We are in the final days of the school year with many events still coming up!
A quick reminder about Ghana Cup on Sunday May 19- Volunteers are still needed on the day.
Also our most coveted event for our fabulous Teachers is the Teacher’s Appreciation Luncheon which will be next Wednesday May 22nd. Our theme this year is “Destination Appreciation.” Each teacher will be given a passport and boarding pass as their invitations. If anybody has materials we can use that represent places around the globe we would greatly appreciate it. If you have any postcards, please kindly leave them with reception.
We are looking for lots of parents volunteers on the day for food, servers, recess duty, set up and clean up. Our parents really look forward to this each year, so we always like to make this a special day for them and all they do for us.
In order to make sure we have enough food, please make sure your class has 1 of each of the following:
1- Appetizer or Salad
1- Entree/Main Dish
1-Dessert
Each dish should serve about 8-10 people. Please have all the dishes labeled with your family name and we will have them ready after school for pick up. More detailed instructions are in the attached Sign Up Genius link. Food donations should be dropped off to the school by 11am. Any questions, please feel free to contact Liz or Polly from the PA.
Mock Middle Schools is off to a great start! Most students are really stepping up to the organizational challenge. Many are dutifully organizing materials into accordion files (thank you for supplying these!), most are effectively recording their reading each night, as well as completing their 4 math questions for each day. Thanks for your support! They say they are enjoying it so far… I hope you’re hearing good things at home, too!
I want to let you know that next week I am very excited to be on a professional development trip collaborating with teachers from a fascinatingly forward-looking school in Vietnam. Kathy Schiller, a longstanding teacher in the ZIS community, will be teaching in my place, as well as one day with Sheryl Schmidt, who is a newer teacher to ZIS. They will be the students’ “advisory” teachers next week, and will also teach them Geometry when they have that class. If you would normally notify me about something (late arrival, illness, etc.) please notify the ZIS reception instead at: lsrecep@zis.ch
Furthermore, upon my return, I will be working with five students from 5R, as well as another 7 students from fifth grade in the Model United Nations Program, as they go to Rome from May 20-23 to participate in the MUN Conference. Ms Schiller will continue with 5R at that time.
In this post, you’ll find an update of the Child Protection and Puberty lessons of this week, as well as a few words about fifth grade’s Mock Middle School, beginning next Monday.
Child Protection Lessons
This week we had two Child Protection lessons, as developed by our ZIS Counselors. The topic of the first lesson was communication. The students discussed three types of communication: aggressive, passive, and assertive. After discussing these we role-played different kinds of communication in everyday situations and then discussed that you might have to use assertive communication in situations to keep yourself safe.
For our second Child Protection session, the focus was touch. We approached the discussion by dividing touch into categories: Safe, Unsafe and Unwanted.
We defined these as:
Unsafe: Touch that can be hurtful, kicking, pushing etc., as well as touching of private body parts.
Safe: Touch that won’t be hurtful, and isn’t threatening.
Unwanted: Touch that you don’t want. It might not be ill intended, but you don’t want it, like too much tickling or affection in a way that feels uncomfortable.
We introduced The Touching Rule: No one should touch your private body parts except to keep you clean and healthy. We then discussed our “gut feelings”, trusting our impulses when we’re uncomfortable, and erring on the side of caution when we don’t know someone’s intentions.
Students spent some time individually making a list of trusted adults that they felt they could speak with if they ever had a disturbing experience in this way.
Finally, we outlined some safety steps:
Say words that mean NO
Get away
Tell an adult
Puberty
This week has also featured two lessons focusing on body changes, as described in last week’s newsfeed. Students were divided into two groups, by gender.
Boys watched this video:
Girls watched this video:
Our focus is on the physical and emotional changes that happen during puberty. We aim to take a scientific “just the facts” sort of approach. Additionally, students have the opportunity to submit anonymous questions so that we can address worries and wonderings sensitively.
Sex education is not part of this talk and so we may direct students to ask certain questions to their parents where necessary. Please be aware that your child may want to talk about what has been discussed in class.
Mock Middle School
As described on the newsfeed, next week we launch our Mock Middle School in fifth grade, as part of our process of preparing students for the transition. As students will be moving (with their current class group), from teacher to teacher for different subjects, organization can be a greater challenge. Many students may choose to purchase an accordion folder, like this, to keep their notebooks and work organized. Many will also prefer to have a pencil case of writing tools with them.
Home Learning will increase somewhat during this time. Students will be expected to be recording their nightly home reading (the expectation continues to be a minimum of a 1/2 hour per evening) in their agendas. Their agendas will be checked each morning. Additionally, students will receive 4 math problems per day, 4 times per week to complete. If the content is new for them, they may skip that problem and have a look at a solution the next day. Please support them in their organization to be successful with these responsibilities.
Many thanks for your support for your child’s home away from home!
We would like to thank you for being part of our exploration of the Seesaw platform. As we mentioned at the beginning of the process, we are exploring how we can best utilise this tool to capture and share student learning moments. We will be officially launching Seesaw with all classes across the Lower School in August for the new school year.
At this stage, we would like to hear from you. We have developed a short survey to gather feedback from the students, parents and teachers who have been exploring Seesaw. This feedback will help us develop and refine processes we will launch in August.
