Our programs
Learning at school means questioning the world. It also means acquiring specific languages, acquisitions for which the simple growing up is not enough. Determining the program purpose is crucial, because, to adapt a quotation from Yogi Berra: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else”. In other words, if you don’t really focus on the reason why the program is important to learners as well as their future, and if you don’t have a vision of what you want that future to look like, then at best your work will randomly bring them closer to a better future, and at worst, push them further away from a better future.
This program is designed according to the Objective-Based Approach, and is enriched with situations. A situation is a set of circumstances in which any person can find himself. When the person has successfully dealt with a situation by mobilizing various resources, they have effectively developed one or more skills: we will then say that they are competent in this situation. A person cannot be declared competent a priori since they must first deal with situations. The situations proposed in the program do not constitute an end in themselves, but rather means to allow learners to develop skills.
This program is structured around two learning cycles:
In the First Cycle, all lessons question the world. Mastery of languages, particularly French, is central. In the First Cycle, the acquisition of fundamental knowledge (reading, writing, counting, respecting others) is the priority. Teaching must be particularly structured and explicit. It is about giving meaning to learning but it must also be considered in its progressiveness.
The children who reach the First Cycle are very different from each other. They grew up and learned in different family and school contexts which strongly influence learning and its pace. The class is therefore organized around constant repetition of the knowledge being acquired and a learning differentiation.
In the First Cycle, meaning and automation are simultaneously constructed. Understanding is essential to the development of solid knowledge that students can reinvest and the automation of certain expertise is the way to free up cognitive resources so that they can access more sophisticated operations and understanding.
All teachings are concerned. In mathematics, for example, understanding the different operations is essential to developing the knowledge that students reinvest. At the same time, readily available knowledge (such as the results of multiplication tables) significantly improves “intelligent calculation” capabilities, where students understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. When questioning the world, the construction of temporal benchmarks follows the same logic: their understanding linked to explicit learning gradually allows them to be used spontaneously.
In the First Cycle, we articulate the concrete and the abstract. Observing and acting, manipulating, experimenting, all these activities lead to representation, whether analog (drawings, images, diagrams) or symbolic, abstract (numbers, concepts). In the First Cycle, oral and written skills are significantly different. What a student is capable of understanding and producing orally is at a much higher level than what he or she is capable of understanding and producing in writing. But speaking and writing are very closely linked and, from the first grade, students have access to writing, both in production and in reading. The gap between oral and written is particularly important in the learning of modern languages.
The First Cycle also helps to establish the milestones for the initial development of students' competence in several languages, firstly orally. The teaching and learning of a modern language, foreign or regional, must put students in a position to practice the language and reflect on the language. Work on language and work on culture are inseparable. In the First Cycle, intuitive knowledge still holds a central place. Outside of school, in their families or elsewhere, children acquire knowledge in many areas: social (rules, conventions, customs), physical (knowledge of their body, movements), oral language and culture. This knowledge contributes to the foundations of learning. The student is encouraged to understand what he knows and can do as well as to use his thinking during learning times.
Cycle 2 now links the last two grades of primary school and the sixth year, with a greater concern for educational continuity and coherence of learning serving the acquisition of a common base of knowledge, skills and culture.
This cycle has a double responsibility:
⮚ consolidate the fundamental learning that was undertaken in cycle 2 and which conditions subsequent learning;
⮚ allow a better transition between primary and secondary school by ensuring continuity and progressivity between the three years of the cycle.
The 6th grade class occupies a special place in the cycle: it allows students to adapt to the pace and the educational organization while remaining in the continuity of the learning undertaken in the Fourth and Fifth grades. This cycle 2 program thus allows a progressive and natural entry into the knowledge made up of the disciplines but also into their languages, their approaches and their specific methods.
The introduction of English as a language of instruction also constitutes added value. We adopt the Cambridge International Curriculum for Science and ICT and the 3D Dimensions Curriculum, strongly supported in England and Australia for the consolidation of morality.
Learning Objectives of the Consolidation Cycle
The second cycle firstly aims at stabilizing and strengthening, for all students, the fundamental learning undertaken in the first cycle, starting with that of languages. The first cycle allowed the acquisition of the reading and writing tools for the French language. Cycle 2 must consolidate these acquisitions in order to put them at the service of other learning in a broad and diversified use of reading and writing. Oral language, which also conditions all learning, continues to be the subject of constant attention and specific work. Generally speaking, mastery of both languages remains a central objective of cycle 2 which must ensure that all students have sufficient autonomy in reading and writing to enter secondary school with the necessary skills to continue their education.