Grades 1 - 6
Overview
The Preparatory School in both the Foundation (Grades 1 to 3) and the Intermediate (Grades 4 to 6) embraces the best practises of Outcomes Based Education (OBE), which we believe best serves the needs of our pupils as they face a changing world.
We place great emphasis on the acquisition of skills and an awareness of attitudes and values in all our teaching. This is reflected in the variety of teaching strategies that are used. Our aim is to equip our learners to solve problems creatively and communicate the solutions effectively.
Learners are encouraged to develop interpersonal skills and to collect, analyse, evaluate and use information efficiently.
Moreover, small classes allow for meaningful interaction between teachers and learners, to ensure that they achieve to the best of their ability.
The National Curriculum serves as a guideline, but our academic programme strives to challenge our pupils in all learning areas, such as languages, Mathematics and Natural Science. Although each learning area has its own importance and worth, we believe that cross-curricular themes integrate the curriculum and make it more relevant.
This is particularly evident in our Information Technology lessons, where the school policy is to use the computer as an aid to teaching and learning in all areas of the curriculum.
Pupils are trained in basic MS Office skills that enable them to conduct internet research and produce documents, slide shows and spreadsheets. Using MS Suite, the pupils learn research, processing and presentation skills. Each of the classrooms can support 10 network points, and will be supplied with terminals in the near future. A second, smaller computer room for the Foundation Phase assists the teaching of numeracy and literacy.
Assessment is an integral part of OBE. Pupils are assessed in many different ways (designed to fully recognise and credit different learning styles and abilities) throughout the year.
We believe that through a system of continuous evaluation, our pupils will develop an understanding that they must work to the best of their ability at everything that they do, and not only to achieve good results in tests.
Our reporting system gives full feedback on the various outcomes that have been achieved by learners, as well as the results of summative assessments. Portfolios are displayed at the end of the third term. We regard personal and social development as extremely important, and individual comments on all aspects of the pupils are included in the report. In addition, parents are invited to meet the teachers individually each term.
