I was so impressed with the class today as most of them remembered to bring their party food in as well as supplies and dvd’s and a great time was had by all this afternoon in 5KP. We were celebrating their first published 5th grade narrative which will be on display later in the week. Well done 5KP.
I received a very comprehensive e mail from the grade 3 parent rep Monica O’Mara just now and I am copying the dates she told us about below for your information. We certainly have a lot happening between now and the Winter Holiday which is only 60 sleeps away by the way…So thank you to Ms O’Mara and please keep the below dates in mind as you plan ahead.
This Weeks Events:
October 21st, Scholastic Book orders are due
October 23rd, United Nations (UN) Day 8:00 A.M. – 2:00 P.M. If you would like to go with your child 5KP are going at 9 am
October 23rd, Unit 3 Math Test
The test wil cover…
*determining angle measures based on relationships between angles
*estimating the measure of an angle
*measure an angle to within 2 degrees
*identify types of angles
*identify types of triangles
*identify place value in numbers to billions
*know properties of polygons
*define and create tessellations
*draw congruent triangles
Upcoming Events:
October 26 – 29th IOWA Testing for Grade3 – 5
October 29th, SAS Connects 9:00 A.M. at Vizcaya Club House; Topice “Our Community” Guest Speaker: Shanghai Community Center
October 30th, Halloween Parade 8:30
November 5th and 6th Parent Teacher Conferences – 1/2 days of school. Students leave at 11.30 A.M.
November 12th Elementary School PTSA Meeting 10:00 A.M.
November 12th Treat Day sponsored by Middle School
Volunteers still needed: The Eagle Shop still team needs volunteers to work at the store on either Monday and or Friday. It’s a great way to help the school and our kids! You can sign up at any time that is convenient for you…The shop is open from 11:00 – 1:30. If you are interested please contact Hina Farooqi at hinaharis@gmail or on her mobile at 13601665122.
Hi Parents and Students
I just copied the following from the Elementary Principal’s blog.
Dear Parents,
Students in grades 3 – 8 will Iowa Test of Basic Skills during the week of October 26th.
Shanghai American School provides many different sources of assessment throughout the year. One source of information is our program of standardized achievement testing. The test series we use, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, is a norm-referenced test. This means that a student’s scores indicate how he/she compares with a representative sample of peers (the norm group). This gives us an idea of how our students’ academic achievement compares to students at public and private schools from the United States and other international schools.
The following is a list of subject areas students are evaluated in:
* Vocabulary
* Reading Comprehension
* Language: Spelling, Capitalization, Punctuation, Usage and Expression
* Mathematics: Math Concepts and Estimation, Math Problem Solving and Data Interpretation, Math Computation
Reading comprehension includes: understanding factual information; drawing conclusions; inferring feelings of characters; and determining topic, viewpoint, attitude, structure, and style.
Math Concepts and Estimation includes: numeration and operations; measurement; fractions, decimals, and percents; and equations and inequalities.
Math Problem Solving and Data Interpretation includes: single step addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems; multiple step problem solving strategies; reading amounts; comparing quantities; and interpreting relationships.
Important Suggestions and Reminders:
* Students should get a good night’s sleep and eat breakfast before coming to school.
* It is important to remember that any individual’s test score is only a measure of how well he/she performed on a single assessment on a given day. The score may be different another day due to testing conditions and the physical and/or emotional state of the individual student.
* The IOWA is only one source of data the School uses to measure student achievement.
If you have any further questions, please contact your classroom teacher or the elementary administration.
Well folks, the break has come and gone! I hope you had a pleasant vacation, I have enjoyed hearing about what you got up to from your children and am happy to see them all safe and sound back in class ready for the next couple of months of study before the Winter Break.
Some reminders about the rest of the month…
Treat Day is tomorrow, Thursday, October 15th. Please bring in 5 RMB if you want to purchase a delicious treat! Popcorn will also be available for you to buy and all treats will be available free of nuts.
Please see the PTSA blog for information about Saturday’s Fall BBQ. I will be there and I would love to see you there too.
In Math we are working on geometry and the students seem to be grasping everything well so far. They have had a study link to complete for homework each night this week as well as some revision of this new topic. As we are about half way through this short unit already, I anticipate the end of unit test being before the end of next week, that is, around October 23rd.
In Writers Workshop, most of the students have submitted their personal narratives with the remaining students set to hand theirs in by Friday. We started looking at more writing ideas in class today and have also reviewed what makes a good writer’s notebook.
Reader’s Workshop will resume tomorrow morning with the students looking at ways to reflect upon their writing without merely summarizing what they have just read. The students all have a reading buddy within the classroom that they workshop ideas with and the aim is that they will gain greater understanding of their reading through learning various techniques to help them comprehend deeper meanings within the text.
The class have had some great discussions during our Social Studies Cultural unit and I am enjoying being a part of their journey. It would be great if you could take some time to talk to your child about the work we are doing in class. Today we discussed the differences between Chinese Culture and the culture that the students identify with the most. Of course this is difficult for some students who strongly identify with China as their own culture and then the class spent some time discussing issues such as the culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong and how ‘Chinese’ these places were…your students are very aware and involved in world politics but of course there was some confusion too.
http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649
Some of the questions we have been exploring in our cultural studies unit include:
How does culture shape the way we see the world, ourselves, and others?
How does my culture shape me?
Why is it important to understand culture?
How does one retain their cultural identity?
The final assessment will be presented on their blog and I look forward to it being something they are proud of and can share with their family and friends around the world. This task will be completed in time for the parent/teacher conferences on November 5th and 6th.
We were notified yesterday by the Shanghai government that there would be significant traffic interruptions as part the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China celebrations in our fair city beginning at 3:30 tomorrow and continuing through October 4th. Strict traffic limits will be imposed in Shanghai as the city celebrates the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China and the holiday break with spectacular fireworks and lighting shows. http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2009/200909/20090928/article_415152.htm
If you would like to join us for the Spirit Assembly & Spirit Walk:
All school Spirit Assembly will start at 9:30 in the Hatchery
All school Spirit Walk will start at 10:15 in front of the Auditorium immediately following the Assembly and will finish at 11:15. Remind your child to wear their house t-shirt tomorrow.
Congratulations to Erin Zhang who was the first student to correctly identify the literary device I used in my headline on the last post.
Great job Erin for being the first one to tell me it was alliteration. Students try and write your next blog post using some alliteration. There
were many examples of it in the story I started reading to you recently “Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street” and you will have used it before
writing tongue twisters and the like in poetry lessons. It is a great devise to catch a reader’s attention.
Well done also to Sam Tucker and Nicole Tang who responded to my post with very good answers, just not the exact word.
HI 5KP
First of all, a sticker to the first student who responds to this blog telling me what literary device I have used to catch your attention in the heading of this post…
Secondly, well done today. All 20 of your did your best to play six very exciting games of soccer, sometimes under difficult circumstances. I appreciate your commitment and enthusiasm and I hope you sleep well tonight and are not too tired tomorrow…Try and find a few minutes there to study for tomorrow’s math test!
Readers, when you have the time check out this great wikipedia site for a fantastic list of young-adult fiction writers.
Scroll down the page (or read it, it is interesting) til you get to this sub-heading :
and check out some of the authors and book titles.
How many of them do YOU know? How many have you read? Were there any people you think were left off the list? Who and Why?
Write a detailed blog post telling me your thoughts.
Here are some of my favorites from years gone by…now I am getting ready to read some of them to my daughter which is very exciting…
I can’t wait to see the sort of list you come up with and what you think of the titles on the site.
Enjoy the photos of your last science class on Mixtures and Solutions and your wonderful day on the field today.
Writer’s Workshop
The students have all been paired up with another student in the class who will be their writing buddy for the year. This will continue to be a very important relationship for the students as they will share work, conference, draft and edit writing together. Students will now choose from the small moment stories they have been generating and turn that into their best piece of writing. I have been impressed with the writing that students have come up with and can’t wait for them to publish their writing on their blogs. Talk to your child about their writing and ask them questions about it. We have just focused on paragraphing and structure after originally looking at generating ideas.
Reader’s Workshop
We are continuing with Readers’ Workshop. Students have focused on choosing ‘just right’ books to improve their reading. Students have really been encouraged to think about their reading and write their thoughts about their reading. Students have started to write responses about their reading so ask your child to share some of their responses with you. Incorporated into our Reader’s Workshop has been our interactive read aloud time with the book Nicholas. The children are really enjoying this book and are using it to make text connections with other books they have read and other real-life experiences they have had. Here is some information about the book and why it is such a hit with the children.
Le petit Nicolas (Little Nicholas) was created by René Goscinny and illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempé and it was published for the first time in 1959. Nicholas is an illustration of an ideal childhood and a nostalgic memory of the 1950s.
The humor of the books derives from their unique story-telling style: the adventures of Little Nicolas are told in the first person by Nicolas himself. On the one hand, the books are a parody of the story-telling habits of little children; for example, the author makes frequent use of stylistic features such as run-on sentences and employs an egocentric, naive point of view. On the other hand, adults are the targets of the books’ humor when the straightforward and uncomplicated worldview of the child narrator exposes the flaws of adult perception. The subversive element in the Petit Nicolas thus made it an early example of modern children’s literature that is centered around the experience of the child, rather than an adult interpretation of the world.
As I know your child really enjoys this book, here is a list of other books that amazon.com recommends they may also enjoy.
* The Caliph’s Vacation: Iznogoud 2
* The Wicked Wiles of Iznogoud: Iznogoud 1
* Iznogoud and the Day of Misrule: Iznogoud 3
* The Daltons in the Blizzard: Lucky Luke 15 (Lucky Luke Adventure)
* Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw
* Wiggens Learns His Manners at the Four Seasons Restaurant
* Sempe: Nothing is Simple
* Brave Story
Math
We are well under way on unit 2 focused on Estimation and Computation. The skills that will be assessed for unit are:
*write and solve open sentences for number stories
*round numbers to designated places
*make magnitude estimates
*find the product of multi-digit whole numbers and decimals
*know place value to billions
*find the sum and difference of multi-digit whole numbers and decimals
*identify the maximum, minimum, median, mode, and mean for a data set
We will be doing this test before the October Break.
Unit Study
The students recently finished our science unit, Mixtures & Solutions and enjoyed the experiments very much. Today we will start our new unit on Cultural Studies which promises to be relevant to each and every student and encourage lots of interesting conversation and thought so stay tuned.
Open House
Thank you to those of you who attended Open House. It was great to meet many of you face to face. If you didn’t attend Open House, don’t worry too much because I’m sure we will get to meet at the parent conferences coming up in November. It was a chance for parents to see where their child spends eight hours of their day and also to hear about the expectations of fifth grade and curriculum that will be covered over the year.
After School Activities
Your child may have started ASA’s (After School Activities) yesterday, these will continue over the next 6 weeks on either Monday, Tuesday or Thursday after school depending on the activity your child has chosen.
Soccer Day
The Grade 5 Soccer Day will be held on Thursday 24 September. Come out and enjoy a fun day here at SAS Pudong. Our main goal is to meet other fifth graders from Shanghai but most of all FUN! Please remember to pack a nutritious and filling lunch for your child as they will not be going to the cafeteria that day and also…NO cleats please.
House Shirts
Mr Thornbury will be selling house shirts starting this Wednesday Starting this Wednesday at lunch and continuing until Friday. He will be selling House shirts for returning students only who have worn out, lost or grown out of their existing House shirt. Could you please tell your child that they must bring 50rmb and he will be situated by the playground.
All new students will be getting their House shirts during the Pre-Spirit Walk Assembly next Wednesday at 1pm.
Well, I can say that I am practicing for putting your child on my blog which IS true, but I also wanted to put this out there for my mum to see as You Tube is not working so well in China right now…
Here is Mimi singing one of her favourite songs…
