed on meaningful learning in authentic and real contexts, which is in line with the PYP philosophy.
Conducted in a manner as hands-on as in the WISS Mathematics classroom, the workshop involved 
parents in group activities that students had been practicing in their class time. Some joined G1 teacher Tosca Killoran in making pancakes, exploring measuring tools; some recounted their morning by listing all of the maths used from the moment they woke up; some collated information on the number of countries the group members had lived in, and displayed the data; some created a container for an item they had with them using A3 paper. After sharing their problem-solving processes and results, parents were guided to categorize individual tasks by strands such as number, data handling, measurement as well as shape and space. To further illuminate the program, two G4 teachers Amy Miers and Steve Donohue offered to expound on how they help students construct, transfer and apply mathematical concepts. “In the classroom, we start with what the students know and instruct them to construct meaning through experiments and manipulatives. We always look for opportunities in which the students can apply mathematical skills to real context, and the enduring knowledge is what we want to pass on to them,” Miers explained. For example, when the students in Mr. Donohue’s class investigated the area of a two dimensional figure they drew around themselves, they had to contrive different ways of filling the space with 1cm square MAB blocks to solve the problem of how to ascertain the area of this irregular shape. They also explored many ways of predicting and calculating the number of blocks used to make finding the answer easier and more efficient.
The last part of the presentation was devoted to addressing frequently asked questions and offering the parents tips on assisting their children with maths study at home. Heather Foley, mother of three children in the WISS community, found this workshop reassuring and enlightening. “For me as a previous teacher back in the States, it’s exciting to see maths is being taught here in an ideal way. It’s like opening a new door to me,” affirmed Foley. In the IB Primary Years Programme (PYP), maths is viewed as “a tool for making sense of the world around us”, and WISS students are expected to use maths as a way of thinking in a broad range of realistic situations. To that end, WISS employs multiple ways to promote students’ active participation in the learning process. ”We don’t have one set of structures. Rather, we have many ways to engage our students through hands-on experience, using manipulatives, sharing their experiences and reflecting,” said Mcleod.
WISS continually offers parent workshops to keep them informed of the school’s implementation of the IB curriculum. The WISS community received its IB PYP Pre-Authorization Visit at the end of March, which was positive and reaffirming, and marked another milestone in WISS’s PYP journey and its search of excellence.
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