NEWSLETTER - JULY 2022

"It takes a village to raise a child"

This proverb signifies how an entire community of people must provide for and interact positively with children for those children to experience and grow in a safe and healthy environment.

Magic such as that on Inquiry Day doesn't just happen. Conscious effort is required to imbibe 21st-century skills day in and day out.

Fostering learner independence is the prime aim of students becoming lifelong learners. The Inquiry Day is one such event that saw a plethora of exhibits of learning in action. The students performed without inhibitions and with a sense of growing confidence before the parent body to showcase.

Creativity: Generating and testing new ideas. Being innovative, inventive and enterprising.

Critical Thinking: Looking at problems in new ways, making smart decisions and connecting to other subjects and ideas.

Collaboration: Achieving shared goals with others. Thinking together and harnessing the ideas, skills, and expertise of the group.

Communication: Sharing thoughts, ideas, questions, and solutions in powerful ways.

Contribution from all stakeholders is what makes teaching and learning successful. Parent- School partnerships are accomplished through strong collaboration between parents and the school.

Thank you for helping us and reiterating that learning has no boundaries. All this cannot happen without the extensive support provided by teachers who have worked relentlessly towards Inquiry Day.

Thanks

Manya Jain

Primary School Principal

"Experiential learning means learning by doing. Experience-learning first immerses learners in experience and then encourages reflection about the experience to develop new skills, new attitudes, or new ways of thinking". Kolbs {1994}.

This month, Seedlings, under the theme "Who we are," have experienced and reflected upon how our sense organs have helped us in our everyday life. Students have learned and enjoyed different classroom engagements like blindfold games, sensory booths, sensory paths, and many more. The UOI engagements have been designed with the collaboration of our specialists like the music, dance, and sports departments. Students have also learned how to read a pictograph.

Bar Graph: As we are doing who we are (relationships) Data handling was integrated in it. The learners understood the bar graph.They sorted their families into two types: big/joint and small/nuclear and collected data and represented it using a bar graph.

Manipulatives in education are physical and visual tools that can help students to learn about a concept. They can be anything physical that students use in a learning activity.

Manipulatives are especially helpful for a learner who best synthesizes information through an activity (kinesthetic learner) or through seeing a concept explained (visual learner).

An activity was conducted to help children understand Place value (Tens and Ones) using ice cream sticks. Anything which is easily available, like, straws, wooden sticks, pencils, crayons, sketch colors etc. can be used for this learning. To form a good base for students, we started counting from number One using our manipulative and made a bundle of ten in front of them. Every time introducing the next family, like from sixty to seventy, eighty to ninety and hundred, we would add on to our bundles of Ten. This also helped in understanding about how the value of numbers increases.

Taking the concept of Tens and ones specifically, we would use our groups of Tens and some single ice cream sticks and would count the ten-groups and the individual ice- cream sticks separately. An example for this is "I have five groups of ten, and four individual sticks, so there are 5 Tens and 4 Ones, making the number 54."

We also told our students that it is easier to count in the groups of ten, like twenty, thirty, forty, fifty to One hundred.

Its not just about math learning, using magic "e" wand we tried to make the learning of long - a sound fun filled. Students got a better idea of how the sound of "a" changed the moment an "e" was added at the end of a word.

Pronouns: To check the understanding of the students we did a group learning engagement called pronoun garden wherein students sorted the pronoun flower petals as per the subject pronoun they got and made a flower. From this learning engagement,their social skills and creative skills were enhanced.

Venn Diagram on healthy and unhealthy:

In this learning engagement flashcards were laid on the table, Learners picked the flashcard with their eyes closed and then sorted it into groups of healthy and unhealthy through a Venn diagram. Through this activity learners thought critically and accordingly expressed their opinion. This Learning engagement was transdisciplinary as Maths and UOI were integrated.

Punctuation marks activity- As to check student's prior knowledge, an activity on punctuation marks was done in pairs in the class where they arranged the jumbled words along with the correct punctuation mark to make a complete sentence. Hence, developing “Thinking skills” and “Social skills”.

Addition with regrouping- After an explanation of addition with regrouping, students were given a choice of forming their own numbers from the given manipulative and solving the sum. This way they practiced addition with regrouping and developed their “Creative thinking skills” and became “Knowledgeable”

Vocabulary enables us to interpret and to express.

If you have a limited vocabulary,you will also have a limited vision”

-Jim Rohn

Vocabulary Building Activity

To enhance vocabulary, students played with flash cards to build three-letter and four-letter words and were able to identify them and understand their meaning.This activity encouraged students to interact and communicate with each other.

TUNING IN ACTIVITY-

This month under the theme”How we express ourselves”, students were able to give their opinion according to their imagination and thought process about the visual images shown to them and they used their creative writing skills to express themselves.

They also have done reflection writing on inspirational story of famous dancer “Sudha Chandran” with reference to the performing arts.

Students were able to Compare and Contrast between Visual arts and the Performing arts in the form of a venn-diagram.

JUST A MINUTE-”If you can speak, you can influence ,If you can influence, you can change lives” Students developed thoughts and ideas and gathered information about a relevant topic and amalgamated all in their speech and delivered it with time boundation.

FUN LEARNING EXPERIMENT( BASED ON SOLUTE AND SOLVENT) “The true method of knowledge is experiment” and based on this thought our students conducted experiments based on solute and solvent and learnt the basic concept of saturated and unsaturated solution.This hands on experiment helped them in developing problem solving skills (thinking skills) and developed experimental approach..

PROVOCATION- Grade 4 developed provoking thoughts and opinions after attending a role play based on consumer rights and duties which instigated their thoughts to culminate the central idea for the unit HOW WE ORGANISE OURSELVES.

APPROACHES TO LEARNING ENGAGEMENT- Students were asked to organise their wardrobe/study table / cupboard as a part of tuning in activity and were asked to send the picture of it before and after organising. This engagement was not only a day long activity but was done purposely to enhance self - management skills.

Shark Tank - Your success will be determined by your confidence and fortitude. Budding entrepreneurs of grade 5 developed a business proposal for an idea that was close to their heart. It was clubbed with a JAM session where they had to pitch their proposals to the sharks seeking funds for their start-ups. Their pitch included their proposal, short explanation of expenses, how they were going to raise funds by offering equity. They also created handmade flyers to promote their start ups.

Learner Profile Engagement - Students did their research on the life of 6 prominent personalities from varied fields and time periods. The learning engagement created was to assign learner profiles to these personalities based on who they were and the kind of work they did. This learning engagement helped the learners identify the IB Learner Profiles predominant in their own personalities.

Colour Theory

Colour theory is both the science and art of using colours. It explains how humans perceive colour; and the visual effects of how colours mix, match or contrast with each other. Colour theory also involves the messages colours communicate; and the methods used to replicate colour.

Colour Wheel

Keeping this in mind, Colour wheel was introduced to grade 1 - 5,where grades 1 and 2 created ‘Colour wheel turtle’ and grades 3 - 5 created a traditional depiction of the colour wheel. Oil pastels and soft pastels were used to showcase the magic of blending by using primary colours only.

Projects based on Colour Theory

Classes 1 - 5 created art projects based on the concept of colour wheel. Whereas, Classes 1 and 2 created ‘Rainbow Fish’ using an aquatic theme, Class 3 - 5 indulged and took inspiration from artist Henri Matisse for their paper cut out art projects.

While Performing Arts allow children to develop creative passions, they simultaneously teach children language and communication skills, helping them to communicate effectively with others with confidence. Performing Arts are all about self-expression, exploring alternative options and embracing individuality.