Dear Parents and Students

Thankyou so much to those of you who came along to the assembly this week to watch our ‘squakaholics’ in action. I am sure you agree that they did a fantastic job.

5KP Newsletter       

 

Wednesday November 28th

 

What’s up in 5KP?

We are successfully working on our Charlie writing projects and the students are very enthusiastic about it. We have completed the first 3 chapters and will be doing the 4^th and 5^th this week. Currently we will be completing the rough draft of a chapter every two days so that we can do the good copies after we finish drafting. I have changed the deadline for the project until after the break. It will be due on the last day of the quarter which is January 11^th. I do not expect the children to work on it over their holiday and as I did not want to work on my holiday either I thought it was more realistic to extend the deadline. It would be ideal if the students had finished all of the writing before the break and in the last week were able to focus on the editing, decorating and fine tuning of their story.

 

Math is moving along and students are working hard on the use of fractions and percents. This is an important skill and it comes up two more times this school year. Please ask your student about their understanding. We have missed a few lessons during the last week due to assembly practice so now that is over we will get stuck into the rest of the unit.

 

Our Unit Study focused on Space and the Environment has gotten off to a great start. Students have begun the second phase and are researching current solutions to environmental issues to aid them in their planning on our class goal to colonize Mars. Please be prepared to support your child with at home research. The goal is to complete all research this week and then to begin developing presentations to present to the class.

 

Please email me if you have any questions kimbra.power@saschina.org

 

Giving Tree Reminder

Please remind your son or daughter to bring in a gift for a child less fortunate than we are. Only 5 students have donated something to the bag so far.

We are giving to:

A 12 year old girl who is 145 cm tall and weighs 37kg

and

A 9 year old boy who is 140 cm tall and weighs 28kg

As Christmas is a special holiday for Western children, so also is the Spring Festival a magical time for Chinese children. Like our own small ones, Chinese boys and girls look forward to the gathering of family members, feasting, visits to friends and relatives, and gifts. There are many children in Shanghai, however, whose families cannot afford to give them new clothes, and for whom toys are a rare luxury.

The Giving Tree.

Helping you share Christmas with a child in need.

Happy Holidays and Thank You!

‘Tis the Season

With the colder weather upon us it is important that your child dress appropriately for the cooler weather. All students are expected to go outside for recess, even when the temperatures drop considerably, as it is important that they get fresh air and use up energy out in the playground during recess.

I have also noticed that some students are a little tired during the school day so please encourage your child to get a good night sleep and be refreshed for school the next day. This will help keep the winter colds away as well. If your child does happen to pick up a cold or flu please keep them at home, we can’t afford to have these symptoms passed on to other students.

Winter Music Concert

The Grade 5 winter concert is being held on Wednesday 5 December in the auditorium. Come along and support the Band and Strings as they treat us to some fantastic music. Students are expected at 1 o’clock so parents should plan to arrive by then. More details to follow with your students.

 

What’s on?

Wednesday 5 Dec.          Grade 5 Winter Concert

Thursday 13 Dec.            Grade 5 Christmas Party

Friday 14 Dec.                Winter Vacation starts. School ends 11:30am.

 

Regards

Kimbra Power

Hi
Many of you have commented that you wanted to know how I did the big KIMBRA down the side of my blog. I will give you a prize if you are the first 5KP student to have completed this activity on your own blog.
Use this link to get you started or read this post if you need more help.
Good luck!

Powered by ScribeFire.

Speaking and Listening task for quarter two

After several e mailing attempts I have decided to put this task on my blog too.

November 9th Newsletter for 5KP

Hannah, Simon and Kimbra Power…Family of Pumas

The only thing bad about soccer day this year was that Jun could not join us due to his broken collarbone…poor Jun, he missed a great day of running around in reasonable weather at the Dulwich field in Jinqiao.

We had a wonderful time and ended up playing seven games during the day, the kids really slept well that night I bet!

I have just spent some time this morning reading over the great blogs my class have been doing. They are really learning so much through this technology. Some students are embracing it more than others and that is only natural but while reading Ben’s blog this morning, I noticed something that I could use as a small teaching moment. Ben hopes that Mr Utecht will be able to teach him how to delete blogs and I know through my netvibes that Mr U. has been talking about this very idea in the middle school. So I suggest that not only Ben, but all bloggers out there, take a look at this post to see what Mr U. has to say about creating your online profile. The main message is…take what you put online seriously, really think about what you want people to know about you before you press publish because once it is out there, it really is out of your hands.

What a busy week we have had with Halloween and our Global Natives Open House.
Check out some photos of what the students have been up to.

 

Check out this SAS podcast to find out more about the happenings today.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Well I didn’t want to give it to more than one student and I didn’t want to give it to two students of the same gender but good blogging is good blogging and I had no choice but to award the October prize to Min Ji Lee and Isabella Wang for their blogging efforts this month.
The link above about good blogging includes this information:

Students need to read blogs! I cannot overstate this fact enough. If
you really want blogging to be transformative and you want it to
sustain itself as a powerful piece of the classroom environment, it
starts with reading blogs and learning about the philosophy of this
genre: critical reading, connecting and synthesizing ideas,
communicating publicly, creating, contributing, community linking and
building, and moving cyclically.

Without this step, students are more likely to see it merely as an
online equivalent to a journal (an expensive notebook) or even worse,
word processing. Teachers are more likely to hear students say “how
long”, “what should I write”, and “what do I now” if this portion is
missing. By laying the foundation, students transform their thinking,
students see this as more than an academic exercise.

So blogging is not just about putting cute widgets of meowing cats on your blog even though that is a fun way to draw attention to your site.
The prize for the best bloggers is a lunch in the middle school cafeteria next week and a free ice cream from Mrs Power. Congratulations girls and keep up the great work 5KP!

Powered by ScribeFire.