A Word from Mr. Lorenzini

December 17, 2010

Dear Parents,

Thank you for all your support this year. Here are some final messages before we break up for Winter. This letter can also be found on the classroom blogs.

Frauenhaus: Thank you for your generous support. On Thursday, a representative from this organization received all our gifts. She again expressed her appreciation to the school community for caring. This year we will build on this initiative with the help of one of our parents, Antje Laqua. At regular intervals, we will send all our lost property to Frauenhaus and collect women's clothing too. More information about this will be provided in due course.

Bike Stands: When we return from the Winter Break, we will have a new place to park our bicycles. All the bike stands will be moved so that they stand under the cover of the front of the school building. Apart from the fact that this will keep everything dry, it is a necessary change in preparation for all the upcoming work on the Elementary School Extension. This project will commence on the March 7^th, during Ski Week.

Report Card Changes: Thank you to everyone who was able to join Mrs. Coffey earlier this month. She provided a snapshot of the professional development the teachers recently received as well as an overview and explanation of the newly formatted report card. The feedback we received was extremely positive.

Conference Reminder: Finally, please remember that our next day of scheduled conferences is on February, Thursday 3^rd. These are different to the Student Led Conferences that were held in November. These are adult to adult conferences to discuss student progress, and they are scheduled a week after you receive the report cards.

Thank you again for all your support during this semester. May I also take a moment to thank everyone for all the personal words of kindness I have received in the past few weeks since my family's upcoming move was announced. I wish you all an enjoyable and peaceful Winter Break.

Warm regards,

Alan Lorenzini

Elementary Principal

Literature Circle Presentations

We have finished our first Literature Circles and have been working in our groups to share the book with the rest of the class.  Our presentations were supposed to tell about the book's characters, setting, and plot.  All of the groups decided to do this through a dramatic play! 

The last group's presentation will be posted in the near future!

German News - Intermediate 2/Advanced - Frau Winkelmann

Dear Parents, liebe Eltern,

We finished our unit where we learned about friendship. These are the things we did.

We:

                        -       discussed the role of friends,

-       reviewed the perfect tense with "sein" und "haben" (Ich bin nach Paris gereist. Ich habe ein Souvenir gekauft.),

-       sequenced stories and events,

-       wrote letters to a pen pal,

-       played cooperative games ( games with no winner).

In November we made lanterns for St. Martin. We talked about the story behind this German tradition and voted on what kind of lantern we should make. Two students of our class presented a short news show in our St. Martin's assembly. Good job, Sebastian and Bart!

Last week we started our third unit in the Deutschmobil 2. It is about comparisons, records and animals.

Currently, we are working on an animal project. A lot of fun, information and hard work!

Have a wonderful and relaxing holiday season!

Andrea Winkelmann                                              

4th Grade Will Be Visiting The 3rd Grade Christmas Markets!

Tomorrow, Wednesday,  April 15th, 4th grade students will be visiting the 3rd Grade Christmas Markets after recess.  3rd Grade has been working hard to create Christmas Markets in their classrooms and they have invited us to come and buy!  Remember to bring money if you would like to purchase some goodies from their markets.  Bringing coins instead of notes will make it easier for the 3rd graders to make change from your purchases.

4.2 Created Voicethreads!

Take a look and listen to the voicethreads that we created in groups after we figured out how to use our Easi-Speak Microphones!  We were able to put a picture to our recordings!

http://voicethread.com/share/1596352/

http://voicethread.com/share/1580918/

http://voicethread.com/share/1596351/

http://voicethread.com/share/1580932/

Elementary News

Please click on the link below to view our 1st Edition of the 'Elementary News'

http://voicethread.com/share/1590175/

Data Handling

We have been looking at data handling in our math lessons recently.  We learned that working with data is a process.  So far we have asked a question, collected the data, organized and represented the data. 

Today we looked at how people represented their data and created some criteria together for how we can best represent data so that it can be easily interpreted by others. 

Next we will describe and summarize the data.  Finally we will interpret the data to make conclusions so that we can start the process again and ask new question.