I have a son at a private school in Sydney which is an authorized PYP school. I have posted this same post in the primary education forum, but as PYP seems to mostly be at private schools, I am posting it here too.
I have grave concerns about the effect the PYP has had on the maths /english and spelling programs. It is a no textbook ideology. At his school this has meant that there are no longer any textbooks for the children in these 3 subjects. THere are also no longer any workbooks or students books such as "targeting maths". Instead, the children are given empty scrapbooks for all their subjects. Then, everyday, they either write directly into these books, or paste pages that have been photocopied from workbooks or printed from the net. In effect, this has resulted in very little written theory being available to the children. At best, there may be one sentence of theory on the pasted pages. THere is of course, no indexing system, as its not a printed student book or text book. So, this makes it hard for the children to back reference a definition or method. THey have to flick through pages to find it. What if a child is absent, he misses out on the lesson. Maybe he will be given the missing pages to paste in, maybe not.What about the theory that was written into the book by the children. How can he get that??? what about all the theory that is never copied from the whiteboard to the page, the missing theory that never makes it to the scrap book.

What is your opinion of all this? I would really like to hear from parents at other PYP schools.