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If you haven't already...join this group for some support with resources etc

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IB PYP/MYP community network has 2,805 members. A community of IB PYP and MYP teachers to share resources, clarify, question and experiment with teaching...

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The PYP Playlist is an introduction for parents and teachers who are new to the PYP. It contains a wide range of e-learning resources to help everyone in your learning community develop a deeper understanding of the programme, and become more active in supporting student learning."
Source: https://www.ibo.org/professional-development/free-learning/pyp-playlist/

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Embed this image on your site:
For children, reading plays an integral role in developing communication and vocabulary skills, boosting self-esteem, and encouraging imagination. The benefits have also proven to extend into the classroom; according to the National Education Association (NEA), children who read regularly and have access to more reading materials at home often have higher grades in all subjects. Some of the most famous and beloved characters and stories in history originated in children's books that have been passed down over generations. Let this collection of the opening lines from children's books serve as a nostalgic walk down memory lane and as inspiration for books you may want to share with your children too.

Find more about the author: Kim Hart

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The Opening Lines from 44 Timeless Children's Books - Infographic | AAA State of Play

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Embed this image on your site: For children, reading plays an integral role in developing communication and vocabulary skills, boosting self-esteem, and encouraging imagination. The benefits have also proven to extend into the classroom; according to the National Education Association (NEA), children who read regularly and have access to more reading materials at home often have higher grades in all subjects.

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PZ’s Thinking Routines Toolbox | Project Zero

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The Toolbox organizes the Thinking Routines into categories that describe the types of thinking the routines help to facilitate. Some routines appear in more than one category, and some routines have different versions that offer modifications for specific age groups or more specific conceptual challenges.

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Command posters for MYP but can be used for PYP 5

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Dr. Seuss books have long been held up as parables. For years, we've celebrated when Sam-I-Am's persistence pays off and felt our hearts grow three sizes right along with the Grinch. But in February 2019, a groundbreaking study pinpointed in depth what people had been saying for years: White supremacy lurks in the pages of many Seuss books. The foundation of the easy-to-spot morals of the stories were disturbing depictions of people of color and racialized nonhuman characters. The study led a number of educators to wonder, How could these racist ideas exist alongside such valuable lessons? Alongside such kindness?

Educators, particularly elementary educators like me, are good at talking and teaching about kindness. It's at the core of elementary pedagogy, after all: those lessons and teachable moments related to being a good friend, being generous and acting thoughtfully. But when being considerate, nice and friendly is all children learn about how to treat one another, we risk losing something fundamental.

Young children are not only developing a sense of morality; they are developing a sense of who they are. This includes their race, gender, class and more. These identities have never been treated or represented equally in our society, so when we teach about love, acceptance and kindness without addressing this inequity, we gloss over crucial differences in the ways our students experience the world.

The harm done by long-term exposure to injustice-to the kind of imagery found in racist books, microaggressions and discrimination-calls for more than a simple understanding of kindness. It demands that kindness be interwoven with substantial notions of true justice. That's why, in my first-grade classroom, my goal was to guide students' thinking in terms of real justice. I used a set of principles that went beyond kindness and moved toward specific actions students could take to counter bias and stereotypes and work for a more equitable future.

Building a More Just Curriculum

The first step was making space in my curriculum for the difficult realities of systemic injustice.

It's easy, for example, to study the civil rights movement and cherry-pick quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King that focus on everyone getting along. But we can also show students that his famous speech imagining a world where children are judged "by the content of their character" is also the one in which he refuses half-measures toward equity, saying, "No, no, we are not satisfied. And we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."

Focusing on the dream of an equitable future without teaching the reality of an inequitable present ignores the radical anti-racism work that King and his contemporaries undertook at great risk and greater cost. It paints the false narrative that kindness is all we need to make social progress. And worse, it suggests that kindness has already won.

In my classes, instead of whitewashing these heroes, I wanted to paint a more detailed picture: They were flawed, human, ambitious, organized. Students deserve fuller stories of King, Gandhi, Rigoberta Menchú and others who practiced nonviolence while working for justice. They deserve tales told with nuance and complexities so they can learn what it really means to be an ally rather than a sanitized idol. Allowing students access to a fuller story helps them see that, even with healthy doses of love and compassion, kindness alone rarely brings about change. Change requires a real understanding of what injustice looks like-and a plan to combat it.

But building a just curriculum isn't only about teaching history in a responsible way. It's also about ensuring that all of our students are represented in our studies and that all are respected in our classrooms. Many schools make use of social emotional learning (SEL) curricula. Audits of SEL curricula and practices can make sure that the end result isn't simply a more emotionally literate version of kindness.

I've used a variety of programs that aim to increase emotional intelligence, but they sometimes fall short of truly honoring children's feelings, where they come from and how they're treated. A just SEL curriculum honors differences and recognizes that emotions don't exist in a vacuum. It also accounts for the history of pathologizing emotional expression by women and people of color and corrects for it.

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Dr. Seuss books have long been held up as parables. For years, we've celebrated when Sam-I-Am's persistence pays off and felt our hearts grow three sizes right along with the Grinch. But in February 2019, a groundbreaking study pinpointed in depth what people had been saying for years: White supremacy lurks in the pages of many Seuss books.

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Support your students' social and emotional learning as they navigate the digital world.

Technology impacts students' social and emotional well-being, from how they express themselves to how they communicate with friends and family. With the right support, students can learn how to integrate technology into their lives to promote their well-being and be a positive influence in their communities.

We created this resource center to give you everything you need to implement SEL in digital life in your school or classroom. Here you'll find CASEL-aligned quick activities, family conversation starters, and professional development resources, all of which align with the core themes and lessons from our free K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum.

See the resources here:

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SEL in Digital Life Resource Center | Common Sense Education

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Common Sense Education provides educators and students with the resources they need to harness the power of technology for learning and life. Find a free K-12 Digital Citizenship curriculum, reviews of popular EdTech apps, and resources for protecting student privacy.

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Listen to my interview with Jeff Frieden (transcript):
Sponsored by Peergrade and Microsoft Teams for Education

In our dreamiest of teacher dreams, some of us might imagine days when our students spontaneously erupt into complex, nuanced conversations about the things they're learning in our classes. If we borrow the language of the Common Core, they would "engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade-level topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly."

Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? And maybe the "teacher-led" kind is possible, because we could structure and guide it, but that doesn't give students much ownership of their learning. In groups? That might be a bit harder to accomplish. And one-on-one? Well, how do you even manage that?

Jeff Frieden, a high school English teacher in southern California, wondered the same thing. Wanting a less teacher-centered class, he was looking for ways to get students talking to each other about the content. He'd tried all kinds of techniques- think-pair-share, appointment clocks, groups of four-but none of them gave him the results he was looking for.

When he tried to get the whole class talking in mixer-style activities, they would "poke holes in those systems," he said. "They just kind of work their way around it to end up talking to their friends, and it becomes more social than content-centered interaction." Meanwhile, he also discovered that many of his students, who had gone to school together for years, didn't know each other's names.

Then one morning, just a few minutes before class started, he came up with something new on the fly: A simple system for getting every student in the room to talk with every other student, a way of tracking conversations over time so that students had a reason to reach out to people they never interacted with, and have more meaningful, content-based discussions with each other. Since he started using this method, Jeff says his classroom just feels different. Students are taking more academic risks, diving deeper into the content, and actually getting to know each other.

The Strategy

Here is the Ongoing Conversations system Frieden uses to get his students talking:

Each student is given a conversation tracker, a chart where they keep track of the conversations they've had with other students in the class.

Students are to have conversations with a minimum number of other students (set by the teacher-about 75 percent of the class) over a predetermined period of time (say, 2 to 3 weeks). These conversations can be structured, based on topic prompts supplied by the teacher.

On their tracker, students record the name of the person they talked to, the date of their conversation, and a one-line summary of what they talked about.

Once a pair of students has had a conversation, they may not return to each other until after they have reached the minimum number of unique conversations set by the teacher.

The image below shows one version of a conversation tracker, where Frieden's students were discussing a novel they'd read.

Currently, Frieden scaffolds the conversations by supplying topics for each round of conversation; students are not left to come up with ideas on their own. He projects these topics one at a time on Google Slides: "It might be something as simple as, Explain one thing that really confused you from the chapter to your partner. " Sometimes he'll recycle a topic by having students switch partners, then summarize the conversation they just had with their last partner.

The Benefits

On the first day Frieden tried Ongoing Conversations, "It went surprisingly well," he says. "I was actually shocked by how well it was going. And it was more content-centered talking, too; it wasn't just about their social lives. They were really responding to the prompts that I was giving them and talking about the book."

Now that he's using the strategy on a regular basis, he's found that it delivers several benefits:

More Students Engaged

Before switching to this method, Frieden believes far fewer students were actually participating in his class.

"For years, I was seeing what I wanted to see with student interactions," he says. Although his class discussions felt lively, "I might have like a third of my class really interacting." Moving to Ongoing Conversations gave more students an opportunity to really participate in discussions.

Simple, Actionable Formative Assessment

When he uses Ongoing Conversations, Frieden says, "My check for understanding is by walking around. The other day my sophomores were talking about Animal Farm, and I had asked a question about Clover, and there were way too many of them saying, 'Clover? Who's Clover? I don't know who Clover is.' And so I just went, 'Okay. Time out.' And then we talked about that character and her relevance in the story."

As a formative assessment method, Ongoing Conversations offers two advantages: It lets teachers take immediate action-like in the scenario above-and it gives them less work to take home. "I don't need to do exit tickets, I don't need to do quizzes," Frieden says, "I collect less work, but students do more."

Works with Other Strategies

This method can be blended with other discussion and instructional strategies. For example, if Frieden is having students do a philosophical chairs discussion, he might have them turn and talk with someone on their side of the room, then record that interaction on their conversation tracker.

Not Just for English Class

Ongoing Conversations is a strategy that can be used in any content area. Although Frieden initially structured these conversations around literature, he quickly realized they could be expanded beyond that. When he moved students into an inquiry-based research project, he continued using the conversation tracker, swapping out literature-based questions with prompts that centered on the research students were doing.

Grading and Assessment

Do these conversations get a grade? When Frieden first started using this system, he gave students a small amount of points for these conversations, and that would work in a points-based classroom. This year, however, he's been working toward a modified version of a gradeless classroom, where a student's course grade is determined by a conference in which the student must justify how well they've met the standards.

Frieden has found that knowing these conferences are coming is what generally keeps students motivated to give the Ongoing Conversations a good effort; they know Frieden is paying attention. "I'm watching," he says. "I'm going to hold you accountable to this, and eventually we're going to have a conversation. You're going to have to look me in the eye and say, 'This is what grade I deserve,' or 'Here, I can justify this grade.'"

Tips for Success

Don't "Free-Range" It

Frieden did not just hand students the charts and tell them to start talking: Even though they are in 12th grade, they needed a bit of structure for the strategy to be successful; younger students would need even more scaffolding. In addition to providing questions for discussion, talk with students ahead of time about behavior expectations, how to initiate conversations, how to ask follow-up questions, and even how to record the content on the tracker. You might even want to model a conversation fishbowl-style, with you as one of the participants, so students can see what a good quality conversation looks like ahead of time.

Frame the Discussion Through a Helping Lens

To relieve the anxiety students might feel about these conversations, Frieden launches the conversations by framing them through a lens of mutual support.

"I'm going to come clean that I'm a confused reader," he tells them. "Join the club. When I read something for the first time, it's always confusing, and I need help to understand it. So let's basically form this class-wide support group here for struggling readers, and as we go through this, let's talk about the things that are perplexing to us that we don't get, words we don't understand. Maybe we miss a detail that our partners or our friends figure out, so they can help us."

Setting this tone has helped student relax. "They kind of know, 'Oh, okay. We're just in here to kind of feel our way through this novel,'" Frieden says. "That's what I'm hoping."

The Value of Conversation

Giving students regular opportunities to engage in rich conversations is good for them in so many ways. "There's tremendous benefit in getting past some of the socially awkward stuff," Frieden points out. "And really just learning how to interact with another human being will actually enrich your academic life too."

Students are recognizing the benefits, too. "Even though they're struggling through the discomfort, they say that it's exposing them to ideas they wouldn't have considered had they just been asked to do it alone or respond on a worksheet," Frieden says. "I had one student who actually wrote a lengthy response saying, You know what? I don't know if I've changed my mind, but I just told myself, 'For the sake of this, I'm going to be open,' and it's actually changed the way I think about this issue. "

It was one of those rare moments when you know you're doing something right.

"My teacher nerd heart was singing that day." ♥

You can learn more from Jeff Frieden by following him on Twitter or visiting his website, Make them Master It, where he shares tons of great ideas and insights about teaching. You can read his original post about Ongoing Conversations here.

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Get Students Talking with Ongoing Conversations

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It's not just a fantasy: This simple system gets every student in your room to have rich conversations with every other student. About content. Really.

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Current Training Opportunities

Primary School Mental Health & Resilience Program

We've expanded our education program to meet the increasing needs of Australian primary schools to deliver a more integrated, impactful program for kids and their communities. We've also added a range of new features you've been asking for including:

Enriched impact evaluation

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Thanks to generous support from the Commonwealth Government, we're rolling out our Whole School Program in 600 regional and rural Australian primary schools. See if your school is eligible.

Over 180,000 Australian educators are using Smiling Mind - that's more than half of all Australian teachers.

The Smiling Mind Primary School Mental Health and Resilience Program is underpinned by a mindfulness-based social and emotional learning framework. Research has shown that developing mindfulness skills can help primary-aged children to develop emotion and behaviour regulation skills, improve attention and concentration, and facilitate optimal environments for learning. Fundamental to the program is training, access to a range of resources and ongoing support for educators.

Mapped to the Australian and Victorian Curricula and included in the Be You Programs Directory, the program assists schools to implement and sustain meaningful development and impactful change - benefiting students, teachers and the whole school community.

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All of our training is complemented with resources to enhance the learning experience and depending on the tier of training you opt in for, there is an opportunity to access all of the below.

CONTACT US

If you're a school leader, parent or teacher looking for support or an answer to a question we haven't covered above, try sending us an email. education@smilingmind.com.au

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Mindfulness Education Program - Smiling Mind

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We've expanded our education program to meet the increasing needs of Australian primary schools to deliver a more integrated, impactful program for kids and their communities.

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Using Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in the IB classroom

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This piece draws from experiences in an early childhood PYP context in Switzer l and . Reflections are shared on ways the Approaches to Learning have the potential to be powerful tools for supporting children's agentic identities with a particular focus on environments, experts and teacher talk.

"Maybe if I get the idea of something. Maybe I get it in a book or maybe I tell [my sister] I'm going to be the one who knows it. Who found it out." - D., aged 4

These reflections by three- and four-year-olds are ideas that have been thoughtfully cultivated as part of in-depth inquiries and a classroom culture that actively seeks to nurture a sense of agency. We educators have found that thinking deeply about the Approaches to Learning as tools for sup porting children's identities as scientists, makers, artists, and in the example above, RESEARCHERS has framed how we plan for explorations connected to inquiries.

The young children's reflections on what it means to be a researcher make clear that they are quite capable of developing a strikingly self-actualized sense of themselves . Without hesitation, they identify THEMSELVES as the researchers-citizens of our community who are highly capable as active participants in meaning-making with strong images and identities as learners.

Many children in our school community are developing English as an additional language, so we educators also bring in other ways for children to share thinking and tell us about who they are as learners. A confident scientific drawing, ease with using materials to represent ideas-these traces of learning give us lots of information about agency, identity and learning.

But getting back to those articulately shared ideas about what it means to be a researcher...  As teachers, we have been considering how lines of inquiry and connected proposals to support learning outcomes might be optimized through the lens of the Approaches to l earning (ATLs). Playing with the idea of developing the skills of Researcher (or Thinker/Communicator, etc.) as central to planning, we have identified three areas which have had a significant impact, including: Learning Environments , Experts and Language (Teacher Talk).

"Children are natural scientists, and an open-ended outdoor setting inherently promotes a sense of wonder and a space ripe for questioning, inquiring and theory-building."

Learning Environments

For an inquiry into ways of how ' exploring and caring for the natural environment leads to discovery ' (Sharing the Planet), much of the "fieldwork" happens in outdoor environments. Dedicated time learning outdoors in the forest, pond and garden provides inspiration for observing, questioning and collecting data. Children are natural scientists, and an open-ended outdoor setting inherently promotes a sense of wonder and a space ripe for questioning, inquiring and theory-building. The outdoors is the ultimate space for developing research skills, but there are others. Classrooms, for instance, have endless potential to support identity and agency. More on that from my far more knowledgeable former colleagues and me he r e.

Experts: A Different Approach

Opportunities to connect with members of the wider community have been important components of many of our inquiries. A visiting musician, an engineer and a professional dancer are just some examples of experts we have hosted. These visits often promote a meaningful exchange of dialogue, sharing of skills and connection. As a team, we have thought a lot about how to optimize these visits. Instead of the traditional invitation to come in and share expertise, we wondered how we might rethink these experiences with a view to reframe the relationship between the children and visiting experts.

Recently, we were fortunate to have a scientist visit as part of a science focused inquiry. Before the visit, we shared that " Dr. O" was interested in hearing about the children's work/projects/research and that a professional scientist might have interesting ideas to share back with us. The children were extremely motivated to share an ongoing color mixing project. Dr. O was able to make connections to his work by sharing, among other things, about how his research also takes place in a lab much like our classroom. Of course, this took some preparation and "frontloading" for our guest but he was grateful to have the teachers provide direction and shared how impressed he was with the children's work and how it made a lot of sense for him to connect to their work and not the other way around. Our aim was to actively cultivate the children's identities as Researchers/ Scientists by valuing their work in real time as opposed to something precluding the work they might someday aspire to - a sh ift in the role of expert toward a dialogue between researchers.

"In thinking about words we use to describe children, we asked ourselves as teachers how this strong image of children as learners might inform the way we speak to children and each other in our classroom communities."

Language (Teacher Talk)

PYP teachers do lots of thinking about how to support the development of the Learner Profile. In my context, some of us have spent dedicated time developing a shared understanding of young children as capable, curious and motivated to be active participants in their learning. In thinking about words we use to describe children, we asked ourselves as teachers how this strong image of children as learners might inform the way we speak to children and each other in our classroom communities. Circling back to those self-actualized young children/researchers at the beginning of this post, we see that their words are weighted heavily with a sense of agency. They spontaneously employed action verbs like investigating , discovering , finding out . They identified themselves as the researchers . They knew what "tools" they required. As teachers, we hope that our conscious use of empowering language contributed to the childrens '  metacognition-their ideas about themselves-as learners.

For most educators, the day-to-day planning for teaching/learning is a practical, often creative, but usually time-consuming labo u r of love. The time we set aside to consider the impact our choices have on children's agentic identities for lifelong learning is also time to appreciate the beautiful work of early childhood education.

Andrea Mills  currently works as both a Primary Teacher and Atelierista /Arts Specialist at The Inter-Community, Zurich. She is from the US, and has a range of international school experiences. Passionate about play based learning, she is also a trained Forest School Leader and is inspired by the educational projects of Reggio Emilia.

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Supporting Children's Agentic Identities through the Approaches to Learning

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This piece draws from experiences in an early childhood PYP context in Switzer l and . Reflections are shared on ways the Approaches to Learning have the potential to be powerful tools for supporting children's agentic identities with a particular focus on environments, experts and teacher talk. "Maybe if I get the idea of something.

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NANOs Day One activity (Click on Series 3. Play based learning)

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NANOs Day One activity (Click on Series 3. Play based learning)

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https://international-baccalaureate.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/PYP+PD+nanos/PYPPDnanos-phase3/Final+En/Play-based+Learning/index.html#/menu/5f8068a9a8ace93c891d20f2

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These resources provide support and understanding about key characteristics of the Primary Year’s Programme (PYP).

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Supporting learner agency in the early years reading

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Supporting learner agency in the early years reading

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This article illustrates the importance of listening to students' voices and the powerful learning that can happen when allowing them take the lead. Planning for inquiry
As we made our way through the first year of our Primary Years Programme (PYP) journey, teachers at Summerhill International School shifted their focus from planning a unit of inquiry with their teams to a collaborative process that included the learners' voices in the planner.
Listening to the students' voices
Our five-year-old class was exploring the central idea, Members of a community can cooperate to achieve their common goals under the transdisciplinary theme How we organize ourselves. During circle time, the students discovered that their teacher had gotten engaged during the break and were excited to hear about her wedding plans. Upon hearing that their teacher had not yet had the time to plan for her wedding, one learner said, "It's ok; we can help you plan". Everyone was very excited about that idea and the Wedding Project was born.
Letting students lead

One way of thinking of learner agency is when learners have the 'power to act'. When learners move from being passive recipients to being much more active in the learning process, and actively involved in the decisions about the learning, then they have greater agency.
~ Derek Wenmoth, CORE Education 10 Trends

The students started by thinking about what they needed to plan for the wedding. As they started to share their ideas, they decided that they needed some way to record and remember their thoughts. They recorded their ideas on cards and stuck them on the wall. A system to organize all the ideas and everyone's roles and responsibilities soon emerged as the students were readying to put their ideas into action. After a group discussion, the students decided to organize their ideas into categories and delegate who would be doing what.

As they got started, they began to take on roles within their wedding plan. The students negotiated their responsibilities with their friends, managed their own materials, and then chose a space to store their on-going project. They also used the calendar to manage their own time by counting how many days were left until the wedding party.
Putting it all together
After all of the wedding preparations for the bride, the students turned their attention to the ceremony and celebration events. They had decided that since they would not be able to attend the actual wedding, they would have a class wedding party with their teacher. This launched a new query into how people celebrate their weddings. The children took on roles as wedding planners by planning and organizing the schedule of events, the guest list, what to wear, and how to set up and decorate the room. They even found a way to make sure that the groom was present at the wedding!
What we learned
Throughout this unit, we witnessed the power of learner agency when we involve students in the planning process. Both students and teachers learned a great deal during this inquiry. With reflective dialogue the teachers realized the power of following the students' lead and how empowering this is when students have ownership over the direction of the inquiry, and are truly invested in what is going on. As teachers became more comfortable with the capacity of young learners to steer the inquiry, the depth and quality of the inquiry rose substantially.

At the beginning of our PYP journey, we tried to plan for student-led inquiry by filling in all the boxes in the planner without leaving room for the learners' voices in the planning. As a school that is new to the IB Primary Years Programme, we felt comfort in knowing that the unit was planned for and in a sense, "completed" before we began the learning. Now we have shifted our thinking to a having a planner that starts off with just a few good provocations and an inviting environment. This means that there is space for children's ideas in the planner. Student-led inquiry can only happen when we listen to and honor the children's ideas and take the time to plan the unit together.

Reference:

Wenmoth, D. (2014) "Ten trends 2014: Agency ". Edtalks. http://edtalks.org/#/video/ten-trends-2014-agency
Jenny Yan is the PYP Coordinator at Summerhill International School, and IB candidate school. She has been a PYP educator for seven years and is passionate about supporting the development of critical and creative thinking in learners.

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Supporting learner agency in the early years

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This article illustrates the importance of listening to students' voices and the powerful learning that can happen when allowing them take the lead. Planning for inquiry As we made our way through the first year of our Primary Years Programme (PYP) journey, teachers at Summerhill International School shifted their focus from planning a unit of inquiry with their teams to a collaborative process that included the learners' voices in the planner.

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This article is based on an example of listening to learning within a pre-kindergarten classroom and how teachers tuning into student voices helped to shape the direction of our inquiry into the transdisciplinary theme of 'How we express ourselves'.
Within our school in Suzhou, China, our pre-kindergarten learners shine brightly as leaders in their quest for understanding and experts in their play. As a co-teaching partnership, my colleague Anna and I understand that often our job is to listen to learning and to take our cues from what we hear.

As we began our inquiry into the central idea that "imagination extends our ability to think, create and express ourselves", Anna and I were supervising outside morning play and talking about how to get started. What provocations might we set up? What stories might we share? As we were talking, a most extraordinary thing was taking place, not five feet from us. One of our students had bent down in concentration, another had joined, and another, until a little group huddled closely, and the buzz of their excitement was reaching us. As I approached, one of our students exclaimed: "Look! Look what we found! It is a blanket from a fairy!" The "blanket" was a golden sweet wrapper, cradled carefully in the hands of a 4-year-old child. As I examined this treasure, our students began to add to the fabric of the tale. "There must be a fairy house nearby! Where could it be?", said one learner. "I hope the fairy is not cold without her blanket!", add another one. Little voices erupted around Anna and I, brimming with excitement and ready to seek out magic.

In The learner in the enhanced PYP communication, it is said that "agency is present when students partner with teachers and members of the learning community to take charge of what, where, why, with whom and when they learn" (IB, 2017). Student agency is supported when teachers marry the interests, talents and skills of the children to the inquiry. Samuellson (2008) notes that play, initiated by children, is often separate to learning, initiated by the adults around them. Within the early learning framework of the PYP, there is a strong case to be made for teachers leveraging students' play and making it the foundation of inquiry, enhancing the status of play and celebrating the competency of children.

Immediately, we realized that the provocation we were seeking had come straight from the perspective and imagination of our learners. Immediately we sought books about fairies from the school library. Supporting our line of inquiry, which was to bring stories we read, share and know to life, we became consumers of fairy mythology. Designing clothes and homes, making beds and blankets, we gave life to our theory of fairies in our playground through shared belief. We naturally began to explore our second line of inquiry, imaginative use of everyday materials, as we played and built.

That evening, I painted a small fairy door and hung it on one of the trees. The next day at play, a shriek of excitement told Anna and I that it had been found. We began to sketch fairies, talk about who might live behind the door, and whether we could only see it now because the fairies knew we believed in them. When the fairies sent us a letter with ingredients for a magical potion, we mixed the ingredients and began to wonder if a small fairy school existed behind the door, where making potions and flying lessons were taught. Students talked, played, drew, sculpted and danced their ideas of what magic might exist around us. We effortlessly explored our final line of inquiry, which was different ways to express ideas.

It may be said that often times, we unpack our central ideas through looking at the words on a page or through a conversation without context. Had Anna and I ignored the voices beside us that fateful day in the playground, we could have had a very different inquiry. Our lesson that day was that the possibilities for magic and wonder that exist when we listen, trust and follow the leads of our students is simply phenomenal.
References:
Pramling Samuelsson, I. & Asplund Carlsson, M. 2008. "The Playing Learning Child: Towards a Pedagogy of Early Childhood". Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research. Vol. 52, issue 6.

Primary Years Programme. The Learner in the enhanced PYP. December 2017. http://blogs.ibo.org/sharingpyp/files/2017/12/2017-December-The-Learner.pdf
Niamh Price is from Ireland and has been teaching for ten years. She has been a pre-kindergarten teacher at Suzhou-Singapore International School in Suzhou, China for 6 years. Prior to this, Niamh enjoyed 4 years of teaching and working with children and families in different areas of Dublin, Ireland. Niamh holds a Masters degree in Drama in Education, with a research specialization in play and creativity in the early years classroom. She believes in the importance of establishing relationships with every student who crosses the threshold of her classroom and is committed to finding out not just what each child can do, but who they are. Creating environments that invite beauty, curiosity and collaboration is an essential feature of her practice.

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Listening to learning: Agency in the early years

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This article is based on an example of listening to learning within a pre-kindergarten classroom and how teachers tuning into student voices helped to shape the direction of our inquiry into the transdisciplinary theme of 'How we express ourselves'.

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LE 4.2 Symbolic Exploration And Expression

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LE 4.2 Symbolic Exploration And Expression

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sample planner #2 How we Express Ourselves

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sample planner #2 How we Express Ourselves

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2023-24 Kramer Pre-K How We Express Ourselves

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2023-24 Kramer Pre-K How the World Works

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PYP - Its all about nurturing curious minds, fostering inquiry and building a brighter future. Lets inspire the next generation to think globally and act locally. Thank you Natalie for my 1st amazing IB workshop.

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Reflecting on the #PYPWorkshop experience today.  It was an enlightening workshop conducted Ms Natalie. it was my first International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme. Grateful for the insights gained and ready to apply them in my teaching! Thank you so much for a fun and active workshop.

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This workshop conducted by Natalie Jensen has helped me understand and update my teaching methods and understand the learner needs and modify my teaching accordingly.

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Every Learner has the ability to learn....
Every process to learn is unique.
Creating a great learning space will enable learners to be life long learners.
Thank you Natalie

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Children take play seriously and so do we.                                              Playful experiences during early years lay the foundation of positive social, emotional and cognitive learning. Thank you Ms Natalie for redefining agentic learners for us.

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Children take play seriously and so do we.                                              Playful experiences during early years lay the foundation of positive social, emotional and cognitive learning. Thank you Ms Natalie for redefining agentic learners for us.

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Fatima Shaikh

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Play is the birthright of all children. It sounds and looks very simple but through play in early years learners develop all IB ATL skills and Learner profiles.

Enjoyed the Action plan and through this workshop, I could find my action plan and make a future plan.

Doughnut strategy where we learned and shared one positive and negative experience of our colleagues. It was good to know my colleagues a little more.

Thank you Natalie

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It was an interactive workshop, and we were engaged into many conversations, discussions and hands on activities. Thank you for sharing your ideas and making the Developing framework of PYP in Early Years so interesting.
Thank you Natalie:)

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It was a very interactive workshop where we touched a lot of topics. Play is an essential part of the Early Years Learners where it lays the foundation for their development.  It was good to learn about the different kinds of play.
Also realised how important it is for us to plan a smooth transition for learners when they come from Senior kg to Grade 1.

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The workshop by Natalie Jenson.
I just want to mention was so much fun to jingle and mingle with our group of friends whose stories were inspiring till the end.
The workshop made us knowledgeable as we were ready with pen, pencils and laptops on our table.
In an engaging and an inspiring way she trains filled us with ideas in our brains.
Thank you!

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SIZE DOES'NT MATTER - TEAMWORK DOES
This is the space where we PLAY and LEARN. From building collective resumes to speed dating to churning up a jingle for an Advertisement for a PYP Early Years Educator to waking up to more on ATL's and the IB LP with our youngest learners, creating safe spaces and building relationships, it has been a weekend with the youngest ant colony busy collaborating to build a new anthill that they call Home! Thanks, Natalie !!

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The 3 Cs - Change, Collaboration, Creative Destruction were the Aha moments for me.
Power of declutter and creating safe supportive environments in Early Years are the key to happy homerooms.
Being proactive then reactive has stuck to me and will go a long way.

Thank you Natalie :)

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Our little inquirers are always eager to know and learn more. They continuously observe and explore things around them and what best way to learn other than PLAY.
Through play they become self regulated learners and engage in purposeful inquiry.

Learning spaces also hold an important key to engage our young learners. A safe and inclusive learning space enables students to collaborate, grow and become independent  active learners.

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Overall, early years learning in the PYP is essential for fostering a love for learning, developing key skills, and shaping well-rounded individuals who are curious, empathetic, and equipped in play way method to thrive in an ever-changing world.
Thank you Miss Natalie for an amazing workshop.

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The mind is like a parachute , it does not work if it is not open. (Frank Zappa)
Children learn through play and their environment and build their own identity along the way.
So we as educators should be open-minded and dynamic in giving them these opportunities and this workshop did just that.
Thank you Natalie for this fantastic engaging workshop.
Farzana T

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I loved how the workshop emphasized on the value of creating an inclusive and supportive learning environment. Every child is unique with their own individual interests, strengths, and challenges. By embracing their diversity and tailoring our approach to their needs we empower them to thrive reach their full potential, and become lifelong learners.
Thank You Natalie
Farida Tinwala