A Global Nexus year is built from monthly themes chosen to match children's lives in Ho Chi Minh City: the seasons, the main Vietnamese festivals, family, food, the neighbourhood, nature and the body. Themes are arranged so that the year moves from the familiar to the wider world, and they return in later years at a deeper level, so that a child who stays from the nursery years to the final kindergarten year meets the same big topics several times with new questions each time. The year plan sets direction; weekly project threads decide what actually happens.
Long-term planning is the least visible part of an early-years curriculum and one of the most important. Without it, themes are chosen month by month according to habit, and children who stay for three or four years end up doing the same activities about the same topics. This article explains how Global Nexus approaches the year, how it uses the local calendar, and how teams keep a long plan flexible enough to follow children.
Why plan a year at all
Early-years teachers sometimes resist yearly plans, and with good reason. A plan written in August cannot know what a class will care about in March. Yet a curriculum with no long view has its own problems. Some topics get covered every year while others never appear. Experiences cluster at certain times, leaving long stretches with little happening outside the classroom. And children who move up through the school meet the same activities again, which tells them that school repeats rather than grows.
The Global Nexus answer is a year plan that fixes very little. It decides the broad sequence of themes, the moments in the calendar that the school will mark, and the balance across the six dimensions over the year. It does not decide weekly content, which stays with the teaching team. In that sense the year plan is closer to a map of territory to be covered than to a timetable.
This approach draws on an old idea in education. In 1960 the psychologist Jerome Bruner argued in The Process of Education that any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to children at any stage of development, and that a curriculum should revisit basic ideas repeatedly, building on them each time. That spiral image is a useful way to think about a multi-year preschool curriculum: the same themes return, but the questions children ask about them change.
The local calendar a year plan works with
Global Nexus themes are anchored in the rhythm of life in Ho Chi Minh City. The table below sets out the main features of the calendar that a year plan usually takes into account. Exact festival dates follow the lunar calendar and move from year to year.
| Period | What is happening around children | Typical curriculum use |
|---|---|---|
| September | The Vietnamese school year opens; new children are settling in | Themes about me, my class and my school; routines and relationships come first |
| Around September or October | Mid-Autumn Festival on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month | Lanterns, the moon, light and dark, mooncakes and family gatherings |
| May to November | Rainy season in the south, with heavy afternoon showers | Water, weather, plants, insects, how the city copes with rain |
| November | Vietnamese Teachers' Day on 20 November | Gratitude, people who help us, what teachers do |
| January or February | Lunar New Year, Tet, the largest family festival of the year | Family, food, traditions, cleaning and preparing a home, growing older |
| December to April | Dry season, hotter months, outdoor play shifts to cooler hours | Sun and shade, keeping our bodies healthy, the neighbourhood |
| 1 June | International Children's Day, widely celebrated in Vietnam | Play, rights of children, friendship, celebrating the year's work |
The calendar is a resource rather than a script. A festival does not have to become a month-long theme, and a theme does not have to fit a festival. What the table offers is a set of moments when children's lives outside school are already full of a topic, which makes it easier to build a project that connects home and classroom.
From the familiar outward
The sequence of themes across a year generally starts close to the child and moves outward. Early in the year, when many children are new and some are very young, themes deal with the self, the family and the classroom. These topics need no outside knowledge; every child is an expert on their own family, and the themes support the main work of the first months, which is building secure relationships with teachers and peers.
As the year continues, themes widen to the neighbourhood, food and markets, transport, the people who work around us, plants and animals in the city, water and weather. Later still they reach further, to other places, other languages, how things are made, and how the world looks from somewhere else. This outward movement fits the purpose stated on every piece of Global Nexus material: a curriculum so children can step out into the world. Stepping out begins with knowing where you stand.
The pattern is a tendency rather than a rule. A class of five-year-olds in their third year with the curriculum may be ready for wider themes much earlier than a nursery group. And a theme that starts close to home can travel a long way: a project about the family's breakfast can end up looking at where rice is grown and how bread is baked in other countries. The year plan simply tries to make sure the overall journey goes somewhere.
How themes return at a deeper level
In the nursery years. A theme about water means pouring, splashing, filling and emptying, feeling warm and cold water, with adults naming what children do in both languages. The learning is sensory and the language is short and repetitive.
At three to four. The same theme introduces simple questions: where does rain come from, what floats and what sinks, why do puddles disappear. Children begin to predict and to describe what they see in short sentences.
At four to five. Children investigate over several days, comparing how much rain different containers catch, finding out how plants in the garden respond to dry and wet days, and recording what they find in drawings.
At five to six. The theme can widen to how the city deals with flooding, why clean water matters, or how people in other places get their water. Children plan their own investigations, explain their reasoning and present to others.
Across all ages. The language grows with the child. Infants hear words attached to sensations; five-year-olds use both languages to argue about why their prediction was wrong. The theme is the same; the thinking it supports is not.
Festivals as experience, not performance
Vietnamese preschools traditionally mark festivals with performances, and families often enjoy watching their children on stage in costume. Global Nexus does not ban performances, but it treats festivals primarily as experiences to be understood rather than shows to be rehearsed. Weeks of practising a dance for a Mid-Autumn show take time away from the questions children actually have about lanterns, the moon or why families gather.
A festival week in Global Nexus therefore tends to look like any other project week. Children might make lanterns with materials they choose, talk with grandparents about how the festival was celebrated when they were young, taste and compare different mooncakes, and explore what happens to light in a darkened room. If there is a gathering at the end, it shows what children have explored rather than a polished routine.
Festivals also carry the bilingual principle in a particular way. For international children, Tet and Mid-Autumn are an entry point into Vietnamese culture, and the Vietnamese language naturally leads much of the talk. For Vietnamese children, explaining their own traditions in English to an international teacher is an authentic reason to use the second language. Both directions are part of what the curriculum means by integration with the world.
Families are often the richest resource in a festival week. Grandparents can describe how Tet was prepared in their childhood, parents can contribute a dish or a story, and families from other countries can share how they mark the turn of the year. Inviting these contributions turns a festival from something the school puts on for families into something children and families explore together, which is closer to how festivals actually work in Vietnamese life.
The first and last months of the year
Two parts of the year need particular care in planning: the opening weeks and the closing ones. In September many children are new to the school, some are new to group care altogether, and older children are moving into new classes with new teachers. The curriculum's main task in these weeks is not content but security. Themes are deliberately simple, routines are introduced slowly, and teachers spend more time on one-to-one connection than on group projects. A theme about me and my class is less a topic than a structure for getting to know each other.
Language planning in these weeks also leans towards comfort. Children who are anxious are reached in the language they know best, and English is introduced through warm, predictable routines such as greetings and songs rather than through new project vocabulary. Teams that rush into an ambitious theme in the first fortnight often find they have to slow down later, because children who never settled cannot engage with projects.
The last months of the year carry a different kind of transition. Five-year-olds are preparing to leave for primary school, and younger children are preparing to move up a class. Themes in this period often look back as well as forward: children revisit their portfolios, talk about what they have learned, visit the classroom they will move into, and in the oldest group think about what a new school will be like. A year that ends with reflection gives children a sense that their time has had shape, which is itself part of what a curriculum offers.
Keeping the year plan flexible
A year plan that cannot change is worse than none. Global Nexus teams review it each term, asking which themes worked, which children were missed, and whether something in the world outside the school, a new building site next door, a flooded street, a family event shared by many children, deserves a place. Themes can be swapped, shortened or extended without starting again from scratch.
Teams also keep a light record of what each class has actually done each year. This record, more than the plan itself, is what allows themes to return at a deeper level. A teacher receiving a group of four-year-olds can see what they explored about water or family the previous year and start from there, rather than repeating the same activities. Without that record, the spiral turns into a circle.
Finally, the year plan is checked against the national programme. Over the course of the year every domain must receive its share of attention and every age-group goal must be addressed. Spreading themes across the calendar is one of the simplest ways to make sure that physical development, aesthetics and social skills are not crowded out by the topics teachers find easiest to plan.
Câu hỏi thường gặp
How many themes does a Global Nexus class cover in a year?
Themes are generally organised by month, so a school year usually contains around nine or ten. Some themes run longer when children's interest is strong, and some are shortened, so the exact number varies from class to class.
Do all classes in the school follow the same themes at the same time?
Classes often share a theme so that the school can mark festivals and events together, but each age group explores it differently. Weekly project threads are decided by each teaching team based on their own children.
Why does Global Nexus repeat themes across years?
Returning to big topics at a deeper level lets children build on what they already know. A child who explored water through play at two can investigate and explain it at five. This follows the spiral idea described by Jerome Bruner, applied to the early years.
How are Vietnamese festivals handled for international children?
Festivals are treated as experiences children can understand and take part in, not only performances to watch. International children learn about Tet and Mid-Autumn through making, tasting, stories and family contributions, often with Vietnamese leading the conversation.
Does the year plan follow the rainy and dry seasons in Ho Chi Minh City?
Yes, the seasons are one of the anchors. The long rainy season, roughly May to November, offers rich material about water, weather, plants and insects, while the hotter dry months shape outdoor routines and themes about health and shade.
Who decides the year plan?
The curriculum lead and teaching teams draft it together before the school year and review it each term. It sets direction and balance across the year, while weekly content remains with the teams who know the children.