As Part of our Care programme, we are committed to giving information to parents about our school programme and to educating the nannies of our Early Childhood children. This term we have had 3 special workshops for parents and nannies to help them develop their understanding of our programme and systems we use at school in order to work cooperatively to educate our children.

The first workshop for Parents was the “PYP Workshop For Parents”. The aim of this workshop was for parents to develop a better understanding of what the Primary Years Programme is, the reasons behind why our school uses this programme and also for parents to see how their children learn at school.

About 60 parents attended this workshop and they all showed enthusiasm to participate and ask questions. They learnt that the IB PYP is a very unique programme as the aim of this programme is to develop international mindedness in our students and to inspire them to be long life learners.

This programme does not ask the children to memorize facts and learn for tests. This programme teaches the children to find and develop their knowledge, skills and understanding of concepts and at the same time develop their attitudes and the attributes of the Learner Profile. We don’t know what the future will be like for our children, as technology develops so fast, but we can prepare them to face their future. That’s why we chose the IB PYP for our school.

The second workshop was called “Teaching Reading to Young Children”. This workshop was intended for Pre Primary parents as their children are at the stage of developing their communication and reading skills. The aim of this workshop was for the parents to understand about when we start teaching our children to read and why our children use the phonics system to learn reading.

The parents participated actively in this workshop. They pretended to be children who are learning to read and they found out that learning reading and writing are not stressful. They saw that while their children are learning to read they are also learning to be independent, confident and responsible.

The children at Tunas Muda are always happy and enthusiastic to learn because they do it in a fun way and at their own pace and readiness. They don’t start reading and writing at a very early age but they start it at the right time, which may be a different time for different children. We value the fact that children are unique and each child develops best when treated as an individual.

The third workshop was addressed to the Nannies. We consider Nannies to play a most important role in the children’s life, because they also spend a lot of time with them while their parents are away. At this workshop the Nannies learnt “How to Communicate with Children Effectively”. It is not easy to communicate with young children as their language skills are not developed well yet. Often we misunderstand or misinterpret their language and which can cause frustration and tantrums in young children.

The nannies learnt about the stages of language development in the early years, the way children communicate with adults and what children need during communication. The nannies practiced communicating with children effectively in role play. The workshop was very short but the nannies learned a lot and we hope that they can put it into practice when they communicate with the children in their care.

Thank you to all parents and nannies who joined or workshops this semester! We hope that you all learned something useful which will benefit our children.
::Ratna Ekawati