Life in the Scriptorium
After writing letters to oblates from the point of view of medieval monks, the grade 5’s try to “age” their manuscripts to make them look like antique parchments.
The Refugee Crisis
“History will judge us for turning our backs while people drowned”
This statement has provoked a desire for change among the Grade 7 students. They are no longer happy to sit back and ignore what is happening in Syria. We have been taking a close look at the refugee crisis and thinking about what we can do. We took part in a simulated Syrian journey to try and understand some of the decisions they are faced with: “I made it to Europe, but I had to make very difficult choices that maybe I wouldn’t have done if I was in that situation for real. I realise why refugees are trying to reach Europe and I really feel lucky.” Gianmarco. “I made it only after countless attempts but I had to sacrifice nearly everything I owned on the way. I also had to ignore people that were in need to avoid getting noticed by border security. Overall a very horrible experience which made me realise how hard it is for these refugees to reach safety.” Filippo R.
This week we are holding a formal debate to discuss whether countries should limit the number of refugees they accept and what are the alternatives. We have also been in touch with the organisation Still I Rise and we hope to collaborate with some of their students. Watch this space for more developments!
Rhiannon Thomas Grade 7 LA Teacher
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Lots of Busy Learners in Grade 4!
We have had a busy start in Grade 4! In Maths, we have been working on place value, estimating and multiplication and division. We have also written personal narratives and now we are focusing on settings in Language Arts. Lots of exploring about the Phoenician empire has been happening in Social studies.
In Art, we started the year by looking at Romero Britto, first creating our own self-portraits, then designing our own pictures in his style. This week, we have started looking at Miro and surrealism. We looked at his painting of the Harlequin and created our own surrealism pictures based around this carnival.
Grace Harrison
Grade 4G Teacher
Swimming Together in Grade 3
The final lines of the book “You Be You” by Linda Kranz say, ” We all have something special we can share. We can learn so much from each other! That’s what makes this world so colorful and beautiful”. The students in Grade 3 listened to this story as part of their Read Aloud program, then they learned to write it using pictures, and tell the story themselves using images and gestures to help remember the words. Finally, the students reflected on this theme in connection to their wishes and hopes for this year at school. They then made paper hand-fish, decorated them and added a speech bubble describing the things they want to do, learn or improve this year. Their work created a bulletin board under the title “We are all different fish, but we swim together in this school”.
Paola Gandrus
Grade 3 Teacher
AUTUMN ITALICA ART
Autumn gives us so many beautiful scenes of vibrant colours and textures! So to bring the outside into our classrooms for Autumn week, Grade 4 decided to take a moment to capture the season by creating a landscape which was decorated using the italica handwriting that we’ve been working on so far this term. The children loved working closely together, snuggled up on the floor making their mark collectively, which resulted in a stunning piece of art work. We thought that hanging it outside the dining room would be a good place to show it off to the rest of the school. We were delighted to discover that it had inspired some Grade 1 children to have a go at making their own pictures with letters, who took a trip upstairs to Grade 4 to show us their work.
Alison Horrobin
Grade 4A teacher
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it!”
The new Grade 8s have started the school year with some arguments! We have looked at where and why people argue and started working on how to structure our opinions and views in clear, meaningful ways. The topics have varied from the trivial (pizza or pasta? Hamburgers or hotdogs?) to the more serious (should we have free speech in school? Should 16-year-olds be allowed to vote?), yet we continue to circle back to the defining question of our time: do you put the milk or the cereal in first for your breakfast? As the debate rages on, we will move on to look at how rhetoric may be used to further your cause, whilst what logical fallacies are, and why they should be avoided. If this inspires the students to be unusually quarrelsome at home in the next few weeks we can only apologise!
Mr Osmundsen
