Grade 5

October 2011

Grade 5 ISB Lower School Specialists’ Newsletter From the Principal

Welcome to the newest edition of our Specialist Newsletters!

Inside this issue: French/Spanish

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Art

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Serbian/Music/EAL

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Serbian MT/PE

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Our specialists teachers (also referred as single-subject teachers) play an integral and important role in the Primary Years Program. The arts, physical education, and language study are essential elements to a comprehensive and holistic primary school education. The content of these subjects is transdisciplinary in nature, meaning that the skills and concepts developed by specialist teachers have relevance throughout the Lower School curriculum and our students’ lives beyond school. Our specialists teachers work alongside our classroom teachers to develop lessons that are both interesting and connected to the classroom Units of Inquiry. For this reason, we think it is important that we keep our parents informed about the teaching and learning taking place in our specialists classrooms. You will receive the specialist newsletter six times during the school year. As always, if you have any questions about your child’s education, feel free to contact us. Be sure to schedule individual conferences with all teachers during parent conferences on November 22. I look forward to seeing you all here for Parent/Teacher conferences, Brian H. Lettinga Lower School Principal

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French Dear fifth grade parents, Here is the second newsletter for the French class in order to keep you informed about the things we have been learning during the last period.

Dubravka Kostanjsek French Teacher

Our island is very much alive now! After some research and reflection, we decided it would be located in the Indian sea, south of India and that it would be a deserted island. We described it, described its climate, decided what animals and plants could be found there (some real and some imaginary), decided what responsibilities we would have and we also set a list of essential agreements about our behavior while “living” there. We are now working essentially on our interactions, creating different situations in our “everyday life” there. All of these activities demanded a lot of research and helped us work on our listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. For Halloween, we reviewed some of the vocabulary linked to that topic through different games allowing us to develop our listening and speaking skills. It will be my pleasure to see you all soon and discuss your child’s work and progress. Thank you for your time and please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Spanish

Snezana Dimitrijevic Spanish Language

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Grade five Spanish students are currently applying the vocabulary and grammatical concepts we have been practicing since the beginning of the year in various reading and writing activities. We’re concentrating on applying grammatical concepts and vocabulary accurately in writing. So far the students have demonstrated a very good command of both grammatical concepts and vocabulary through Microsoft PowerPoint presentations in which they introduced themselves and various members of their family and classmates, pointing out not only basic personal information, such as name, age and nationality, but also writing about what the interests of each member of their family and classmate are. Both beginners and more experiences students did a wonderful job experimenting with the language and using new vocabulary in their presentations. After completing the extensive Family unit, we started by talking about different jobs and moved to discussing where people work. Currently students are preparing to make a video using dialogue they made up about jobs in various professions “En Hotel Hyatt en Belgrado”.

Art We continued with working on our standalone unit How We Express Ourselves and responding on the artists who work in non-representational manner. Students were able to choose between 6 artist and they chosen to respond to Marc Chagall’s work, Pablo Picasso’s work, Juan Miro’s work, Edvard Munch’s work, and Frederik Hundertwasser’s work. Students practiced achieving their objectives value and space (positive and negative space, overlapping, and perspective) while making their sketches with pencils. Children continued with transferring their sketches into their paintings. Those were excellent practices as they gave the children an opportunity to develop their planning skills as well as it gave them an insight into a process that many artists often go through. We have seen many interesting approaches in interpreting work of an artist of students’ choice. Children approached that seriously and studied hard until they found out ways of transferring their sketches into another media while keeping the essence of those. Ones who finished earlier were given an opportunity to try themselves in charcoal drawing during the week before Halloween, having that for a theme for their work. Also, students practiced expanding their understanding of a chosen artist’s style by drawing the still life compositions and interpreting instead of representing them. That was quite a challenge, but it was worthwhile as that gave us all an idea where we were with learning in this unit. We will continue with expanding understanding of the difference between interpreting and presenting in the following weeks. Grade 5A students have classes on Tuesdays. Grade 5B students have classes on Mondays.

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Svetlana SpasicGlid Art

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Serbian as a Foreign Language

Sonja Stanisic Serbian language Teacher

Grade 5 students continued the year with the same degree of enthusiasm as displayed at the beginning of the year. The simulation project is still running strong. The students have described their individual apartments as well as built them. We are still collecting cardboard boxes in order to secure the individual apartments into a structure that will represent the building. We have since split into groups researching: animals, plants, transportation and stores. Two students are responsible for each section; one describing real possibilities and the other creating imaginary ones specific to the area we selected for the building. When that is completed we will move on to drawing a map and describing the climate conditions. We have assessments in reading, writing and speaking during and following the completion of each separate component. This project has allowed the Serbian Foreign Language class to connect with the previous two homeroom units granting students a deeper understanding of the units of inquiry.

Music The fifth grade students are continuing to work on their “Recorder Karate” belts and have memorized several challenging songs. They have also been working on developing their singing voices and a two part song to celebrate Winter. Rebecca Brink Music Teacher

EAL

Visnja Plecas EAL Teacher

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Our focus continues to be on developing writing skills that will enable the students to write different types of texts for different purposes. In addition, one of the goals in EAL class is to expose the students to a wide range of quality children’s literature. In October, Grade 5 students read great stories that deal with important issues such as homelessness, war, family, pollution and the human environment. Serbian Mother Tongue students in EAL also read about Margaret Richards, a hero of the environment. We discussed her actions against a large oil company in her struggle to curb pollution and in support of human rights. The discussions revolved around important environmentalist issues and the students described her activities in writing.

Serbian Mother Tongue Učenici petog razreda su u proteklih mesec i po dana na časovima srpskog jezika u sklopu konekcije sa nastavnom jedinicom o tipovima državnog uređenja, kojom su se učenici bavili u svojim razredima, učili o dinastiji Nemanjić i srednjovekovnom periodu srpske istorije. Najistaknutije vladare smo upoznali kroz bajke Svetlane Velmar Janković, objavljene u sklopu knjige „Knjiga za Marka“. Kroz ove bajke su učenici vrlo lako uspevali da zapamte većinu istorijskih informacija. Neke od bajki koje smo čitali su „Plavetna ribica“, „Dečak i soko“, „Biljka čudotvorka“. Ove priče smo takođe iskoristili za uvođenje novog vokabulara. Kao završni projekat učenici su napisali svoju bajku o vladaru po izboru, trudeći se da u nju uključe što više istorijskih podatke koje su naučili.

Milena Jovanovic Serbian Language Teacher

Physical Education Dear Lower School Parents, During the last month, we have dedicated our time to exploring systems in the human body, muscle groups and understanding how regular physical activity influences our health. We learned how to measure our heart rate and how exercise stimulates our heart beat and how to improve the efficiency of the respiratory system. Also, we have just finished the soccer unit, where we emphasized the importance of teamwork, fair play and respect for each other. Starting this month we will focus on developing basic motor skills. We are emphasizing correct motor control when throwing, catching, passing, and dribbling in order to familiarize ourselves with different sizes and types of balls. We are also going to repeat and practice rope jumping techniques and disc throwing.

Before we start with the climbing wall to work on The level of difficulty will will be placed on the wall esting and challenging.

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upcoming gymnastics unit, we will use our balance, muscle strength and coordination. be controlled using different obstacles that to make the whole experience more inter-

Ivana Grujicic PE Teacher