At YCIS Chongqing, our Primary classrooms are places of energy and life where learning is celebrated and a great amount of opportunities are made available to the students for their learning.

From this academic year, we started to implement the Learning Community model in our Year 2 Programme and we aim to stretch all learners to achieve their potential, to enable them to influence the approaches to learning that work best for them, and to build connections between fields of knowledge and across cultures.

This week Year 2 began their new Literacy topic; ‘Poetry’. To introduce the theme parents, teachers and students from other classes in school were invited to come to Year 2 and perform a poem of their choice. We were lucky enough to hear poems in a variety of languages including Chinese, English, Korean, Russian, Hungarian, Scots, Spanish and Singapore-English.

All of the children really enjoyed this introduction to Poetry and have been enthusiastically talking about the poems they heard and the performances they saw. We hope to use this excitement to engage the children as we learn more about different styles of poetry and their features, as well as giving the children the opportunity to become familiar with the work of a variety of poets.

The Learning Community model has been developed to support, foster and develop “soft skills” in students. We look forward to developing this approach towards teaching and learning, as well as celebrating where this Poetry topic will take our Y2 students!