What an exciting week!

“We liked burying the time capsule!”

“It was nice being interviewed.”

“It was fun to meet important people.”

“It was lovely getting chocolate!”

“It was really nice to be there!”

Monday the 5th of October is a day we will remember for a very long time. It was a very important day. Upper Primary pupils were invited to a ceremony, the laying of the first stone, at the building site of what will become the new ISG School. Pupils were very excited. They listened to different important members of the ISG community giving a speech, they buried a time capsule in the ground, they were interviewed by journalists and they talked to guests at the ceremony. 50 years from now the time capsule will be dug up and we will again be able to look at all the different drawings of ‘my dream school’. We have done lots of counting to see how old we will be by then…

Both Emma’s father Willy and Zara’s father Marius have visited Upper Primary in connection to our IPC unit ‘Going global’. We have learnt a lot about both transport, export and import during these visits. We are so happy that parents want to contribute with their skills and knowledge during our IPC units. We have also watched parts of a documentary about transport. Upper Primary pupils now know more about land transport and sea transport. They know more about the costs involved in the process of transporting, that customers have to pay for this service. They know that trucks and containers are filled with commodities in every direction they go and that countries often import some things to be able to export other. Without transport world trade would stop.

Pupils are also starting to look more closely at their own responsibilities when buying things. Who made the item? Were they payed enough for their hard work? How was it transported to the shop where we bought it? Did the transport affect the environment? Lots of important concerns were lifted during this discussion. ”To be a global citizen is to become a part of something bigger than ourselves.” (Quote from The Big Idea, Going Global)

During literacy lessons pupils learn more about word classes and sentence structures. They read different text types and work with follow-up to increase their understanding and add more words to their vocabulary. Upper primary pupils now start to learn how to independently write books summaries. Middle and Upper Primary pupils visited the Public Library at Zuid on Thursday afternoon last week. They borrowed lots of different books for pupils in Pre-primary and Primary.

In numeracy pupils are still reviewing skills from the four different operations, to learn what strategies work best when solving different types of problems. Upper Primary pupils are also learning more about learning itself. Pupils become more aware of the fact that there is knowledge we can learn by heart and easily check if we know it, that to learn more practical skills, like using different types of strategies in numeracy or playing an instrument, we often need a lot of practice before we master them, and that understanding something is a process, an always developing and deepening understanding of ideas and concepts.

It is exciting to learn!