Primary school
Teaching method - Philosophy – Bilingualism - EYFS
Primary school is the moment when your child truly enters the world of school. At the Petite Ecole Bilingue, your child will acquire all the basics: reading, writing and arithmetic.
Reading is taught using the syllabic method, which allows children to assimilate the foundations of reading and spelling quickly and surely. Pupils write compositions to get into the habit of writing, so they consider it a natural gesture. We also encourage our pupils to develop a taste for first-hand accounts. Reading is enhanced by a wide selection of beautiful texts read aloud by their teachers or our librarian. This gives the children a considerable advantage in their intellectual and cultural training. An historian comes once a week to round out this training by recounting and discussing past events with the children.
With regard to mathematics, we see to it that the four arithmetic operations have been thoroughly grasped. We use drills to help the children exercise their memories by learning the multiplication tables by heart. We consider this memorisation process indispensable, for it fixes notions that the children will need later on.
Living languages are a focal point of our attention; at this age children learn foreign languages with great facility. Our goal is to ensure that the pupils are at ease in the use of French and English or Russian, depending on which option they have chosen. Our school is truly bilingual: the morning classes (French, mathematics and history) take place in French and the afternoon classes (foreign language and literature, science, computer science, art, music, singing) are taught in the selected foreign languages (English or Russian). All the teachers and classroom contributors are native speakers.
Russian is an excellent linguistic complement. It demands sustained effort, which is rewarded by opening the children’s minds to a different culture both rich and original.
Monitoring each pupil individually, which is facilitated by small class size, is one of our main concerns.
In keeping with the British tradition, we emphasise cultural, theatrical, musical, artistic and athletic activities, which play a very important role in our teaching programme.
Our qualified teachers put their expertise in the service of tried and true methods that have proved effective in the past, to enable your child to acquire traditional yet varied knowledge. Our teaching method gives children a solid intellectual background, acquired through rigour, order and effort. Protected from illiteracy, at the end of their primary school studies, they will be ready to succeed in a good high school. Indeed, our vocation is precisely to encourage pupils to work in school starting at a young age, and to see that they acquire a body of knowledge that will ensure their future success.
Thanks to small classes, our teaching method, and individual monitoring, your child will develop above-average academic skills.