November 29th, 2015
Dear Parents and Students,
The Dreaded Exams are over and we have seen
improvements across the board, although there have been a few exceptions where
students have not reached their potential and have had to write the test again.
Parents, please sign the communication
books as well as worksheets and the exam papers and send them back to school,
so that when you get the report card, it’s not such a surprise and any queries
can be dealt with timeously.
As said previously, the
worksheets are an indication of what your child is doing or not doing, as most
of the work completed is either done individually or in collaboration with
other students. Any incomplete class assignments
(worksheets) are to be completed as homework, at home.
Forms for the upcoming PTC on Saturday,
December 12, were sent home last week and have been trickling back. While I
understand that we are all very busy, please write something at the back of the
form in the NOTE section, be it a question, a suggestion or just an observation
of your child’s progress this semester.
We have a speech contest on Thursday
and have yet to choose the students we’ll send to the finals. Due to exams, we
were a bit late getting started. All the students have been given the story, ‘The
hungry baby’, which they have to prepare for Monday. I don’t expect them to
have memorized it, just read it. We will give everyone an opportunity to recite
the speech and choose the best 5, to represent room 504.
Thank you to the parents for supplying
the black shirts for our Christmas performance. We have decided to go with
luminous paint instead of the LED lights (which would have been so cool!)We
hope that you will be proud of us as we are trying to do our best given the
circumstances.
Moving
forward, we are on schedule with the work assigned and this week we will
complete the story ‘Ben’s Outdoor Adventures’. This story can be found in the
MSW level C book. (P124-133) This is the last story in this book and next week
they will receive their new books.
With all the activities going on, I
would like to add that the daily homework continues to be reading and
previewing the text. We spend so little time with our children and we are
practically cutting that in half due to school homework. A very interesting
article I read the other day https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/24/how-twisted-early-childhood-education-has-become-from-a-child-development-expert/ , reinforces my belief that children (and
adults) should be given free play time. The type of structured play we engage
in on a daily basis is causing us to lose our ability to express ourselves and
we are left with children who are waiting for us to tell them what to do, what
to say and what to think. There is no motivation and no innovation!
In our lessons a few weeks ago, we
read about the famous artist, Leonardo Da Vinci as well as the famous scientist, Sir
Isaac Newton. We discussed how they were able to come up with their ideas and
discovered that they had lots of free time! To do whatever they wanted to do!
An example of this is, the other day a
student came up to me at break and told me that she was bored! I told her to go
outside and play. She asked me what she should play. I said go outside and
think about what you want to play.
I will assign only the reading of the stories as homework, as an experiment, and see how far we get this week. J
HOMEWORK:
Monday: Read P124-133
Tuesday: Read P124-133
Wednesday: Read P124-133
Thursday: Read P124-133
Friday: Read P124-133
Have an amazing week,
Carmen
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