The PYP is a curriculum framework for young learners aged 3–12. Like all International Baccalaureate (IB) programmes, the IB learner profile permeates all facets of school life in the PYP.
The PYP is based on the recognition of a child’s natural curiosity, creativity and ability to reflect. It generates a stimulating, challenging learning environment to nurture the whole child and foster a lifelong love of learning for all. The PYP is transdisciplinary, meaning students learn across subject areas while inquiring into big ideas.
The IBPYP focuses on students’ social, physical, emotional, and cultural needs while also focusing on the development of the whole child as an inquirer, which prepares students for further education and careers.
IBPYP creates lifelong learners and highlights approaches to learning through thinking skills, research skills, communication skills, social skills, and self-management skills. These skills develop learners that are able to make a difference in their own lives, communities, and the wider world.
Student-centered and based on deepening conceptual understandings that will transfer across subjects and beyond the classroom, WISS PYP employs a co-teaching model, with two full-time teachers in each classroom. This allows for a very low student-to-teacher ratio and supports our students in their inquiries. Here at WISS, our teachers are role-models of the Learner Profile, facilitators, guides, mentors, and coaches. Deepening student understanding and moving student learning forward by helping students to construct their own meaning is at the heart of our mission.
Parents are also an important part of our vibrant Learning Community at WISS. Parent involvement is encouraged and is evident through “Come Learn With Us” sessions in the Early Years and informational Coffee Mornings and Parent Workshops in Primary. Including parents in understanding how their children are learning, and how they can best support them in their inquiries, gives parents an opportunity to become involved in the PYP learning process and to make meaningful connections between school and home.
Facilities and indoor/outdoor spaces are flexible, promote creativity, discovery, and inquiry. Students also play a role in helping to co-construct learning environments, as well as participate in establishing essential agreements for conduct. WISS believes strongly in students having voice, choice, and ownership of their learning and this includes being involved in designing, organizing and evaluating our learning spaces.
Throughout the PYP, students are developing agency and are encouraged and supported to take action that is meaningful to them personally, and to their learning. From helping to organize a flexible snack time and having choice in their play centers in Early Years, to participating in Student Ambassadors and Action Cubs in Primary, students are actively engaged in meaningful, relevant, real-life problem-solving.
Preparing WISS PYP students for 21st-century skills they will need whilst developing principled, caring, reflective, open-minded, balanced, knowledgeable, thinkers and communicators who are able to inquire into their passions and interests is what drives the PYP at WISS.
The IB Primary Years Programme (PYP) is a curriculum framework for young learners aged 3–12. Like all International Baccalaureate (IB) Programmes, the IB Learner Profile permeates all facets of school life in the Early Years and Primary.
The PYP is based on recognizing a child’s natural curiosity, creativity, and ability to reflect. It generates a stimulating, challenging learning environment to nurture the whole child and foster a lifelong love of learning. The PYP is transdisciplinary, meaning students learn across subject areas while inquiring into big ideas.
Young learners are intelligent, resourceful, and creative. They need a curriculum and environment that supports critical learning during these crucial early years. Through our inquiry-based approach, we engage and stimulate curious minds to explore, question, and wonder from a place of security. Classroom communities foster a growing sense of safety, well-being, and warmth.
Our daily interactions as a community focus on building secure and confident communicators who have a growing realization of their agency as they interact with the world around them. Using purposeful play as a vehicle for learning, we enable students to make personal connections to inquiries organically and authentically, building on existing knowledge and understandings as they develop transferrable skills in a facilitative environment.
Children engage in a balanced Early Years curriculum that meets the IB Primary Years Programme‘s standards and practices. Through carefully planned units of inquiry, children engage with big ideas in science and social studies, enabling them to develop transferable conceptual understandings. This foundation of knowledge and understanding is the platform on which they continue to grow as they build upon their learning from year to year and beyond the Early Years.
The immense benefit to parents and students is that WISS is the only school in mainland China where young learners can progress from kindergarten through to high school, completing every IB Programme. By offering all four Programmes, the skills endorsed in students during kindergarten flourish and bloom as they progress through the IB, with each level building upon their abilities.
