At Siriaunda School, we are committed to nurturing confident, creative, and caring learners who are equipped with the skills to thrive in an ever-changing world. Guided by international best practices and grounded in the Singapore Nurturing Early Learners Framework, our curriculum is designed to support each child’s holistic development across key learning domains.
We believe that every child is a unique individual with limitless potential. Our curriculum is designed to celebrate and nurture this uniqueness, creating a safe and engaging environment where children can grow and discover the world around them. We cultivate a passion for lifelong learning by empowering our students with the skills they need to thrive both academically and socially, to encourage them to take ownership of their learning through exploration, inquiry, creativity, and meaningful relationships.
We acknowledge that every child learns at their own pace and in their own way. Our child-led approach values diverse pathways to understanding and celebrates each child’s unique ideas. We emphasize the learning process over the final outcome and tailor our teaching to meet individual needs. Additionally, we collaborate with parents, recognizing their essential role as their child’s first teachers and building on the foundations established at home.
Our English programme aims to develop children’s literacy skills and competence in the language. The phonics component teaches children the basic skills in reading and spelling decodable words, as well as recognising sight words. The programme combines stories, rhymes, literacy activities, reading, spelling and creative writing. Together with our in-house materials, we use up to 15 English readers per year at K2 and K3.
We aim to support our children in developing their English language skills by encouraging them to recognize and use words they hear from conversations and reading. Our focus includes practicing conversation rules, such as taking turns, listening, and asking questions. We promote engaging discussions with peers and adults on various topics, helping them ask questions to gather information or clarify understanding.
During Creative and Critical Thinking lessons, children have the opportunity to express their thoughts and ideas. It is a time where children are encouraged to ask questions and to come up with logical answers themselves. The emphasis is on the observation of the environment using all the senses. Components of the MATAL Early Childhood Programme from Israel form the basis in developing these critical thinking skills.
Our TOI programme aims to engage students in active exploration, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It encourages students to ask questions, investigate topics, and seek answers through research and hands-on experiences. The main objectives of the programme include:
Connecting Learning to Real Life: The programme encourages students to apply what they learn to real-world contexts, making their education more relevant and meaningful.
The Story-Based Approach is an educational method that seamlessly integrates storytelling into the learning process. This approach harnesses the power of narrative to engage learners, making concepts more relatable and memorable. It offers children the opportunity to develop problem-solving skills, critical thinking skills, creativity, emotional intelligence, and more lifelong skills that will aid them in the future. It also fosters high motivation, active participation and cooperation among children.
This curriculum focuses on the “how” of learning and was created by a world-class team of developmental psychologists and educators. Vygotsky believed that true education is not merely the acquisition of specific knowledge and skills, but the development of children’s learning abilities—their capacity to think clearly and creatively, plan and implement those plans, and communicate their understanding in a variety of ways. Through this cognitive programme, children develop exceptional mental tools, abilities, and mindsets, which are essential for successful learning of all kinds. The modules used in the K1 – K3 levels are:
Construction: The Construction programme develops children’s ability to plan; to articulate what they have planned; to analyse the structure of objects (e.g. buildings, bridges, fences etc); and to analyse the relationships between their different parts. To do this they learn to use an important mental tool – a scheme (which is a drawn plan or a structure) which acts as a visual model of a structure that the children will build for themselves using a set of modular building blocks. Through the use of a range of schemes in a variety of tasks, children learn to look at objects from different perspectives and to think carefully about what they need to do to build a given structure before they start building.
Creative Modeling: Creative Modelling develops creativity and allows children to work together to realise different ideas and to create artistic compositions by exploring materials, colours and textures. Through Creative Modelling we are able to help children learn how to create representations of aspects of the real world; and in this process we help them to develop mental models of, and emotional responses to, the realities they learn to represent.
Expressive Movement: This programme offers young children the opportunity to develop emotional intelligence, and non-verbal communication skills with the help of movement, gestures and expression. It fosters creativity, asking children to use their bodies to produce their own imaginative representations of emotional states, animals, people, and scenarios.
Sensory Mathematics: Sensory Mathematics helps children to recognise and apply fundamental sensory standards of colour, shape and size. It enables them to begin to analyse objects and their relationships using culturally defined sensory norms. The natural world is almost overwhelmingly rich in its diversity of colours, shapes and forms. Our senses give us the ability to perceive this diversity, but it is culture that teaches us to understand our perceptions, for example, how to look and what to look at. Human cultures organise experience, systematising and classifying it in ways that allow us to make sense of the world and to operate confidently within it. Sensory abilities, shaped by our cultures, are the foundation upon which mental development builds.
Story Grammar: The Story Grammar programme follows a specific set of procedures (Visual-Spatial Modelling) for helping young children develop a love of story, ownership of story language and a profound understanding of story structure. This lays the foundation for children to start writing narratives.
Mathematics:This programme introduces the concepts and language of mathematics and develops fundamental understanding of mathematical relationships. Children discover the concept of number; they learn to think about the relationship between what is being measured and the unit of measurement required for measuring it. The main task is to help children internalise concepts of relative quantity and relative size (length, weight, volume). We aim to develop the ability to make generalisations and to see connections through the use of visual mediators.
You-Me-World:This programme offers young children the opportunity to learn about themselves as physical, emotional and social beings. They learn about the natural and material world, about living things and inanimate objects, and about relationships between people. They are encouraged to explore, to empathise and help others learn.
Various learning centres, including art, construction, Dramatic Play, English, Thai, Mathematics and library, are set up in the classrooms to provide opportunities for independent learning. Learning centres offer a variety of activities and materials that cater to the multiple intelligences of children, and children can choose to go to the learning centres that interest them.