Plookpanya School

Plookpanya is a private school situated on the green area of eight and the half acres, on the premises of the Irrigation Department in NakornRatchasima, Thailand.

We currently enroll 578 students in the nursery-kindergarten-primary and secondary grades with a staff that includes 7 foreign teachers and 89 Thai teachers for other academic subjects. Students are expected to be respectful, independent but disciplined, cooperative and responsive learners.Parents are expected to be active participants in school matters.

The mission of Plookpanya School to a learning organization started with the founder’s desire to create a place where life skills along with book-learning are taught to children in the city of Nakhon Ratchasima (Korat). To serve this purpose, the Plookpanya School learning environment is designed differently from typical schools. The school buildings are more than just classroom buildings.

They are purposefully designed to stimulate students thinking and learning. Every corner at the school aims at encouraging students to explore, observe, think or even question and strive for the answers. This is because Plookpanya School believes that learning can occur anywhere and anytime. In addition, various types of activities both indoor and outdoor, e.g., free play, hands-on experiments, are organized for students. Therefore, teachers and students will have opportunities to work collaboratively and develop their learning abilities continuously.

At Plookpanya, we believe that everyone can function as an instructor, not only a teacher. Everyone can share the teaching responsibilities. For instance, chefs, who are experts in cooking, can provide suggestions concerning healthy food and eating habits while ground crews can offer advice about practical waste management methods. Teachers are then able to introduce wider concepts of environmental conservation and preservation. In addition, parents can help design the inspiring learning activities. All these ideas and direct experiences will be integrated into classroom lessons in order to create favorable characteristics of Plookpanya’s students.

Plookpanya is truly a learning organization where every staff member can continuously develop their abilities to achieve their career goals. It is also a place where new ideas and lifelong learning are encouraged. Teachers have academic freedom to trigger students’ inspiration and collaboration to enhance personal and professional advancement so as to achieve the ultimate goals.

“Process-oriented teaching approach which we use does not only equip students with the knowledge, but also wisdom. That is to say, the process of thinking and planning students gained from hands-on activities will enable them to self-direct their own learning in the future.”

Plookpanya School provides an education of the heart, as much as a kind of education program designed to sharpen curious mind that seeks to have global perspective, to understand life’s secret, to feel responsible to earth and humanity. We offer the curriculum designed to assist children to progress smoothly from concrete to abstract, to meet individual interest and needs of each stage of development. Realizing the importance of all-round development, we seek first and foremost, to provide a firm broad foundation at an early age, by putting a great stress on early childhood program, so a child is expected to grow up to be a self-actualize person, a lovable and caring being, a thoughtful, wise, and well-balanced individual. We do believe that “the early the better”.

We firmly believe that language and literacy are to be strongly stressed at a very early stage, be it our own mother tongue or foreign languages. Our school pays equally attention to both. We even believe that content of each academic are could be blended and dealt with both languages as one unit, if planned carefully, and handled with care by specially-trained Thai and foreign teaching staff.

We also firmly believe that if we were to succeed in laying this kind of foundation for very young children in our care, intensive academic programs at primary and secondary levels can be attained without any difficulty.

We offer learning areas that contain materials, a careful balance of teach-guided and child-directed experiential activities that develop academic skills with some stress on encouraged problem solving to reach their human full potentials.

School building provides ample space both for free play and for planned activities, for group and individual spheres of interest. In each classroom there is ample floor space for group learning, namely instruction game, group discussion, choral reading and other creative activities. There is a “thinking tank” in each room where shelter and solitude, vitally need even at a tender age, are provided. We are equally concerned in developing social skill and deep respect for privacy, independence of sprit, and fulfillment of inner life of each individual. At some point each day, various kinds of learning and creative for mix-aged groups are organized in specially designed rooms, namely art / craft, music movement, math-science lab, sensorial education for small muscle growth, language skill, drama, cooking programs and library (a fixed area for varied kinds of books and wee-equipped listening center) A big spacious hall is specially designed for parents meetings, for school social days and for staff-development. We are deeply concerned in promoting experiential kind of knowledge, with great emphasis on teaching technique. For us, in-service training is a long road of infinity, a melting pot, an education blend of deep-seated root of what is considered traditions of our forefathers and multi-culture of various countries. We are not totally committed to any single school of thought, nor to any theory of any educator of the present age. We reserve the right to maintain any conviction and any selected method to develop a sense of morality, cognition, intellectual attitude, and intellectual skills (basic study skills and life skills).