English Acquisition

We believe it is essential that our children, who will live the next generation, have practical English skills. It broadens options for their future dramatically. Exposure to English is not just about learning the language, but opens the door to deeper understanding of different values and cultures outside Japan.
Nurturing “International Mindedness” is one of the important goals of our school as it is also mentioned in the IB mission, and we believe the English Education Curriculum at Sunnyside must be organic.
The curiosity and ownership of students is highly important, activity ideas must be broad, fun. We don’t expect our students to be fluent at the stage of early years. It is more important we nurture foundation through “play”.

Highly trained professional teachers

Our native English teachers are all qualified as school teachers, have enough amount of various experience in teaching English. Teachers are assigned by every grade, students get enough interactions throughout the day.
Our teachers take training to improve their skills on the regular basis hoping to offer fun English lessons for students.

THRASS Approach

In order to have a balanced curriculum, we integrate THRASS method in our English curriculum. THRASS（Teaching of Handwriting,Reading,Spelling Skills）is the well known learning method in the countries such as Australia, New Zealand, UK, South Africa.

Relevance between English education and Unit of Inquiry

English should not be just vocabrary, we introduce English to students based on their daily life context as much as possible so that they can understand that English is some words, phrases to be memorised but it is connected with meanings. English specialist teachers and home room teachers collaborate in curriculum planning so that English words and phrases can be integrated in the content of student’s Unit of Inquiry.

Various ways of learning

Our English curriculum offers various ways of learning. Collective activities are only partial, we respect that students like to choose their own style. Some children like to do activities with the teacher in a small group, others like to use ICT(PC, iPads), reading books, coloring, play with blocks, puzzels, etc. We believe that any learning is not productive if it is not fun for the children.