An elementary school in Lethbridge has received a significant designation.
Our Lady of the Assumption School has been certified as an International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme, or IB-PYP, school.
This makes the Holy Spirit Catholic School Division site the only IB-PYP elementary institution in Lethbridge and the surrounding area. The IB-PYP certification means students learn the typical provincial curriculum, with an added focus on inquisitive, knowledge-based learning about various social and global issues.
Caryn Swark, associate principal and PYP coordinator at the school, says OLA has been working on getting this verification for about two years.
“At an IB school, the biggest push is that we are learning about how to learn as much as we are learning about what we learn,” she says.
“So, the goal is for students to become active global citizens who are ready to take their place in the world, who are ready to ask questions, who are ready to inquire and just make a difference. It’s a lot about learning to learn, so what we’re teaching is still the Alberta curriculum but it’s as important how we’re learning it and the skills we’re building and who we’re becoming as we learn as it is what we are learning.”
Swark adds the hope is that when students leave OLA, whether they go to another IB school or not, they will have those valuable life skills in place.
“They’ll be able to ask the big questions, they’ll be able to think critically about information, which is very important in our world where there is a lot of information but it’s not always easy to discern what’s accurate,” she remarks, adding the skills students develop will help them confidently take action to make a change in their community.
Swark says the biggest adjustment for teachers will be implementing transdisciplinary learning. “If you look at a class schedule at OLA, instead of seeing math, science, social studies, what you’re going to see is ‘inquiry’,” she notes.
“We have six big themes we do throughout the year, and these are the same at every IB world school. They address big [topics] such who we are, sharing the planet, things like that, and we take all of the Alberta curriculum, and we put it into those themes.
So, the students aren’t learning science facts in isolation, they’re learning about the science curriculum in connection with the social and language arts, and religion and health, and they’re learning about it all in the context of these big questions of who we are, where we are in place and time, that sort of thing.”
Swark adds the certification is especially valuable at OLA due to its diverse student population. “By our last count, I think we have 35 languages spoken at our school. That’s the other piece with IB is that it’s very focused on language – we start learning French in grade one as opposed to grade four, which most of the schools do,” she says.
“Our students are really working in a lot of different languages and from a lot of different cultural [areas], so this is also a really neat way for some of them to connect to their home cultures, to issues that may be of concern to them and their personal communities.”
PRIMARY YEARS PROGRAM EXHIBITION
The certification was celebrated with the Primary Years Program Exhibition by grade six students, who showcased projects on topics like air pollution and climate change.
Swark says the event on Thursday served as the culmination of the IB-PYP program and is done in the last year of elementary schooling.
She likened it to a science fair, but instead of science projects, students chose a way they would like to change the world.
“For the kids, it really shows them that even though they’re young, they have the power, they are the future, and they are able to go out and make a change in the world,” Swark says.
Devlyn Jackson and her team’s project focused on how climate change is affecting marine life. “We mainly focused on coral bleaching and how climate change can cause it, and about [how] the algae disappears once climate change starts affecting that area, and how climate change [happens],” she explains.
“I really like marine life, and I wanted to [research] climate change,” she says.
She believes working on this project has prepared her for the future, and how one should treat the environment. “I know how to do things better, instead of littering and throwing things where they should be,” Jackson says.
Meanwhile, Tejiri Ovwasa and his teammates researched air pollution.
“For the past month, we’ve been researching traffic-related pollution,” he says.
Ovwasa says about the IB program, “I like how creative you can be inside of it.”
“I like how you can really choose any topic for yours … you can also connect it to your faith, so we decided to add Catholic social teaching to ours,” he adds.
Grade six teacher Jorin Gaudet says he was impressed at how dedicated students were to creating their presentations, noting their “fantastic” work.
“One thing I can say about them for sure is their passion for this has been really easy to guide because they’ve chosen something that they are so interested in and they know that they want to do something to make the world better,” he states.
“So, just guiding that and helping them figure out the steps to be able to actually do that has been a really enduring process. It’s been fantastic to see the growth.”
In total, Gaudet says there were 17 projects on display and, “There’s 17 big celebrations that could be had for each of them for the growth that they’ve had”.
The only other school in Lethbridge with this designation is Winston Churchill High School. More information is available at the International Baccalaureate website.
