001Hello, families, and welcome to Madison Simis. My name is Laura Webb and I'm the principal of Simis. We are an elementary school serving pre-K through fourth grade in beautiful north central Phoenix. While our campus was rebuilt in 2016, we have a 65 year old tradition of academic excellence and community service. We pride ourselves in being a community that works together to provide students with the best educational opportunities possible. Madison Simis is also proud to be an IB or an International Baccalaureate Programme, part of the Primary Years Programme, where we focus on developing the academics, the social and the emotional well-being of all of our students. Students practice the IB learner profile traits which are prominently displayed all around campus and they encourage independent thinking and taking responsibility for our learning. All of us encourage eachother
002to ask questions and research answers as part of an IB program. And finally, we ask students to focus on taking action from their learning, whether that's just explaining to another person what they've learned, or it's doing something to create some change in our community or the world around us. Simis is so proud of our staff and students and our families, and we're excited to give you just a small glimpse into our school. Welcome! Hi, I'm Melissa Powers and I'm the IB Coordinator here at Madison Simis and at Simis, every student is an IB student. We offer the PYP, Primary Years Programme, for every student grades kindergarten through fourth grade. PYP is an inquiry-based, student-centered approach to learning where we encourage our students to be critical thinkers, to wonder, ask questions, then research to find their
003answers. We also want our students to take agency by taking action from their learning. We also encourage our students to be globally minded thinkers as they study the world around them. So we hope to see your student here at Madison Simis. Hi, I'm Jamie Monroe. I teach kindergarten at Madison Simis. I have so many reasons why I love teaching kindergarten at Simis. We are a school that focuses on the whole child with our IB learner profiles. Kids learn how to be open minded and how to be inquirers and ask questions, how to be accepting of others and everyone's differences and what makes us all unique and how we can learn to respect one another. In addition to that, we have a lot of observation based learning, inquiry based learning. A lot of hands on they're
004able to explore through different experiences that we provide and reach their own conclusions and dive deeper into their learning process. So we really do grow critical thinkers and we really strive for that extra rigor and that higher level thinking. So we always want to challenge those kiddos to not just stop there, but what comes next. So we're asking a lot of questions and we're really excelling their thinking in many different ways.