No naming and shaming schools, but my 8 year old has been in an IB PYP school this year (our first year in Dubai) and I'm not really impressed. I'm all for holistic, integrated education, I'm not expecting rote memorization, I value depth over breadth of coverage, but I really feel they've learned very little at all, and that their only "projects" have been teacher-assigned, copy-from-books-onto-posters types of activities with very little authentic research or student-driven learning and no themes into which basic skills are integrated. I've really had enough of hearing about the "types" of learners" if there's nothing to learn about at all!
In comparison, my daughter in 2nd grade has been in a UK National Curriculum school using the International Primary Curriculum (IPC) and I've been really happy with the theme-based work they've done. For example, in one unit they studied the sinking of the Titanic and did little science activities about how boats float and wrote newspaper-style articles about it and used the number of passengers for Math etc etc...
If any of you have kids in PYP years 2 or 3, can you give me an idea of what your kids have done this year so I can compare -- have they done any themes, any hands-on work (besides making posters!!), a full syllabus would be great :DD
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