Supporting Your Child’s PYP Journey at Home: A Guide for Parents

The Primary Years Programme (PYP) is about much more than what happens inside the classroom.

At Nexus International School Singapore, we want our learners to become curious, knowledgeable and confident thinkers who can ask questions, explore different perspectives, solve problems and take action. The PYP gives them the framework to develop these skills, but their learning journey does not stop when they leave school.

As parents, you play an important role in helping your child make connections between what they are learning at school and the world around them.

You don’t need to be an expert in the PYP. You don’t need to know exactly what every unit of inquiry involves. In fact, some of the most powerful things you can do are very simple: ask good questions, share your own thinking, listen to your child’s ideas and show genuine interest in how they see the world.

Hear from Paul Rimmer, Deputy Head of Primary and PYP Coordinator at Nexus International School Singapore, as he shares how parents can support their child’s learning journey beyond the classroom.

Top Tips for Supporting Your Child at Home

1. Ask better questions

If you ask your child, “What did you do at school today?”, they’re probably going to say, “I didn’t do anything and it was good.”

Your questioning needs to be more refined.

Try asking:

“Talk to me about some problems that you solved in maths today. What did that look like? How did you solve it?”

“Did you hit any barriers today at school?”

“What did you find out today?”

“What was most exciting about today?”

“What was something that challenged you?”

We talk about roadblocks, barriers and moments of failure at school. We celebrate moments of failure.

“I tried this and it just didn’t go right.”

Then you can ask, “Why didn’t it go right? What could you have done differently?”

The children are learning to frame questions to get the right answer. As parents, if we can frame the question to get the answer we’re looking for, then it helps with that.

2. Share your own thinking

One of the key things I did as a parent was share what I was doing and my thinking with my children when we were having conversations around problem-solving.

I would share experiences of solving problems in the workplace and encourage them to draw parallels with problems they were tackling at school, whether in maths, language, science or social studies.

So, have those conversations around the dinner table. You can even talk about your own challenges.

You might come home from work and say:

“You know what, this happened today. I thought I was really open-minded about it, but when I tried to solve this problem, maybe I could have approached it in a different way.”

Have those open conversations about being on that journey yourself. You have those attributes and characteristics too.

At Nexus, we want the PYP language to be more than just a tick-box. We want it to become a habit and part of our culture within our community.

If parents also use that language about themselves and their own experiences, it helps their children too. You’re modelling it for them.

Your children might just think, “Oh yeah, I was a risk-taker today because…”

That’s the justification. That’s the reasoning behind what we’ve done.

3. Encourage your child to explain their thinking

One of the things we want our learners to be able to do is explain and justify their thinking.

I remember a conversation between my eldest son, Charlie, and one of his cousins. They were talking about something that was happening around the world and Charlie asked his cousin:

“But why do you think that? What’s the reason for you thinking or believing that and then sharing it?”

His cousin replied:

“Well, it’s what my teacher told me in the class.”

Charlie was horrified.

“But it’s not what you think. It’s what your teacher thinks. What do you think?”

That conversation really stuck with me because agency and voice, and the ability to challenge and justify, are key to what we do and the way we think.

We want children to be able to have a perspective, explain that perspective and understand that somebody else might have a completely different perspective.

So when your child tells you something, ask:

“Why do you think that?”

“Could somebody see it differently?”

It doesn’t mean that they have to change their mind. It’s about being able to explain their thinking and listen to somebody else’s.

4. Make connections to everyday life

We don’t want to just teach in a box.

Children get all of this information at school and then they go out and it’s like it’s gone. We want them to transfer what they’re doing, understanding and thinking about in school and take it out into their lives and use it, do something with it.

That’s why the conversations you have at home are so important.

If they’re learning about migration, talk about your own family’s experiences of moving between countries. If they’re learning about sustainability, talk about the choices your family makes. If they’re learning about maths, find opportunities to use maths in everyday life.

It’s about making connections and showing children that what they are learning has a purpose beyond the classroom.

5. Give your child opportunities to inquire and take action

Inquiry is a process of curiosity, questions and gathering knowledge or understanding.

When we inquire into something, we need to be interested in it because if we’re not interested in it, we’re not going to inquire into it fully. Learners need to feel curious about it. 

You can support that at home simply by being curious together.

If you don’t know the answer, say:

“I don’t know. How could we find out?”

You don’t need to have all the answers. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is model the process of finding out.

And then, once children have that knowledge and understanding, ask: What are you actually going to do with that?

Action is key to the IB.

You can learn this. You can know this. You can do this. But what are you actually going to do with it?

We want children to take their new knowledge and new understanding and reflect on their lifestyle choices. Maybe they change something they do in their life. Maybe they have an impact on their family. Maybe they find out something that is impacting our community and try to change something.

That’s the action component. It’s that ability to advocate. It’s that ability to make choices around using your knowledge and your understanding to make change.

6. Remember, you don’t have to be the teacher

As parents, you don’t need to recreate the classroom at home. You don’t need to know everything about the PYP.

What you need to do is help your child make connections, make it engaging and show that you are invested and interested in what they’re sharing.

Talk about the books you’re reading. Talk about something you’ve seen. Talk about something that happened at work. Show your children that you’re interested in learning too.

The key is to keep the conversation going.

Ask questions. Share your own experiences. Talk about problems. Talk about barriers. Talk about the things that didn’t work. Ask about the “aha” moments.

And, most importantly, let your child know that you are interested in how they think.

Because the PYP is not just about what children know. It’s about what they do with what they know.

We’re all on the journey

At the heart of the IB framework is the idea that learning is a journey. It supports inquiry, collaboration and the understanding that we are all learning at different stages.

There will be times when your child needs guidance and support, and times when they are able to support somebody else. That’s all part of the journey.

What matters is that we’re helping the children at Nexus develop the skills to keep learning: to ask questions, explore information, reflect on their perspectives, collaborate with others and take action.

Because these skills don’t stop being useful when children leave primary school. They are skills for life.

Find out more about the Primary Years Programme at Nexus or Book a Tour to see learning in action.