Specialist Areas Working Together Towards one Approach
Goal: Holistic development of the child and well-balanced education in the social, emotional, intellectual and physical spheres.
Visual Arts: Every young person deserves a complete and competitive education that includes the arts. The art is hands-on, has immediate rewards, focuses on positive achievements, develops concrete products and fosters collaboration. The arts provide many opportunities for students to demonstrate their skills through authentic performance. The arts enable children to grow in confidence and learn how to think positively about themselves and learning. Arts education helps make learning matter to students by giving them a medium to connect new knowledge to personal experiences and express what they have learned to others.
Music: Music is an extremely important subject for all children to learn and can lead to better brain development, increases in human connection, and even stress relief. Not only will music education allow children to develop their musical skills, it will also give them the opportunity to work on their math skills, reading and writing skills, science skills, and history knowledge. Music enables students to communicate in ways that go beyond their oral language abilities. Music delights and stimulates, soothes and comforts us. Musical experiences and learning begin with the voice. It is important that students are given opportunities to discover a broad range of music experiences including classifying and analyzing sounds, composing, exploring body music, harmonizing, listening, playing instruments, singing, notation, reading music, songwriting and recording.
PE: Physical Education course fosters the development of knowledge, skills and attitudes that will contribute to a student’s balanced and healthy lifestyle. Through opportunities for active learning, courses in this subject group embody and promote the holistic nature of well-being. Through physical education, students can learn to appreciate and respect the ideas of others, and develop effective collaboration and communication skills. This subject area also offers many opportunities to build positive interpersonal relationships that can help students to develop a sense of social responsibility. Various games like football, basketball, hockey including sprints (100 meters, 200 meters and 500 meters) are being organized. Kho-Kho, basketball, football inter-house matches are being organized from time to time to inculcate the spirit of competition and collaboration among students. Yoga, aerobics and exercise sessions are being held to keep the fitness and sound health of young learners.
Library: The purpose of a library is to provide a variety of resources- to support learning, to provide resources just for leisure reading or recreation. The school library plays a central role in any school by being a hub of knowledge and storehouse for information. For IB School, the library is its vibrant heart. It should act as a stepping stone in which students are supported in their journey towards developing self-confidence and academic powers. At IB School, Baru Sahib, we provide a range of resources both print and digital, from Grade Nursery to Grade 5, to support the inquiry. Through several learning engagements, students get encouraged to read and reflect. These planned sessions help learners not only to be a good reader but also to think critically and reflect on their reading. They take ownership of the same and share their review confidently. With technology finding its way to the hands of our children, it’s important to teach them Digital Citizenship as a part of their library classes.
ICT: The PYP identified six skills to be developed through technology, which reflect the Learner Profile and the Five Essential Elements are Investigating, Creating, Communicating, Collaborating, Organizing and Becoming Responsible Digital Citizens. If we want our students to have a greater understanding of cultures, people and issues around the world, we should simply give the students access to them. The development of international mindedness is the most important aim of the IB programs; by achieving all of the other aims, we hope to achieve this ‘umbrella’ aim. Technology has made it easier than ever to develop international mindedness because the rest of the world is no longer inaccessible. The students create PPT, Stop Motion Videos, Taking Tales, Scratch Animations etc. and become lifelong learners by working on multimedia.