The Great, The Bold and the Brave

Upper Primary started the new year by welcoming two new classmates, Lucas from Brazil and Regina from the USA. We have also celebrated a few birthdays here in the classroom. Happy birthday to Riya, Lucas and Kyrell, our January and February birthday UP pupils!

We have had some dark and rainy days during the 6 weeks between the Winter Holidays and the Mid Term Break, but that didn’t stop us from being active and busy in class! We have still not yet wrapped up our IPC-unit, ‘The Great, The Bold, The Brave’, but we have already come across many interesting people and ideas from the ancient times. The IPC-books are filled with notes from different research projects, and pupils' models and displays are filling up the hallway walls and tables. We have investigated many aspects of the old Greek and Roman societies and have looked at the differences and similarities with modern day life. From religion to sport, and from family life to architecture, we have tried to investigate it all. The whole class combined the writing focus from last term, playscripts, with the new IPC-unit and performed plays during Assembly. They made any props and masks needed and helped each other to a really good presentation.

Children in the bilingual program have been doing research about the IPC-unit in Dutch as well. The group that just started learning Dutch is starting to make more and more sentences in Dutch, both in speaking and writing. The advanced group has worked a lot on spelling and they have re-written some old Greek myths into a play. During assembly the group has also presented a role-play and introduced themselves as the ‘Gods of ISG’, wearing a mask and bringing a prop to the stage.

These last few weeks, pupils have started to take a closer look at their individual learning styles, to know what they need to focus on and how they could work to improve on their knowledge, skills and understanding in different subjects or when learning new things. Pupils have just taken their mid-term test in Numeracy and by discussing their answers, they are learning to look at their own learning process and use any mistakes to learn and improve. Pupils have tried to set goals for their own work, they have looked at the result and assessed their own progress. They have given each other feedback on presentations in front of the class. They are investigating many different aspects of learning - and one of their home learning tasks this week is to interview a family member about their learning style.

The last two months we have also talked about a lot about our two values of the month, Morality and Thoughtfulness. Morality – ‘stop, think and do the right thing’ and Thoughtfulness – ‘think about the other and show that in your acts’, are similar to each other, but they are still challenging for our group. Some pupils are still working on becoming more open-minded and accepting of their differences. We see pupils showing an interest in developing new friendships, however, and that means a lot to us.

As we like to go out with a bang, we have celebrated a long anticipated Carnival on the last Friday before the holiday. Children had been super excited about it for weeks and finally the time had arrived to shine. Enjoy the pictures, enjoy the holiday and let’s all get ready for spring and for better times!