Students at St. Anthony IB World School participate in IB PYP Exhibition

Grade 6 students at the St. Anthony IB World School in Montreal’s West Island have been hard at work researching real-world issues ranging from forest fires, oil spills, child labour, homelessness, and much more.

They’re now ready to not only share what they’ve learned but also the actions they’ve taken to make a difference, and it’s all happening here at their fourth annual PYP Exhibition.

“For the last seven months, we’ve been working on this. It’s about homelessness, we’ve been trying really hard to make this board and we have all our key concepts on there right now,” said Adem Toktas, a student at St. Anthony IB World School.

Another student, Jasmine Arsenault, says, “For our exhibition we chose pet endangerment. We chose the topic because it’s a very important topic and many people don’t understand the importance of pet endangerment.”

While many popular topics came up again this year, such as ocean pollution and various ones surrounding animals, some new topics were addressed for this year’s edition.    

“We found this year, we had a group on sexism and a group on LGBTQ+. And so some people in the class felt uncomfortable with those topics because they weren’t passionate, but the ones who chose it really were. So it was kind of interesting to see how some people really know what they wanna learn about and what they wanna do and the actions they wanna take in their own lives,” explained Adriana Di Valerio, the IB coordinator at St. Anthony IB World School.

Leading up to the exhibition, students had to write informative essays and do a deep dive on their topic, where they ultimately got to share what they learned, whether it be through a fundraiser, group presentations, or physical education games.

“We usually try to lead them to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and so something they feel passionate about, and then they do kind of an inquiry cycle about the topic and really dive into areas of interest to them. At the end of it, they do an action to share what they know and to take action because here we really believe in student agency that’s part of our IB philosophy,” Di Valerio explained.

Matthew Sztenberg, a student at St. Anthony IB World School, said, “The action that we decided to do is we decided to do green shirt day to represent youth homelessness and to help all the homeless people that need it and donate to Dans La Rue.”

Mia Vanloo Funes, another student at St. Anthony IB World School, added, “For our action, we hosted a fundraiser along with a theme day on April 11th to donate to the SPCA because April 11th is National Pet Day […] We raised $416.95.”

For this year’s exhibition, there were 14 teams made up of three students, and they each worked on their own topic that they presented in front of the entire school during the day and then in front of parents and members of the community after school.

“We know that these skills and these attributes are what’s gonna help them as they kind of continue on after elementary school into high school and then into adulthood,” said Di Valerio.