M.D. Bennie IB Program report

By Nayeem Jonny, Grade 6 Student

After tremendous hard work by students, parents and staff, we’re proud to announce that we are an authorized International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years Programme (PYP) World school!

If you aren’t familiar with IB, what we do as an IB school is display traits of our IB attributes while being engaged inquiry learning through trans-disciplinary themes. We learn through these six themes each and every year, from Kindergarten through to Grade 6: Who We Are, Where We Are in Place and Time, How We Express Ourselves, and How We Organize Ourselves, Sharing the Planet, and How the World Works. The Ontario Curriculum is integrated through these themes to make sure that we learn everything we need to in our province.

In early March, two people from the IB team visited our school to take a look around and check out all the IB related learning we are doing. We showed them around the school while they were recording videos and questioning some students from a few different classes. You can watch some of the videos here at https://www.publicboard.ca/en/mdbennie/ index.aspx

As I mentioned earlier, one of our goals as an IB school is to display our IB attributes. The IB attributes are 10 things we can do to make ourselves better while helping to create a better world. The attributes are inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-takers, balanced and reflective.

Our Parent Council chair stated, “If all that the kids remember is our 10 IB attributes, that is still amazing because those 10 attributes can change a community.”

We have seven key concepts which are integral parts of IB: form, function, causation, change, connection, perspective and responsibility. These are ways of thinking that will be useful for almost all of our lives.

As an IB school, we also try to encourage handson learning. We try and teach through experience. It helps us students develop the skill to make decisions to help us reach our end goal. In my opinion, it’s also more fun than standard learning.

In the last year of the PYP, students have a celebration of learning called exhibition. We start off by choosing a topic we’re passionate about. After that, we research our topic and start creating our presentation. Our teachers make sure that we’re on track by checking up on us frequently. A small thing we do while creating our presentation is we write down the IB skills that we use the most (i.e. what attributes we used the most and key concepts) while creating our presentation.

That’s a bit of what M.D. Bennie has been doing on IB recently, while looking forward to continuing our IB journey and taking action to benefit our community.