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The IB Primary Years Program is a curriculum framework that aims to achieve a balance between the search for meaning and understanding and the acquisition of essential skills and knowledge.  In addition to the academic program PYP offers encourages nonacademic learning that supports the development of the whole child including social, physical, emotional and cultural awareness by teaching the PYP attitudes and student profile attributes. 

The PYP uses six themes at each grade level that transcend the traditional subject disciplines to create “big ideas” that are universally relevant and therefore could be studied in any school around the globe.  The content for the themes includes the Virginia Standards of Learning and the Williamsburg-James City County curriculum that we are required to teach and extends it to include a more global perspective for learning about other people and cultures.  This curriculum content fits naturally into the units of inquiry, although the instructional approach changes dramatically.  The instructional approach for these units is inquiry-based which extends the students prior knowledge and provokes further inquiry on the part of the student.  For example, teachers in Fourth Grade are required to teach Virginia history and the events that have impacted our history as a state.  A PYP unit would use the SOL for Virginia history to share a wider context such as how the state’s history parallels a pattern repeated by migration of people around the world. (Singh, 2002).

Six Organizing Themes

The six units of inquiry are developed around six organizing themes that provide the K-5 scope and sequence of the international program and are organized to reflect global concepts.

Who We Are:  An exploration of the nature of the self; or our beliefs an values; of personal, physical, mental, social and spiritual health; of our families, friends, communities and cultures; of our rights and responsibilities; of what it means to be human.      

Where We Are in Place and Time:  An exploration of our orientation in place and time; of our personal histories; of history and geography from local and global perspectives; of our homes and journeys; of the discoveries, exploration and migrations of humankind; of the contributions of individuals and civilizations.

How We Express Ourselves:  An exploration of the ways in which we discover and express our nature, ideas, feelings, beliefs and values through language and the arts.

How The World Works:  An exploration of the physical and material work; of natural and man-made phenomena; of the world of science and technology.

How We Organize Ourselves:  An exploration of human systems and communities; of the world of work, its nature and its value; of employment and unemployment and their impact on us and the world around us.

Sharing the Planet:  An exploration of our rights and responsibilities as we strive to share finite resources with other people and with other living things; of communities and of the relationships within and between them.

Adopted from International Baccalaureate Organization (September 2000).  “Making the PYP Happen”.