Science & Numeracy Week

This was a busy and productive week. We started by rearranging the furniture in the classroom. We were all happy with the new arrangement.

Inspired by an activity at Edcamp Tokyo, the students wanted to to try a challenge. They tied ribbon to their wrists so that two people would be stuck together. It is possible to escape, but it takes creativity and cooperation.

Bushra and Suheda even tried staying tied together until they solved the puzzle, but it was a bit too inconvenient.

The Science & Numeracy Week activities were a hit as usual. I was working in the 'volcano balloon' room and captured pictures of Miray and Safiye working together on a fun chemistry experiment.

On Thursday, our class schedule cooperated with the weather, and we took our field trip to Yoyogi Park to conduct the students' Fashion Perception Survey. If you have a few minutes, please complete the survey!

It was inspiring to see all of the students acting with great confidence and enthusiasm! We published the survey online and were excited to see that Julia, from last year's grade 6 class, had responded!

In the next weeks, we will be completing all of our inquiry tasks so that we can 'kick off' the Exhibition. Please visit our Exhibition website for details!

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Stories connect us to the past

This week, the Uniters Grade 5/6 class began to focus on stories, specifically, personal histories. During our weekly trip to the Harajuku public library, I introduced them to the English language biography and reference section. Of course, there are many ways in which people share their stories, and our inquiries in the next several weeks will explore many of them.

The students were particularly interested in Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes as a unique perspective on the history of the world in the last two hundred years.

On Parent's Day, we were excited to reunite with Julia, who took a spelling pretest with us. This week was the start of a period of serious academic practice. Each class has a separate mathematics plan to focus on basic skills that will develop their numeracy and help them toward their best achievement on the International Schools Assessment in February.

I have also been impressed by general improvement in writing. All of the students are including more specific details and organizing their ideas in more fluent and understandable ways.

On Friday, the sixth grade class from Jinsho invited us to help them to interview foreign visitors in Japan. They are inquiring into attitudes and ideas about Japan around the world and our multilingual students were happy to help them.

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