M.D. Bennie launches IB candidacy

Editor’s note: Margaret D. Bennie Public School will be showcasing their IB candidacy as part of a series of guest columns over the coming months. This is the first in the series.

By Nayeem Johny

I’m Nayeem, a Grade 6 student from M.D. Bennie.

M.D. Bennie is a candidate school for the International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years Programme (PYP). If you aren’t familiar with IB, our goal as an PYP candidacy school is to make our learners more creative, open minded, and show traits of our IB attributes in general.

Recently, Grade 6 has been connecting global problems to our own community in Leamington.

Ghina Hamra is a Grade 6 student who took the hunger issue in the Middle East and brought it back to our own community by creating a school food drive to help the hunger problems here in Leamington.

Ghina and her helpers took action to create a school food drive and they collected many cans. All the food donations went to The Bridge Youth Resource Centre in Leamington for distributing.

Another Grade 6 student named Morgan Reiter took this opportunity to set up an awareness campaign against littering. This action will be active during early spring, which is when we can see all the trash that was covered with snow during the winter.

Other Grade 6 students created posters, puzzles and booklets to send important messages to our younger learners in fun and engaging ways. We’ve also taught them simple and easy ways that they can take action and make a difference themselves.

A big IB topic we’ve been talking about is taking action. Taking action is the way we use all of these things we learn. Taking action is the way we demonstrate our understanding of a topic.

For example, I could learn a lot about how flight works, but it would mean more to me if I took action by creating and testing my own plane.

Our kindergarteners have also taken action by adding their art creations all around our library. Our Library Discovery Centre has been upgraded by their incredible creations.

That’s what is happening in IB at MDB.