Welcome to the Primary Years Programme. We are a school section of approximately 230 students in classes Kindergarten up to Grade 5. Our youngest students enter the Primary Years Programme when they reach five years of age. Our oldest students are eleven years old when they leave Grade 5. We have two Primary Years Programme classes in each grade level.
Homeroom classes of the same grade are adjacent to one another. There is a large sliding door separating each classroom. This door is often open to allow students to benefit from a team teaching approach. Collaboration and team teaching provides opportunity for teachers to move students across and between the two classes. This facilitates teachers to group or pair students within the grade as a whole based on shared learning targets, readiness levels for a particular concept, skill and/or interests.
Homeroom teachers teach mathematics, English literacy, Science, Social Studies and Personal and Social Education. In addition to homeroom teachers, our students benefit from specialist instruction and learning spaces for Art, Library, Music, Physical Education and Japanese. All teachers integrate technology into teaching and learning when appropriate in ways which truly enhance and transform learning. Technology is seen as an important tool, but we also monitor screen time. The emphasis on technology increases as our students get older.
Primary Years Programme students also gain from a range of support staff including teaching assistants, a counselor, learning support teacher, English as an additional language teachers and a speech therapist.
TIS is an International Baccalaureate (IB) World School delivering the IB Primary Years Programme (PYP) in Grades Kindergarten to Grade 5. The PYP curriculum framework begins with the premise that students are agents of their own learning and partners in the learning process. It prioritizes people and their relationships to build a strong learning community.
Lower School students use their initiative to take responsibility and ownership of their learning. By learning through inquiry and reflecting on their own learning, Lower School students develop knowledge, conceptual understandings, skills and dispositions to make a difference to their own lives, their communities, and beyond. The framework emphasizes the central principle of agency: learner empowerment.
"We have choice in what we learn and how we learn it."
Mete Grade 5
Tokyo International School is one of only a handful of international schools outside of the USA recognized by Columbia University Teachers College (New York) as a Reading and Writing Project School.
The Reading and Writing Project is an acclaimed approach to the teaching of reading and writing.
The approach complements the IB Programmes.
Tokyo International School is a non profit school, which is accredited by the Council of International Schools and the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.
We are a fully authorized, International Baccalaureate World School, catering for students from Kindergarten 1 (four years old) to Grade 8 (fourteen years old).
