The 2014 Exhibition Has Begun!!!

The Grade 5 ISPP students changed class early Monday morning, March 31 bubbling with excitement. Immediately, they jumped into exploring various issues through reading books and scanning a few selected websites in order to find facts for a "Did you know...?" wall that they will organise based on issues later this week. After this learning engagement, students began to discuss and draft a list of potential issues to inquire into.

This morning, students met with our second guest speaker, Ms. Caroline McCausland from ActionAid Cambodia. The students listened and took part in lively discussions with her about poverty and its causes, issues of access to education, human rights, and disaster management, and ways that organisations like ActionAid Cambodia seek to help Cambodian people and the government to deal with these issues. In collaborative groups, the Grade 5s then planned and created murals to demonstrate what they had learned from Ms. McCausland before Tweeting about her talk. Students benefited from an early exposure to a variety of issues and to the concept of action through her visit; as teachers, we hope that they are already formulating ideas about what action they might take as a result of their inquiries.

Please remember to check out recent photos of our Exhibition as it unfolds by clicking on the "Photos and Media" section of this blog or by clicking the following link:

Photos and Media

Students Create Central Idea for the 2014 Grade 5 Exhibition!

Image by Ryan Leach via http://openclipart.org/

On Monday, March 3, the ISPP Grade 5 students met again with Ms. Kim Engasser to discuss the transdisciplinary theme, "Sharing the Planet", and to distill a central idea from it. Students worked together in groups of three or four to combine their own versions of pieces of the the transdisciplinary theme they found engaging. After this exercise, the Exhibition teachers facilitated a combination of the best parts of many of these groups' central ideas.

The resulting central idea for the 2014 Grade 5 ISPP Exhibition is:

Human beings have a right to have their basic needs met and the responsibility to share natural resources with other living things.

Having come up with this central idea, students will be taking a break from Exhibition preparatory meetings to focus on their current unit of inquiry on materials.

NEXT ON THE EXHIBITION AGENDA...

During the first week of the Exhibition starting on March 31, students will be exposed to many issues through guest speakers, a field trip, and small research sessions. As a parent, you can help your child prepare to select an issue that falls into the realm of our central idea by having conversations about problems both of you see in the world around you everyday.

Second Exhibition Meeting Completed! Students Have Interpreted the Transdisciplinary Theme "Sharing the Planet"!

Grade 5 students met for the second time last week to learn about and interpret the transdisciplinary theme for the Exhibition at ISPP, "Sharing the Planet".

This theme can be described in the following manner, based on the PYP document, "Making the PYP Happen":

Sharing the planet

An inquiry into rights and responsibilities in the struggle to share finite resources with other

people and with other living things; communities and the relationships within and between

them; access to equal opportunities; peace and conflict resolution.

Students worked in groups to read through this descriptor, highlight words they were unfamiliar with, and to describe sections of the description in their own words. 

This is all part of the Exhibition process. Students start out by looking at the big picture of the unit in the form of an overarching theme and will be zooming in on concepts and issues that go into understanding this theme as the Exhibition progresses. In the coming weeks, students will be: creating a central idea to guide their inquiries through this unit, doing some initial research into various issues that could help them understand this central idea,  and writing questions about these issues based around the key concepts of form, change, function, connection, causation, perspective, responsibility, and reflection. 

Check out the photos below to see students in action and records of what they discussed together.