Primary eNews – April 1, 2021

April 1, 2021April 1, 2021 Primary Secretary Grade 3, Grade 4, Parent Information Session, Preschool

“Managing Tech at Home” Virtual Parent Information Session

Dear Parents,

Based on our parent survey completed earlier this school year, almost 50% of you are interested in finding out more about technology and digital citizenship in the PYP. Please join us over zoom on Thursday the 8th of April to find out more about how technology supports teaching and learning, what technology looks like at our school and how you as a parent can support your child in being a digital citizen including health and well being, responsible usage and protection.

Grade 3 UOI: Learning Through Comics!

The Grade 3 students have been exploring a wide range of new and interesting apps to support their learning throughout the year, with amazing results for each new app! Our latest discovery is the Pixton app, which has enabled us to not only create Avatar Yearbook photos (also for all BIS students and Staff!), but some fun comics, too. Creating comics is a fun way to extend learning across the curriculum and involves all the elements of a good story – a setting, characters, and a plot. It also allows students to experiment with other elements such as dialogue, facial gestures, and costume design.

Our current central idea is: “Organisations and individuals work together towards having an impact on local and global problems”. In relation to our Unit of Inquiry, students have been creating comics as a way of sharing their learning and innovative ideas for taking action. Here are some of our favourites:

Grade 3 Indonesian Studies – Supporting BAWA!

Earlier this week, the Grade 3 students were privileged to have a guest speaker from BAWA joining our Indonesian Studies Zoom. Ibu Cynthia from BAWA shared information about their organization and how they continue to support animal welfare in Bali.

Grade 3 students really show their interest in animal-related topics. They really paid attention to the presentation session and were eager to ask questions and share their experiences. They were introduced to the Five Freedoms for Animals that hopefully will support them to develop one of the learner profile attributes to be a caring person.

The presentation session gave the students an opportunity to realize the problems related to Bali dogs. It also gave the students a model of how we, as humans, can work together as an organization to take some real action to solve problems around us.

Many thanks to Ibu Ina for this wonderful opportunity – the BIS students have made a donation to show our support. Go team BIS!

Unit in Preschool

This term in preschool the students have begun their unit, ‘Understanding the properties of materials means that we can use them in different ways.’

To ‘tune in’ we inquired into the properties of paper. We explored that by using different techniques we can change the shape of paper and the function. We could tear, fold, pleat, rip, cut, and weave paper. We learned by folding or changing the shape of paper we can make it stronger. We found ways to make paper fly by changing its shape.

Using this developing knowledge we solved challenges e.g. make a chair strong enough for the baby bear to sit on using only use paper, some tape, and our creativity. We also made paper bridges strong enough for our toys to cross over. We found by pleating paper we were able to make the paper stronger. We folded paper into towers to hold books. We explored the best shape to get the strength to hold the most books.

We explored how water can change the property of paper by making ‘blooming flowers’.

The children used paper to create pieces of art inspired by Henri Matisse.

Lots of learning this week by the preschool students☺

The Preschool Team

Grade 4 Persuasion through Advertising

Grade 4 students have been exploring the notion that “people can create and manipulate messages to target specific audiences”.

During literacy, and supported by the library, students have identified the different structural features of advertisements and news articles.

They used a range of drawing techniques, including digital tools, to demonstrate their understanding and create simple advertisements.

Students extended their understanding to analyse news articles.

Paying close attention to headlines, captions, subtitles, leading sentences, text and conclusions, they attempted to separate REAL news from FAKE news. The 5 “W” questions and “how” helped us to ask questions critically thinking about what was being written.