Elementary School
The English language has become without doubt the principal tool for international communication in practically every professional, economic, scientific and cultural environment.
Buddies Elementary School represents the only educational opportunity available today in Torino that is specifically structured to offer a curriculum that is completely compatible with the italian ministries educational program and at the same time able to guarantee that students, through the use of the English language as the main communication tool, will reach a level of mastery of the English language adequate enough to meet the challenges of globalization.
A mastery of the English language is already and will increasingly become in the coming years, a basic competence and an essential element for growth and progress in a world increasingly interconnected and interdependent.
From this point of view, children who grow up in a bilingual family, for example with one italian parent and one whose mother tongue is English, have a clear advantage compared to their peers, as they obtain a thorough understanding of a second language - English -- naturally, without any difficulty and with no detrimental effect on the main language in the country of residence, in this case Italian.
The aim of Buddies Elementary School is to provide the children that come to the school with the competitive advantage of being bilingual in Italian and English irrespective of family circumstances and background: the mastery of English, written and oral, typical of an international school in the English language and the knowledge of the Italian language, written and oral, identical to that of their peers who attend elementary school in the Italian language.
As a result of the continued monitoring of the students learning rhythms, both in the Kindergarten and Elementary schools, and corroborated with both formal and informal evidence gathered from the parents, we can confirm that learning the Italian language, together with all the lessons provided by the ministerial programs, in no way disadvantages the students when compared to their peers attending schools where the mother tongue of the teachers is Italian. In fact, many scientific studies have indicated that early exposure to a multi-lingual environment makes a very positive contribution to cognitive development in general (CLIL - Content and Language Integrated Learning).
At the same time the knowledge of English, written and oral, achieved by the students at Buddies is therefore significantly superior than that of their peers who only study English in the limited number of hours dedicated to the English language i.e. merely as another school subject and not as a natural transverse and multidisciplinary means of communication.
In summary: English like the best international schools and Italian like the best Italian schools.