Upper-Primary - Ms Kelsey | International School Ghent

International mindedness

Oh, we have interesting discussions in Upper Primary. We have talked about moving to a new country and about going on a holiday somewhere. We tried to find similarities and differences between our experiences. We all agreed that moving somewhere made us feel something different than what we felt when we were going on a holiday for a few weeks. Going on a holiday is exciting, while moving somewhere can be more of a sad experience. It is difficult to leave people you love behind.

We talked about preparing a move or a holiday trip somewhere. Upper Primary pupils had so many great ideas. We know about booking and paying for the ticket and we know about packing clothes and belongings. We then said that we might have to check the weather and climate at the destination, to be able to pack the right things. We also said, after thinking for a while, that it might be useful to contact friends and family at the destination, or to find a map and make a list of attractions and things one should see or do in the new country. Then we realised that we might have to check if we knew the language at the destination, or if it might be useful to learn some words and phrases in the new language. It is nice to be able to greet others, to say hello, goodbye, please and thank you. And what about food at the destination? And culture and traditions? All the do’s and don’ts and the laws and the rules in the country. Is it safe to go there? Are there any dangerous animals or plants one should know of? And what currency is used at the destination? And what if… Finally we realised that all the things we were talking about was indeed International Mindedness – to have a global mindset and be aware of other countries, languages, cultures and traditions! We agreed that a good global traveler would prepare him- or herself for a journey this way. It is important to be open, respectful and adaptable!

The discussion about moving to a new country lead us in to yet another Personal Goal in IPC, Adaptability. Adaptability is about being able to deal with changes and challenges in a way where one is willing to change, adjust and adapt to different conditions. It is about the process where one is willing to be flexible and learn new things and to change oneself. Here at ISG we show our adaptability in many different ways. Some have learnt a new language. Some are learning to learn in a different way than they are used to from previous schools. We have all moved to a new country and learnt many things about languages, culture and traditions. We have all made new friends. Adaptability is about changing oneself to fit all the new things around. We think that we all have shown adaptability when adjusting to our new lives here in Belgium.

We have added more evidence of the Personal Goals that we see here in our class! We write post-it’s with comments about ourselves or others whenever we see Respect, Co-operation, Morality, Resilience, Enquiry and Adaptability in Upper Primary. As you can see we can find evidence every now and then!

We are now preparing all the things we would like to show the parents during our Exit Point. We want to share our learning with you again! An invitation will come soon!

We also had a visit from Lower Primary pupils. Ivan, Chinmay and Luka came and gave us a nice challenge. Lower Primary wants all of us to be aware of the connections between healthy body/healthy air and the way we travel to and from school. We are challenged to come to school by public transport or by foot tomorrow! If we come from far and have to come by car, we are kindly asked to park a bit further away from school and walk the last part to ISG. We like challenges! We will do our best!

Have a lovely weekend!

Maps, maps, maps

We have added a few imaginary countries. Have you ever heard of Olbert, Bellwood, Karunzia, Maccabilia, Beslo, Dibsa, United Eagleland or Britalia? We will soon introduce these countries to you. This week we have been busy typing and searching on the internet. We chose nice pictures and wrote our persuasive texts. Now the adverts start to look really nice! We think that our adverts will make you inspired to go on a holiday to any of these countries. They are spread around the world, so you can choose if you want to travel within Europe or go to Asia, South or North America or visit a new country in the Pacific Ocean.

We are still working with many geography related tasks. We are learning to use maps to locate the position and geographical features of particular localities. We are learning even more how to make maps and plans of different locations, using symbols and keys and we are working hard to use the right geographical terms. We have started talking about airports, where they are located and what might happen when people around an airport start to protest against pollution or noise. When we created our countries, we all wanted to have really beautiful nature, with mountains, rivers and forests, and we all wanted lots of wild animals living there. The environmental and ecological questions are very important. We are designing our own airports and we will absolutely think about these important aspects as well.

In Numeracy, we have continued with measurement – perimeter and area (year 4), time (year 5), we have started organising and interpreting data (year 3) and we have tried to find averages (year 6). Some things are easy to understand, some problems are easy to solve – and sometimes we are challenged and have to use a lot of different strategies to solve problems.

In Literacy, we have worked with grammar, vocabulary, spelling, reading and follow-up. We are all learning to express ourselves more clearly, to choose the right words and think about spelling and punctuation rules when we write independently. We hope that you can see our progress!

On Monday we had our first PE lesson in the big sports hall. That was great!

On Tuesday, Dave visited us and explained more about how a bank works. We now know more about how money is transferred, why we need bank account numbers and why we need money. We even got to transfer money from a fake account to ISG -- for a school trip to all our home countries! What a pity that it was a fake transfer... It was a really interesting visit and we had so many questions. Dave promised us that we could send a mail with all the questions we didn’t have time to ask and he will send us a reply and explain even more.

Both on Thursday and Friday we had birthday parties here in Upper Primary. Vedant turned 8 years old and Bobette is now 9 years old! Happy birthday to both of you!!

Tomorrow it is time for a school community event. Some of us will meet and play bingo! See you there or see you here at ISG next week!

A dream destination

We visited Miss Jenny’s fantastic travel agency – ‘Your Dream Destination’ - and learned more about different types of journeys - we can go on an expedition, trek, tour, cruise etc. We read texts about the destinations to understand what they offered us. We had to look at many different maps to be able to compare the destinations. We looked at climate maps, to learn more about the climate they have at the destination. Did you know that Belgium has a moderate climate, with warm summers and mild, rainy winters? We have talked about the difference between the climate zones – tropical climate, dry climate, continental climate, moderate climate, polar climate and the highlands. We looked at another map where we could see how many hours of bright sunshine a place has per year. We also looked at a map to find out how many time zones we travel to reach a certain destination. Some people like to travel far, others like to stay a bit closer to home.

We ended the whole activity with a role-play where we had to pretend to be customers who wanted to go on a specific type of journey, and the rest of the class had to pretend they worked in a travel agency and help us find our dream destination! Upper Primary pupils did their best to be polite and helpful travel agents.

When we talked about our own dream destinations in our class, we realized that we found different things important when we chose a destination. We are different. But we know that it doesn’t really matter how far we travel or what we do during our holiday, we can still learn new things when we visit new places and meet new people. We also had a long and interesting class discussion about the advantages and disadvantages with tourism. Upper Primary pupils shared their thoughts and ideas and they knew a lot about positive and negative effects of tourism in different parts of the world.

We continued with our imaginary countries in art. The maps are looking like real maps now. We have designed a flag for each country and now we are working on an airline logo for our country. To design a logo is hard work, we have to think about layout and symbols, text size and colours. We will present our art work soon, so keep your eyes open out in the hallway!

In literacy we have read texts and worked with follow-up questions, we have learned more about spelling rules and we have worked with grammar and punctuation. We have also started writing persuasive texts – we want people to understand how fantastic our imaginary countries are and we want them to come and visit! We have started to think about how to attract people’s interest by using persuasive language. We talked about how AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) can help us write better adverts.

In numeracy our focus this week has been to learn more about measurement – both capacity and time (year 3 and 4) and perimeter and area (year 5 and 6). Lots and lots of counting! Lots and lots of thinking! The pupils have all done their best to challenge themselves and learn more.

Once again we had a busy week and we learned a lot! We will hopefully have a lovely (and snowy!) weekend and then we will continue with fun learning here in Upper Primary!

Personal goals and other things

We are busy with our new IPC unit and we are loving it!

Pupils in Upper Primary really love traveling around the world, both in reality and in our minds. We are learning useful vocabulary about maps and the globe, we are talking about longitude and latitude, the Equator and the compass directions north, south, east and west. We have traveled around the world and seen all our birth places -- on Google Earth. We went to India, Israel, the Netherlands, Spain, the USA, Canada, Sri Lanka and finally to Sweden. We wish we could travel to all these countries for real… We are also creating our own maps of our imaginary countries and we learn how important the key is for the result. The key (or legend) explains what the different symbols of the map mean. Without explanations for the different symbols, you wouldn’t understand how amazing these new countries are!

Kaaru shared a French tradition during show and tell one morning, and we talked about how interesting it is to learn more about other countries, traditions, cultures and languages. We talked about the fact that international mindedness makes us wiser, because when we know more about each other we understand each other better. We think that the world would be a better place if more people were interested in international mindedness! We have also discussed the Personal Goal of the month, morality. It is something we agree is important, but something we have to practice every day. We want to do our best to make the right choice in every situation, where we otherwise could end up fighting. We want to remember to always do the right things, be kind, be fair and, very important, think before we speak... But, we know, it is a challenge!

In numeracy we have talked about shapes, 2D and 3D shapes, and we have discussed and looked at models to better understand and be able to define faces, edges and vertices. Pupils in Year 5 and 6 have been learning to plot coordinates in one or four quadrants and to translate shapes on a grid. During the follow-up pupils in Upper Primary worked hard, individually and in pairs, to answer questions.

Upper Primary pupils have also worked nicely together with plastic pearls, building fantastic patterns and images. They are now eagerly waiting for Miss Jenny to iron the pearls!

Thursday morning we had a cute little visitor here in our class. A robot called Zora came in to our classroom and talked to us and danced for us. Upper Primary pupils really enjoyed this visit! This humanoid robot is used in hospitals and schools. You can learn more about Zora here.

Take off!

We kicked off our exciting new unit with an Entry Point in the Citadel Park. We played games related to a real trip and luckily we ran a lot, because it was cold, windy and rainy on Tuesday! We had fun when we packed the suitcase in our ‘Suitcase Relay’, we practiced both patience and trust when we guided our blindfolded pilots through storms in ‘Daring Descent’, and we showed how well we can co-operate and support each other when it was time to remember what we packed in the suitcase in ‘Lost Luggage’. We had to write a list of all the items we had packed and describe them well to get any points in this game. We remembered a lot! We have memories like elephants!!

Our Knowledge Harvest was to try to remember as many things possible needed around and in an airport. We showed our teacher that we have travelled a lot, because we know what it is like arriving at the airport, checking in, going through the security check and waiting in the departure lounge before it is time to board a plane. Miss Jenny was impressed!

Now we are working with Geography. We have started looking at maps and we are now using words like symbol, key and scale when we talk about maps. We know that maps aim to represent reality, but that they don’t show everything, because then the map would get too messy. One needs to decide what the map is showing, before one starts choosing the symbols representing the most important things. On Monday we wrote presentations about ourselves, to put up on the big World Map in the shared room, before we even knew we were going to work with maps and geography! We have also worked with vocabulary related to travelling, using dictionaries. Journey was a tricky word for some of us, but now we know that it is just another word for a trip. We have talked about some of the countries we have visited, but we still have lots of work to do with our atlases and maps!

This is what we look like! Some pupils were absent, so they will write their presentations later during the unit.

We spent one lesson talking about what travelling in Belgium was like 100 years ago – before there were fancy cars and fast airplanes that would take you far. What was it like to travel when you didn’t have much time to travel and couldn’t afford expensive trips? Where did you go if you only had a bicycle? What was it like to take a train to the seaside and see the sea for the first time?

Of course we have worked with mathematics and language activities and we have had our PE and swimming lessons too! It didn’t take long before we were back in our normal hard working atmosphere here in Upper Primary. Lots of questions have been asked, lots of answers have been found, lots of discussions have taken place and lots of learning have been going on, already! We had a really nice week!

Happy New Year, everybody! We think 2015 will be a fantastic year!

Happy holidays!

Friday evening, last week, the second group of ISG parents and pupils went to the Observatory in Ghent and learned more about space. The first group went there two weeks ago. We say a big thank you to the volunteers working there, they taught us so many things! What a nice evening it was, we all gasped when we saw beautiful stars and planets and when we realized how huge the universe is. We used the big telescope, but it was very cloudy this Friday, so we did not see any stars, but only the golden dragon on top of the Belfort in the city centre. That was interesting as well.

These photos were taken during the first visit at the observatory.

This week we continued reading and discussing poems and lyrics and we added lots of autumn and winter words to our vocabulary. We have, of course, written our own winter poems – acrostic poems, rhyming poems and poems with repetition or metaphors – that we now proudly share with you in the hallway.

We walked to the Public Library in Ghent Monday afternoon, where we could only return books, not borrow any new ones, since there was a nationwide strike and many workplaces were affected. The library was one of them… We will go back and borrow new books in January instead!

On Tuesday we listened to the book “How the Grinch stole Christmas” and then we watched the movie. The pupils in both Lower and Upper Primary liked the story and they laughed a lot! We then shared our learning from our IPC-unit. This was our Exit point. Upper Primary pupils taught Lower Primary about volume, decibel and high and low pitch. Lower Primary pupils taught us more about ear size and explained why some animals have big ears and some have small ears. Interesting!

On Wednesday we continued our Exit point with a nice jamming session. Upper Primary pupils used their knowledge about orchestras and made sure that all the instruments were placed in the right way in front of the conductor. After the concert it was time for games, games, games. The pupils had brought games from home and shared them with their classmates. Dart, spelling games, spinning tops and lots and lots of fun – the pupils almost didn’t have time for their snack!!

On Thursday we had a chance to finish off our literacy assignments and continue working on the decorations for the Christmas Fair on Friday. The head of school, Miss Sonja, also came up to our classroom and gave us our Swimming certificates. At the end of the day we got our Mid-year reports. It was exciting to see how much we have learned since we started here in September. We are amazing pupils!

On Friday we went swimming in the morning. It was raining cats and dogs! We were absolutely soaking wet!! All the radiators in our classrooms were full with socks and gloves!

After lunch we made sure we were ready for the Christmas Fair! We were excited and maybe a bit nervous... The big room looked different with all the decorations and with all our guests – family members, volunteers and other guests. We sang, danced, read poems and did our best to make our parents feel happy and proud. English, German, Tamil, French, Dutch and Hebrew were part of the show. It was interesting - some of us recognised some languages, others had never heard them before. We talked a bit about International Mindedness, something we have discussed here in our Upper Primary classroom before. It is really interesting to share languages, cultures and traditions. Some of the pupils in Upper Primary have realized that in some of the mother tongues in the class you write and read texts from right to left and in others you write and read from left to right.

Then it was time to wish each other a happy holiday – and to say goodbye to the people that now leave ISG. We had prepared goodbye-cards and we all felt a bit sad when writing them, but we know:

Goodbyes are not forever.

Goodbyes are not the end.

They simply mean “I’ll miss you,

Until we meet again.”

Happy holidays! See you again in 2015!

December days...

The second-to-last week means that Upper Primary pupils have been working with guided reading, grammar, vocabulary, spelling and mathematics, just like we always do. But it also means that we start to prepare for the Christmas Fair next week. This week we have been practicing a lot because next week we will perform during the Christmas Fair and we all want to do our best! But the second-to-last week also means that we make sure that we have time for some unexpected and fun activities...

On Wednesday, for example, we had our end-of-term fun. We walked to the Christmas Market in the city centre to practice our ice-skating skills. Some of the pupils in Upper Primary practice ice-skating every week, one of the pupils practice ice-skating every day and other pupils tried ice-skating for the first, second or third time in their lives. It was tricky for some of us to just stand up on the skates, others were twirling around on the ice like it was the most easy thing in the world! We all had lots of fun and almost didn't want to go back to the school again! Luckily we remembered that the parents had prepared coffee morning, with lots of yummy food, and we we started thinking about that it was easier to walk. We ate delicious food!

Last week we printed our sound wave patterns on cards, to give to Pre-primary for their shop. Thursday afternoon it was time for the shop and Upper Primary pupils were as eager as Pre-primary pupils to shop, shop, shop!

The Personal Goal in IPC this month is to think about all the goals we have worked with so far: Respect, Co-operation and Resilience. We, the pupils in Upper Primary, show that we understand these words and that we practice them in our daily activities here at ISG. We every now and then put a post-it on our door, where we keep our own definitions of these words, and show with real-life examples that we are respectful, that we can co-operate and that we want to show more resilience. Parents, you are more than welcome to come and share examples that you see at home.

Parents, for the Christmas Fair could you make sure that boys wear smart pants and a white shirt/top and girls need to wear a dress. Thank-you and we look forward to seeing you all next Friday for some Christmas cheer!

Saint Nicholas came!!

It is December and some pupils in Upper Primary can't wait to see some snow here in Ghent. But, so far we haven't seen a single snowflake and today it rained... again!

Luckily we can spend a big part of our days in our classroom and work with interesting things! This week we started off with a Technology task where we had to read and follow instructions and build an instrument. Pupils in Year 3 built a panpipe (or panflute, if you prefer) and pupils in Year 4, 5 and 6 built a rubber band guitar. The pupils were focused and did their best to make nice instruments. They did not only work hard to make them look nice, but they also did their best to make sure they sounded nice as well. Pupils in year 4, 5 and 6 had a real challenge when they tried to tune their guitars - rubber bands are not always co-operating. At the end of the lesson we had a nice jamming session. You can see all the photos from this week, and a little video from our jamming session, here.

We finished off our lino block prints and now they hang in the hallway. If you pass them, take a moment to study them carefully. What you see are soundwave patterns! We also printed a few extra things, small cards that we will donate to Upper Pre-primary's shop. Their IPC topic is 'shopping', their shop is their Exit point and they will donate the money they earn to a good cause, and we of course wanted to support this fantastic initiative.

We have started practicing for the Christmas Fair, we now sing with Mr Simon every Friday to make sure it will sound fantastic! We have also started practicing something with Vedant's and Diya's mothers. We will not tell you what just yet, but we think you will like it!

We spent quite some time this week working with our guided reading. Miss Jackie and Miss Ana help us every week, so that everybody has a chance to read with a teacher. We work with follow up and we do our best to write full sentences, spell everything correct and summarise the texts in a good way. Of course we also focus on grammar in other ways, and this week quite many of us had to walk over to the bookshelf and fetch a dictionary to be able to use words in the right way in a sentence or explain them correctly.

We also want you to know that we are very eager to get a star for a healthy snack on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The pupils get ready for their breaktime, they then come back in to the classroom and enjoy talking to each other and eat their snack before it is time to go out and play. Some pupils wish every day was Healthy Habits's day every day, and the teachers at ISG think this is a lovely idea and support pupils bringing healthy snack every day!

Last, but not least, you will not miss the fact that we had a very special guest visiting us here at ISG today... Saint Nicholas came and he gave gifts to all of us, even to the teachers! Everyone got to hear a nice comment from Saint Nicholas, and also a reminder of something they should try to improve. Look at the lovely photos here! The pupils were happy but exhausted afterwards and the last lesson on Friday, music class with Mr Simon, was a bit difficult for the youngest pupils at ISG. Some pupils in Lower Pre-primary almost fell asleep...

We wish you a lovely weekend! See you next week!

Our hard work paid off

Upper Primary pupils have shown resilience, they have accepted that experiments does not always work out the way we plan and they have been willing to try again!

We went back to the experiment with the 'spoon necklace' - we tried a different type of string this time and we did the whole experiment one more time and this time it worked! The pupils could hear a clear difference in volume when they compared the sound of the chiming spoons far away from the ear and with the string really close to the ears! We wrote a conclusion that explained what happened. The sound vibrations travel through the spoons and through the string and we directed the sound straight inside the ear, that is way it sounds louder!

Our volume experiment lead us over to our pitch experiment! There is a difference between volume and pitch, and we can explain it! A sound can be soft (low volume) or loud (high volume), but a soft sound can be a high-pitch sound or a low-pitch sound and the same with a loud sound. The pitch has to do with the frequency, how fast a sound wave vibrates.

We now felt lucky and continued with a second experiment. This time we wanted to investigate if the length of string affected the pitch of a sound. We built a set of chimes by using a stick, some spoons (exactly the same size, since we wanted it to be a fair test) and string that we doubled each time we tied a spoon to the stick. We rested the stick across the back of two chairs that we put on two desks of the same height.

When we used a fourth spoon to strike the back of each spoon, we could hear a difference in sound between the shortest and the longest string. The pitch changed. The longer the string, the lower the pitch and the shorter the string, the higher the pitch. Vibrations travel faster alonger the shorter string, so the note is higher.

We continued with more science experiments this week, and you are welcome to ask your child about them. We have built string telephones, compared the sound in empty and almost full bottles and we have worked with acoustics and how to absorb sounds. All the experiments worked out really well and we are happy, because now we could write really good scientific texts. We have explained what we are investigating, what we predict will happen (hypothesis), what we do during the experiment and what the result is (conclusion). We have made labelled drawings in our IPC-books and we have documented our work in a good way. You can see all our photos from this week here!

We had a lot of IPC during this week, but of course have we done lots of other things as well! We started the week reviewing what we have done in numeracy this autumn, and Thursday it was time for a numeracy test! The pupils worked really hard and they all did their best! The pupils have worked with their independent writing samples, grammar, reading and follow-up as well. There are also PE-lessons, swimming classes, music lessons, Dutch and French classes to attend, birthdays to remember and good-bye cards to prepare...

Resilience needed...

We are still working with our IPC-topic 'Turn it up' in different subjects. In Literacy we have worked with useful vocabulary and with texts about sound, noise and silence. In Science we made a long decibel line in our shared room, to show how quiet or how loud different sounds around us are. We also know that there is a pain limit, that sounds start to hurt at a certain level (around 130 dB) and that we can damage our ears if we listen to too loud music or if sounds around us are too loud. We also tried to do another experiment, but since the walls here at the school are really thick, it didn't really work out as planned... again! But, since we are resilient, we will not give up, but try again! There are still many exciting tasks to work with in our unit! More sound experiments will come!

Tuesday afternoon we took a walk down to the Public Library in Ghent. We borrowed many books and we have to confess that the walk back to school was a bit slower than the walk down to Ghent Zuid. But we now have lots of lovely books in our two 'Public LIbrary books' boxes and the pupils are so eager to sit down and read them! It was absolutely worth the hard work!

We have worked with fractions in numeracy, and for the ones working with fractions for the first time, it has been a challenge. Pupils in year 4, 5 and 6 revisited the topic, but now on a more challenging level. We have worked with different strategies and looked at different ways of explaining what a fraction of a thing of a number is, what equivalent fractions are and how we can reduce fractions.

Then we worked hard in literacy as well. Apart from the guided reading, the grammar and the English skills work, we have also been writing recounts. We have looked a model texts and used them to write good recounts. The pupils worked really hard and did their best writing. The whiteboard was full with useful words and facts! Upper Primary pupils wrote about the trip to the Sound Factory or the walk to the Public Library. Miss Jenny and Miss Catherine were impressed!

We have also started printing with our cool sound wave patterns on lino blocks. It looks fantastic and the result will be even more amazing. Once we have finished off the activity we would like to share our beautiful artwork with the rest of the school and hang it up on the wall in the hallway. Keep your eyes open! We hope you will like it! You can see some photos from the art lesson and other lessons here!

During the PE lesson, the pupils really were acrobats this week! They were building human statues and Miss Jenny was impressed when she heard what they had been doing during the lesson, she only saw the warm up...