Title:
Teaching Children How to Think Internationally
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
The International Primary Curriculum is an idea that
began in Britain eight years ago. Today this
curriculum is taught in more than one thousand
primary schools in fifty-eight countries, including
the United States.Educator Martin Skelton co-wrote
the International Primary Curriculum, or IPC. He
says for children to learn and succeed, they need a
program that permits them to learn individually. He
says the idea with the curriculum is to help today's
children become good citizens of the world and
twenty-first century leaders. He says most of world
problems are going to be solved internationally. No
single country is going to solve the environment or
terrorism. Mr. Skelton says the curriculum has
activities built around the development of
"international mindedness" starting from the age of
five. The British American School of Los Angeles is
one of a few American private schools that teach the
International Primary Curriculum. Second grade
teacher Alison Kerr says the main goal is to engage
children in the learning process. This term, for
example, her class is learning about people
important in history. She says the children dressed
like famous people. They had to research and bring
ten written clues and the rest of the class had to
guess who the people were.The British School in
Boston held a fair for students and parents called
Around the World in a Day. Emma Northey, head of
primary learning at the school, says fifty-one
nationalities were represented. She described one
activity designed to teach about similarities among
different cultures. She says the children were each
given a passport. They knew that they were going
around the world in a day. Ms. Northey said: "We
told them 'You have to come back with two
similarities that you had seen between the different
cultures.' Even the three-year-olds came back to me
saying 'Gosh, you know everybody writes. Some people
write going down. Some people write from left to
right, some from right to left.'"Another educator,
Kate Foy of the British School in Washington, says
the teacher's role is to enable students to discover
for themselves. For VOA Special English, I'm Carolyn
Presutti. Tell us if you have experience with the
International Primary Curriculum and what you think
of it. Share your comments at voaspecialenglish.com
or on Facebook and Twitter at VOA Learning English.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
