I do hope everyone had a happy Chuseok holiday and is rested and ready to go again.
First off let us all welcome Emma to our classroom. She is new to Korea but not new to international schools. I am sure the students will do their best to make her feel at home and welcome to 5D.
Our schedule this week is as follows;
Monday Oct 5 - in school (day 1 - Band & Library)
Tuesday Oct 6 - virtual at home (Day 2 - Art)
Wednesday Oct 7 - virtual at home (Day 3 - Band)
Thursday Oct 8 - in school (day 1 - Band and Library) *** This is the makeup day from Aug 18th.
Friday Oct 9 - PD day for teachers, no school
This week we will complete our first published writings. I have now read over about 70% of the final drafts and what I see is quite varied. Some students have learned what I have been teaching and either put it in to their writing or attempted to. Others are still in the learning stage of this kind of in-depth writing, This is not unusual as it is most likely the first time that they have had to write a narrative that not only tells the story but also give the reader a theme, in-depth look at the characters and highly descriptive scenes. I have commented on all students who have shared their work with me.
I must ask all of you to please not be hovering during the home learning time, You are not helping your student since they will not get this when in school and I am expecting to be full time in school within the next month. One of the goals of grade 5 is to make the students understand their own learning and when help is needed to ask for it - in teacher talk, having their own agency. This should also be the entire time they are online learning. While this can be a hard idea, we are built to learn from our mistakes and no mistakes does not make us better - just more reliant on others. Please find other things to do while your scholar is on line. I am sure they will ask for help if they need it.
Students have band on Monday & Thursday but should NOT bring their instruments. We still do not have clearance for students to play instruments or sing,. We are expecting a change in this soon so please stay alert to this. While students are at home, they can play their instrument but need to be 1-2 feet away from the computer which needs to be pointing to them. This is quite a unique opportunity for students so I want to do the most we can when we are virtual.
This week is our first time we have library period so students should return all books in order to sign out more books for the rest of the next two weeks. Our next unit is on non-fiction reading and writing and I will be requiring them to find books for this unit of study. These books will go home as we continue with our 2-day on, 2-day off schedule. As we have no idea how long this will continue, being on top of this is VERY important.
I have sent an email to each student of the things I am still missing from them. Please help them locate these materials, finish the work or let me know when something is missing, The longer this takes the more impact it has on their learning. While there will be time to work on it on Monday, the only assignment that will be due on Monday is their THINGS I WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT ME poster and writing (the latter should have been completed about 5 weeks ago now). If something is lost let me know so I can try to replace it.
Parent - teacher conferences are in about two weeks so be on the lookout for emails about how to sign up for these. These emails will come from the ES office not from me.
Our new PYP unit is on Migration. This week students will need some help from you regarding your family tree and movement over time. Please assist when necessary. It is a neat unit and really gets students looking into their own backgrounds as wells the plight of many people over the world who are either forced or choose to migrate. This unit will go for about the next 6 weeks.
We continue our math unit on Multiplication and Division of whole numbers. Not surprisingly, some students have really picked this up while others are struggling even after three weeks of learning. As this is a unit that has a lot of impact for the rest of the year, we will work more and more on this over the next two weeks. The test for this will be next week sometime. We will do the pretest for the next unit, one of the two days we are in school this week.
For the first time since the start of the year, I have some pics to attach to this home letter. Have a look at the engineering challenge we did. There were some amazing outcomes with this. Over all everyone had fun and it worked really well with our design unit.
