Welcome IST’s PYP Information Site

Welcome to the International School of Tanganyika’s PYP Website. Here you will find what’s happening with developments in the Primary Years Programme, curriculum, examples of student work and much more. Please check back often and feel free to leave us a message with your ideas, links and good thoughts. Asante!

Engaging Children over the Holidays

This morning we had an interesting discussion about what to do over the holidays. Next year we will focus on teaching the Essential Elements of the PYP – knowledge, concepts, attitudes, trans-disciplinary skills, and action. Today we talked about some of the trans-disciplinary skills: thinking skills. These are listed below:

Acquisition of knowledge
Gaining specific facts, ideas, vocabulary; remembering in a similar form.

Comprehension
Grasping meaning from material learned; communicating and interpreting learning.

Application
Making use of previously acquired knowledge in practical or new ways.

Analysis
Taking knowledge or ideas apart; separating into component parts; seeing relationships; finding unique characteristics.

Synthesis
Combining parts to create wholes; creating, designing, developing and innovating.

Evaluation
Making judgments or decisions based on chosen criteria; standards and conditions.

Dialectical thought
Thinking about two or more different points of view at the same time; understanding those points of view; being able to construct an argument for each point of view based on knowledge of the other(s); realizing that other people can also take one’s own point of view.

Metacognition
Analysing one’s own and others’ thought processes; thinking about how one thinks and how one learns.

We used work related to Bloom’s taxonomy, another framework for higher order thinking skills, to help us come up with different ways to help children work on their thinking skills. If you would like to learn more about these kinds of skills, feel free to explore these websites.

Articles:

Bloom’s Taxonomy Parent Guide

Article on Bloom’s Taxonomy

Article on Using Higher Level Thinking Skills

 

Charts to help develop tasks to do over the summer:

Action Verb Guide to Bloom’s Taxonomy

The PYP Exhibition

Parent Workshop: Assessment

Writing Workshop

WRITING AT IST

This serves as a reminder that there will be a writing workshop on February 16th. Please see the poster for details. This workshop is best suited to parents with children in Grades 2 to 5. I look forward to seeing you there!

Writing at IST Workshop Reminder

Maths at IST

Today at the parent workshop, we talked about the different strands that are important in Maths education. These are:

• Conceptual understanding – understanding what multiplication is, rather than just knowing your times tables
• Procedural fluency – being fluent with use of algorithms
• Strategic competence – having strategies to solve problems
• Adaptive reasoning – being able to explain you thinking
• Productive disposition – seeing real world applications

Further, we discussed different ways to practice each of these strands. Parents came up with a variety of activities that you can do at home with your children. Some of these are provided below:

1. Managing pocket money – learning how to spend appropriately, save, and keep track of expenses, sorting and counting change
2. Cooking / using recipes – this can be to practice measuring, to estimate, or to shrink/enlarge recipes
3. Keeping a notebook for a problem a day
4. Dividing up treats between siblings. How many are there? Is there a remainder? How many does Mama get? Or do you divide the last cookie into fractions ?!
5. Playing various board games that involve strategy or counting money
6. Reading the luku meter
7. Books: counting and sorting books, number of pages, time taken to read a book
8. Look in refrigerator to see what is left, how many there are.
9. Stick it – place the timetable all over the house
10. Swimming: count strokes and laps, take your pulse, take seconds or minutes off your time
11. Time: look at how long it takes to complete a task, talk about starting time and finishing time
12. Mic colors to practice ratios

Thank you to the parents who attended the workshop! You had a lot of great questions and comments that will influence new workshops.

 

Bagamoyo 2011

Grade 4 Visits Bagamoyo

Last week, the grade 4 students went on an overnight trip to Bagamoyo. This trip serves as the provocation for their next unit called “Children’s Rights and Responsibilities”, where students explore more about Who We Are. Moreover, it solidifies their understanding of the effect resources have on migration, which was a key understanding in their previous unit, “Karibuni Tanzania”.

Why on Earth would we go to a tiny town north of Dar? In the 19^th century, Bagamoyo was an important trade center for East Africa with Arabian, German, and British forces staking claims to the area. Bagamoyo was a significant port largely due to its proximity to Zanzibar, which was famous for its spices. Unfortunately, exporting these spices took a lot of manpower, which was solved by importing enslaved people from all over East Africa.  These captured people would walk more than a thousand kilometers from Lake Tanganyika, stopping in Bagamoyo before moving to Zanzibar where they would be sold as slaves. It was a terrible journey and many people died before they could make it to Bagamoyo. Many more died on the sea voyage to Zanzibar.

In response to the cruelty of the slave trade, a mission was established in Bagamoyo. Members of the mission would buy enslaved people from the markets with the little money they had. They would then teach them different trades to ensure that they could survive in Bagamoyo, which was far from their original homes. The mission also created an orphanage and a school for the children who had been enslaved.

In addition, many famous explorers made their way through Bagamoyo including Richard Burton and John Speke. David Livingstone, whose body passed through Bagamoyo after his death, was appalled by the slave trade and did what he could to help put an end to it. Even though the slave market was closed down in 1873, the slave trade continued to flourish for many years afterward, and Bagamoyo was heart of this trade. Both the Germans and the British opposed the slave trade and there were clashes with local businessmen. Eventually, the slave trade collapsed.

IST students toured the historical sights of Bagamoyo. First, we stopped at the Caravan Serai where traders stayed after their long journeys from the west. Next, we drove by the Customs House near the fish market to see where enslaved people would have been tied up awaiting their voyage to Zanzibar. From here, we moved to the German bomas which were the official buildings of German East Africa. Our next destination was the Old Fort. This building represents the history of this time period in Bagamoyo. It has functioned as a private home, a storage unit for enslaved people, a German fort, a British prison, and a Tanzanian police station. IST students also went to the Catholic mission to learn about how the mission helped enslaved people. They also saw where David Livingstone’s body was kept for a night before being moved to Zanzibar, and ultimately to Westminster Abbey where he was buried.

Our students learned a lot and managed to have some fun despite the somber lessons learned. Here’s what a few of them have to say:

I enjoyed listening to the slave trade book about Siwema. It was fun to act out.

I learned how the slaves were captured and how their lives were.

I enjoyed seeing the Kaole ruins. They were so old but crumbly.

I learned that the slaves had chains around the necks and on their ankles. They were attached to each other. If one fell down they would probably all fall down.

Of course, what they all really enjoyed was being able to spend a night with their friends in a new place. They loved swimming in the pool and seeing their friends’ rooms. Each class had a slightly different experience in Bagamoyo, but they all bonded with one another and their teachers.

 

 

Reading from EC to Grade 2

This is a reminder that tomorrow, Thursday, September 29th, there will be a workshop on reading for grades EC to 2. This will be held in the staff room and will start at 7:20. Karibuni sana

SEPTEMBER 22nd WORKSHOP

Yesterday I held a presentation on Reading at IST for Grades 3 to 5. We discussed:

• Balanced literacy includes reading, writing, word work, and speaking and listening
• Reading includes phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension
• In grades 3 to 5 the focus lies on fluency, vocabulary and comprehension
• Reading includes: modeled reading, interactive shared reading, guided reading/literature circles, and 1-to-1 reading with the teacher
• Setting reading goals is an important part of improving your reading
• Teachers typically teach skills in the different areas of reading and then reinforce them through the different kinds of reading, such as shared reading and guided reading
• At IST we use the Bonnie Campbell-Hill continuum and the Diagnostic Reading Assessment to inform our teaching

I encourage you to attend as many workshops as you can. Next week, I will hold a workshop on Reading in grades EC to 2. I look forward to seeing you all there.

Click here to view the handout.

Everyday Math Computations

Many of us learned how to perform mathematical computations in ways that differ from the way our children are learning. To learn how Everyday Math teaches various computations, please go to:

http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/educators/computation/