Concepts are understandings that cross time, place and culture. Imagine that you had a series of telescopes or lenses that when you looked through them you would see the world in a very particular way. This is what concepts help learners do, see that regardless of disciplines or subjects all things are connected and can be viewed in particular ways through conceptual understandings.

The IB PYP has identified seven key concepts to focus all learning in the primary years. However conceptual inquiry is not unique or limited to teaching within the IB. For more ideas feel free to contact us and we can help you develop concept driven inquiry for you and your learners.

FORM: What is it like?
If you are looking through the form ‘telescope’ you will be able to uncover an idea that stretches across time place and culture suggesting that everything has attributes and features that enable it to be observed, classified and described)

For example the telescope or FORM lens would have you discovering

Key attributes or features (e.g. shape, colour, size, texture, movement) of a place, object or event

Ways of using specific details to group or organise information

Use the lens of FORM to look at these photos…

If you were an artist what might you notice about the form of these shells?

Image © 2019 Beconwiz

If you were a mathematician what might you notice about the form of these shells?

Image © 2019 Beconwiz

If you were a scientist what might you notice about the form of these shells?

Image © 2019 Beconwiz

My Island

By Stephanie Demasse-Pottier and Seng Soun Ratanavanh

Princeton Archiectural Press. 2019

Cresent Moon and Pointed Minatrets A Muslim book about shapes

By Hena Khan

Illustrated by Mehrdokht Amini

Chronicle Books 2018

Joseph Had a Little Overcoat

By Simms Taback

Viking

What Ship is Not a Ship?

By Harriet Ziefert

Illustrated by Josée Masse

Blue Apple

*BCW will now use‘They,their — themself’ as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun in all subsequent material generated on our website.

All Rights Reserved © 2018 Beconwiz All ideas and illustrations are the property of BeConWiz.

BeConWiz Ideas and Thoughts by Carla Holmes, Mary-Denese Holmes, Pearl Holmesis licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Based on a work at https://beconwiz.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://beconwiz.com.