First Grade Fun and International Primary Curriculum

I'm enjoying the International Primary Curriculum that I am teaching at ISG-Jubail School. My first graders entered into the first integrated studies theme of Celebrations! by planning a pirate party, start to finish. They planned food, decorations and activities, including a treasure hunt for chocolate coins and imaginative play on a pirate ship.

The Pirate Ship in the Classroom

It's fun to be in a K-10 school - the older students came out and cheered on the costumed "pirates" as they paraded around the school.

The pirate celebration

Next the students studied different elements of celebrations and one of those was the wearing of masks. The children designed a mask on the computer in their ICT class and then made an actual face mask in Art.

Masks and IPC

We finished out the investigations with a history study of Then and Now, researching items from the past and seeing how they have changed today. The children made timelines showing how they have changed over time, too.The international culmination of the unit will be a Celebration Museum where children and parents will work together to make a display showing a favorite home country celebration and kids will answer questions about their celebration at a school-wide fair (think science fair format).

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Where we are working now

ISG Jubail School is the Anglo-American school for this area: Jubail is one of two planned industrial cities in Saudi Arabia, given a special royal commission for development and planning. Our district, the seven schools of International Schools Group, runs the school in the other industrial city -- Yanbu -- as well. Jubail is on the east coast, between Dhahran and Kuwait. Our nearby "big city" is the tri-city metropolis of Dhahran-Khobar-Dammam, where all the big shopping malls and quaint old markets are, along with the central 3 schools of our district, where Coleman attends high school. ISG Jubail has 410 students -- an average of 2 homerooms for each grade, K-10. Class size varies, up to 22. I have 12 in my required course "Computers & Information Management"; Barb has 12 students in her first-grade class. Most of the teaching staff come from the U.S., some from the Commonwealth. Several teachers are wives of engineers an...

Riding the Bus often

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Reservoir of European Youth, Parliament

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