Counting down...

These last two weeks of Term 1 have started very well, with all of the students very engaged with their inquiries and excited to learn with their friends at school.

It has been a particularly busy week for Miray, starting with her blog post about one of her favorite television programs. Below is the tweet from our class Twitter account (twitter.com/jiesgrade6).

Miray blogged about a #greatstory, @digeryarimatv! http://t.co/UwzTZJtXg4 #Turkey
— 'Uniters' JIES Gr5/6 (@JIESgrade6) December 8, 2014

Sule and Miray worked together to measure the area of the school playground as part of Sule's inquiry into 'how many soccer balls would it take to fill the playground?'.

Congratulations to Suheda for completing XtraMath! Each student in our class practices XtraMath daily and can easily access their account from the JIES Grade 5/6 wiki (jiesgradefiveandsix2014-15.wikispaces.com).

It was difficult to keep the secret, but many students at JIES planned a surprise birthday party for Bushra!

Of course, finishing inquiries and preparing for the Winter Performance Celebration of Learning takes quite a lot of work. The class is collaborating to write a trilingual script about alien abduction and cultural perspectives over time. View their work in progress by clicking this link!

They also made a fun discovery while writing their script:

We have discovered the chat function in Google Docs. BAHAHAHA!
— 'Uniters' JIES Gr5/6 (@JIESgrade6) December 12, 2014

We're very excited for next week! See you on Thursday!

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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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Making, creating, cocreating

This week has been very special for me because I am seeing the students grow closer to our motto for the year, 'Inspired and Independent'. They have started more challenging inquiries by themselves, often finishing their snacks quickly to have more time to work.

Another important goal in the beginning of the school year is to build a sense of team, and they are doing just that. By choosing to inquire, make, and learn together, they are practicing valuable social and communication skills. Just as importantly, they are having fun.

This week, I introduced our Carnival Games Tycoon Probability Challenge:

The goal is to design and build carnival games for the younger students to play, but the challenge is to test the games to ensure that the tycoons (Grade 5/6 students) get back all of their tokens.

It will be a great chance for them to use their mathematical thinking skills, data collection, and perform probability experiments. I suppose, however, that they are more excited about the artistic design elements at the moment!

Bushra thought that the key to getting students excited to pay tokens to play games is having great prizes, so she went to work right away on those.

She also designed and built a magnetic claw hand for her carnival game!

We also started building a token machine. Sule and Miray are planning to play 'junken' to get more tokens from the ticket machine. It's hard to explain in a blog post, so you'd better visit the carnival to see how it works!

The students are also busy working on essay blog posts about human rights. Because expository writing is so important, we will devote a lot of effort to becoming fluent essayists and bloggers this year. I look forward to publishing their major work soon!

For now, please enjoy their journals and other posts on our blog, 'Uniters' JIES Grade 5/6.

Early in the school year, I sent all parents a link to their child's grade sheet. It has been updated regularly with scores for homework completion, spelling tests, reading comprehension quizzes, and math tests. Please find the link in your email and have a look at your child's grades!

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