From the Principal

April/May/June 2012

ISB Lower School Specialists’ Newsletter

Inside this issue:

French/Spanish 2

Art 3

Serbian/Serbian MT 4

Music/EAL 5

EAL 6

PE 7

A great example of this is when your children ‘connect’ their school learning with something that happens when they are at home or out and about with the family. Our specialists teachers work alongside our classroom teachers to develop lessons and learning opportunities that are both interesting and connected to the classroom Units of Inquiry. Our specialist teachers work alongside our classroom teachers regularly to find connections between subjects and even participate in field trips when the connec-tion is natural. For this reason, we think it is important that we keep our parents informed about the teaching and learning taking place in our specialists’ classrooms. You will receive our specialist newsletter six times during the school year. As always, if you have any ques-tions about your child’s education, feel free to contact us. Enjoy your summer holiday. I look forward to seeing you all here on the Lower School campus, Brian H. Lettinga

Gr. 2

Welcome to final edition of our Spe-cialist Newsletters. We have had a great school year here at ISB! Our specialist teachers (also re-ferred as single-subject teachers) play an integral and important role in our Primary Years Program. The arts, physical education, and lan-guage study are essential elements to a comprehensive and holistic pri-mary school education. The content of these subjects is transdisciplinary in nature, meaning that the skills and concepts developed by special-ist teachers have relevance through-out the Lower School curriculum and our students’ lives beyond school.

French

Page 2

Newsletter Title

Dubravka Kostanjsek

French Teacher

Milica Rkulovic Spanish Teacher

Spanish

Dear second grade parents,

Here is the last newsletter for the French class for this school year.

Since you’ve last heard from us, we continued learning about cities and villages

practicing different possible everyday communicative situations through various

oral and written activities. Right now, we are finishing this Unit and we are making

board games about cities and villages that will allow us to review everything we

learned. Until the end of the school year, we will be reviewing all of the most im-

portant contents we have covered since September.

Thank you very much for all of your support and collaboration throughout this

school year.

I wish you nice and exciting summer holidays!

See you next year!

Grade two Spanish students have been busy describing. We started the unit by

learning the names of different body parts in Spanish and quickly moved to

attaching adjectives to them and writing descriptions. Throughout the unit we

talked about which verbs are used to describe people, we practiced saying

“neither nor” and using quantifiers, as well as recognizing how adjectives, or just

their ending, change depending on the gender of the person being described.

The students enjoyed playing Guess Who in Spanish, as well as practicing vocabu-

lary through different oral and writing activities.

Page 3

Art

Svetlana Spasic-

Glid

Art

Grade 2 students were engaged in drawing, painting, and making forms, while learning

about color, symmetrical balance, asymmetrical balance, and form. Also, we organized a

grade 3-5 Art Show at the Middle School, which students had an opportunity to visit during

their art classes.

Students have continued to learn about 19th century art and the changes that were hap-

pening in art in Serbia at the time. Children did observational drawing and made their col-

lage projects. The focus of those activities was for them to position the objects in their com-

positions in the same way that they were placed on the tables, taking into consideration

shapes and sizes. Also, the children made their self-portraits with play dough while learning

about the proportions of the human body.

Grade 2A students have classes on Tuesdays.

Grade 2B students have classes on Thursdays.

Serbian as a Foreign Language

Page 4

Newsletter Title

Ivana Jovanovic

Serbian language Teacher

Grade 2 successfully completed their unit about a city/village. This unit was fulfilled

with learning opportunities as we emphasized the oral communication. Each student

created a small convenient store and had an opportunity to communicate both as a

shopkeeper and as a customer. It was great to see our classroom looking as a small

market and students buzzing around and speaking Serbian.

Currently we are working on simple sentences and clothing items. Along with describ-

ing clothing, we are reviewing colors and sizes. As students become more confident

with the target vocabulary and the sentence fluency, we will add some more new

words to our vocabulary and practice physical descriptions.

Entering the last stretch of the school year, we will use every spare moment to review

vocabulary learned and our final activity will be related to summer vacation – we will

learn “summer” vocabulary, how to write a postcard, and make a packing list.

Have a great summer!

Serbian Mother Tongue

Milena Jovanovic

Serbian Language

Teacher

U proteklih nekoliko nedelje drugi razred je vredno radio na časovima maternjeg

jezika, uvežbavajući čitanje i razumevanje pročitanih tekstova. Pročitali smo knjigu

„Priče o princezama“. Ova knjiga podeljana je u par kratkih poglavlja koja su jako

pogodna za vežbanje usmenog i pismenog prepričavanja i uvođenje koncapata

vremena i mesta dešavanja radnje. U pisanju smo naučili da svoje priče podelimo

na uvod, sredinu i kraj, kao i koje informacije pišemo u ovim pasusima. Takođe,

kako školsku godinu privodimo kraju, bili smo zauzeti i raznim procenjama znanja

koje smo usvojili ove godine. Trenutno privodimo kraju učenje o Stefanu

Lazarevicu, koju obrađujemo kao konekciju sa nastavnom jedninicmo o

Kalemegdanu, koju učenici obrađuju sa svojim nastavnicama.

Page 5

Music

Visnja Plecas

EAL Teacher

Ljudmila Janicijevic

Music Teacher

Another eventful year is coming to a close. Throughout the year we were fine-tuning our musical taste, played a variety of instruments, went on a number of musical journeys to faraway places, met many interesting artists, and grew in understanding and appreci-ation of this beautiful art. More importantly, we are still going strong. Grade 2 students are playing xylophones and keyboards, continuously improving their fingering technique. Aside from this, they are excited about ending this year with a guest appearance from the “More than Play” theater. Their artists are coming to ISB for the third time, slowly making their performances an ISB tradition when it comes to our music program. After Nutcracker and the Sleeping Beauty it will be exciting to see what they have in store for us this year and how our students respond in the role of an audience.

EAL

In the past month, Grade 2 students engaged in a few different kinds of infor-

mation gap activities. We focused on learning how to express position and de-

scribe spacial relationships. The point of these activities is to develop listening

and speaking skills. In a one-way information gap activity, one person has all the

information which they impart to the other students and the others have to ask

questions in order to gain the information that they need to fulfill the task. In

two-way information activities, neither of the participants has all the infor-

mation and they need to share in order to achieve their goal. The children,

working in pairs, did picture dictations. They had to draw pictures by seeking

and giving information, and following directions.

Page 6

High Beginners/Low Intermediate Group

In May we continued supporting the trans-disciplinary theme: How we organize our-selves – Systems and Services Unit, and its central idea: Systems are constructed to meet the needs and wants of people in communities. We introduced vocabulary related to describing different communities and focused on comparing a city and a village. The students created a Venn diagram, in order to see what different communities have in common. The inquiry led us into reading about vari-ous communities world-wide. The students compared their hometowns to Belgrade, focusing on vocabulary and phrases we use when comparing. We read a number of stories and talked about the setting, as in “The Mother Goat and Her Five Children”, “In the Stable”, to mention but few. Pull-out support included a guided reading station for Serbian EAL learners. Supporting the Unit of Inquiry, we continued reading leveled books. We focused on describing the setting, and retelling. In addition, we continued enhancing contextual understanding by reading illustrated books with more sophisticated vocabulary, providing word explanations and

developing dictionary skills.

Grade 2 Beginners:

In May, we continued creating our own sentences using newly acquired vocabulary, and reading leveled EAL books. We practiced describing pictures, and retelling events that frequently occur, using present simple tense. We read a number of picture books, in-cluding “I hate English”, focusing on new vocabulary and comprehension. The students were very interested in the story, and made personal connections with the main charac-ter talking about how they felt when they started learning English at ISB. Inspired by the book, the students created their own stories and presented them in class. In addition, we read and role-played “The Magic Fish”. In the beginning of June, we’ll start reviewing the material we have covered thus far.

EAL

Divna Stakic

EAL Teacher

Page 7

Physical Education

Marija Dimitrov

PE Teacher

Track and Field was the unit second graders worked on during May.

After a discussion about each event in this sport, our students focused on improving

their running and jumping skills.

We ran various distances: short, middle and

long, in order to improve our speed and endur-

ance. We practiced our agility starting from

different positions and we ran races starting

from standing and sprint starts positions.

A variety of exercises on hurdles prepared us

well for running over them. Our goal was not

to race against each other, but to overcome

hurdles without hesitation in our tries.

Relay races were something we all enjoyed a lot. We practiced running with a baton

and handing it off to our runners, as well as running our best for the team.

Throughout the unit we’ve learnt that people keep records of the results in Track and

Field and that the best results are called world’s records. We all were amazed with

the length of the longest jump by a man, (8.95m). We were curious to find out how

many jumps it would take us to reach that distance, so we measured the length of our

broad jump and calculated it. Aside from broad jump we practiced the proper taking

off and landing on technique for the long jump into the sand box.

The most important thing for our second graders is not to beat the world’s record yet,

but to give their best and become better in each try. But one day, maybe……………who

knows?!

Stay healthy through sports!