Progressive Schools

[ishq]

Thanks for letting me know about Mandarin.  Did not know that about Singapore - thought Mandarin was the official language. 

Malay is the national language. I just wiki-ed

[To sewbge]

I completely agree with you. I've read a book recently, 'What's the Point of School' Claxton that explains exactly what you've said and takes ideas further. There are various private schools in the UK which are beginning to teach children a growth mindset, explaining that mistakes are how we learn and explaining why we learn what we learn. Not blindly following the National Curriculum.

I read somewhere that Stephen Hawking was labelled a 'low ability' child at school as his handwriting was below the standard expected for his age and he didn't tick the boxes which showed he was academically 'able'. He then assembled a working 'computer' from bric and brac!

Is there a rule that international schools must stick to the curriculum of their country of origin?

[scorn]

"Most international schools around here encourage the children to think for themselves, which is why most parents would rather put them there than in the local schools."

This is one of those statements that is often expressed without thinking. Children in international schools don't so much think for themselves as they are encouraged to express their opinion. But often, and especially in younger grades, the subject matter requires a straight answer, not an opinion.

The building blocks of math, science and reading don't have a range of correct answers that a student can select according to his/her inclination. There is right and there is wrong, and the student needs to learn which is which.

In our former IB school they allowed the kids to spell words as they sounded, not as they are supposed to be spelled. The result was atrocious spelling through to the later grades.

As for the local schools, while a good part of the early years curriculum is based on remembering rules and methods, the student's ability to problem solve is key. The math curriculum for example has problem solving as its main objective. Here's a typical question from a P3 (Grade 3) math test:

Alice bought 4 boxes of pies.
There was an equal number of pies in each box.
After Alice ate 3 pies, she had 29 pies left.
How many pies were there in each box at the beginning?

There is no answer to remember. The student needs to think how best to solve the problem using the toolkit of methods supplied by the teacher.

For later grades, once the ground rules of the subjects have been learned, I think there is a strong argument for a more liberal education that incorporates the student's opinions, but personally, I think there is far too much faith in the idea that young kids can 'teach' themselves with gentle prodding from the teacher.

[also at sas]

Problem solving is also part of the K-Gr5 Everyday Math program at SAS. Here's an example from Grade 1:

Sarah looks in the window of the bike shop and sees a collection of tricycles. She counts 18 wheels. How many tricycles are in the window?

The math program is not a bunch of memorized facts (although basic facts certainly need to be learned). Children are constantly being asked questions like: "What strategies did you use to get that answer?" or "How can you prove that your answer is correct?" or "What were you thinking when you got that answer?"

Mandarin: the only children who do well at Mandarin are those who have lived in China and/or have private tutors. Parents are always wishing their kids could have more/better Mandarin programs, but if the kids don't hear it spoken outside the classroom, it's hard for them to use it and learn it. When we lived in Korea & Indonesia, the kids had 2 language lessons per week in school and quickly became conversational or fluent because they had to use the language out in the community every day.

[dumb mum]

Thanks for letting me know about Mandarin.  Did not know that about Singapore - thought Mandarin was the official language. 

Malay is the national language. I just wiki-ed

Well don't believe everything you read on wiki then.  There are 4 official languages of Singapore: English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil.  But the most widely spoken is English (although amongst the local population it is a colloquial version known as Singlish, which incorporates direct translations from Hokkien Chinese, which is probably the most common Chinese language here.)

My kids learnt Mandarin for about 5 years.  Did quite well at pre-school, where there were Mandarin speaking teachers around most of the time, but lost it once they went to UWC and have since transferred onto Spanish.

You can easily live in Singapore for 10 years and never have to speak anything other than standard English, though it does take a while to tune into and understand the local pattois.

[ib school]

ISS runs a pretty well-respected IB program from elementary through to high school. It isn't considered as often as the other schools as it is a lot smaller. this could be a good thing for your kids, depending on how they learn and interact. another aspect that you might like is that it is very international, and students are encouraged to learn about other cultures, but particularly in the elementary school, they tend to make friends with no attention paid to race, which is very nice.