Great International School

Early Childhood Education uses in addition to the Brazilian curriculum, according to the BNCC, the international curriculum IEYC - Fieldwork Education.

Great International School has carefully planned its Early Childhood Education with routines and organized spaces to provide the most diverse meaningful learning experiences, taking into account multiple intelligences and languages.

The child is encouraged to think about reality, to create hypotheses about the world and, thus, based on inquiries and natural curiosity, build reasoning and solutions to the problems encountered.

At Great International School students develop skills and competencies through two languages in a variety of environments and contexts, with different experiences inside and outside the classroom. They build resources to interact with each other and move around the world.

“Being bilingual is being the process, a process in change, it is not having two languages but living in two languages, in two worlds, navigating in other spaces; it is widening views, having other perspectives of the world, it is freer participation, dynamic knowledge; it is to live in love, accepting others as they are, it is being open to communicate, as well as the act of giving and receiving; communicating as a way of life; it is a new worldview where there are no fixed models in which institutions and values start to be referenced and therefore reconsidered in order to be more possible; it is to live in more than one existence”- (Antonio da Cunha Duarte Justo, 2008).

At Great International School, we believe that we must develop literacy in a literate environment. We believe that literacy is developed in context. The literacy process consists of mastering the alphabetic writing system in the context of social practices of the written language as learners participate in the written culture.

In a bilingual context, there are not two literacy processes. A child who is literate in a certain language (L1) will not have to learn to read and write again. If, upon becoming literate, the child has already mastered speaking and listening in L2, the skills he or she acquires in L1 will be transferred to the other language. Students have one linguistic repertoire which encompasses all the languages they know. It is important to know the linguistic repertoire of students in order to be able to analyze the hypotheses the students are creating in both languages and make the necessary interventions so that knowledge is transferred and systematized.

The school routine is very important for this age group as a way of organizing activities. It is structured based on objectives which are aligned with the school curriculum, with activities that are planned and distributed throughout the day and which takes into account cognitive, affective, motor, socio-emotional and linguistic development of children. In this organization, children’s interest in play, creativity and socialization are also taken into account.