Teaching & Learning in BSS Kindergarden
Centred Learning
Another approach that is widely used in Infant school is Centred Learning. At its essence, it is enabling the learning environment to conveniently accommodate several activities at once.
In this his way our students can have multiple activities, supporting and challenging the student with different abilities and interests while even covering material from different subjects. In this environment, our students find it much easier to make the cross-curricular link, define concepts and generalise.
Jolly Phonics
Jolly Phonics teaches children to read and write using synthetic phonics, which is widely recognised as the most effective way to teach children to read and write in English. The students` immense progress has been studied in numerous research projects, the results of which led to phonics becoming central to the UK curriculum.
This comprehensive programme, based on the proven, fun and multi-sensory synthetic phonics method that gets children reading and writing from an early age. This means that we teach letter sounds as opposed to the alphabet. These 42 letter sounds are phonic building blocks that children, with the right tools, use to decode the English language. When reading a word, they recognise the letters and blend together the respective sounds; when writing a word they identify the sounds and write down the corresponding letters. These skills are called blending and segmenting.
TBL (Thinking Based Learning) in KG
We at BSS, as a Thinking School, believe that what stays forever in demand is the skill to think critically and creatively. To be able to judge the reliability of the information, to choose wisely and to predict accurately are just a few of the thinking skills that our students master under the guidance of trained teachers, coaches, and trainers.
We start working on these skills from the age of 3 when the students are supported in developing “thinking maps” or steps they follow when they are challenged with a new situation.
The youngest ones use a lot of pictures and simplified thinking maps to develop the basic skills.
This way they learn how to:
- Find the parts of the whole
- Predict
- Compare and contrast
- Classification of objects
Later on they will start developing the more complicated critical and creative skills.
Visual Tools for Thinking
British School of Sofia is a home for the mind where classroom conditions support thinking development and help students become skilled, independent and reflective learners. Our absolute belief is that all learners have innate abilities to think in a variety of ways.
The Thinking Maps is a visual language, or tool-kit, of eight thinking process maps, developed by Dr. David Hyerle. They focus on the development of the eight fundamental cognitive processes and are introduced to students as tools for reading and writing, content-specific learning, and interdisciplinary investigations. Over time, students learn to use multiple maps together and become more fluent in choosing which thinking processes with their enabling Maps fit the immediate context of learning.
CBL (Concept Based Learning) in KG
Knowing everything is impossible, content changes but concepts stay the same. In order to prepare our students to be successful in their future endeavours, BSS turned to Lynn Ericksonand introduced Concept-Based Learning.
At the BSS Kindergarten, the students enjoy one cross-curricular topic that transcends subjects, time and space. The students achieve their goals though exploring concepts like “exploration” and “pirates” in order to develop the planned skills for the term.
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