From the Primary Principal

Dear Parents,

It was lovely to see so many of you at this week’s Primary Share. Those of you who were able to attend will already know that our first graders are teaching the rest of the school about Kelso’s Choices.

Kelso’s Choices: This is a conflict resolution wheel that helps children to consider different strategies for resolving problems. In the coming weeks, we will encourage all our students to consider these ideas. Please feel free to reinforce some of these strategies at home. When there is a conflict you can

• Ignore it
• Make a deal
• Tell them to stop
• Apologize
• Share and take turns
• Go to another game
• Wait and cool off
• Talk it out
• Walk away

Recyclable Lunch-boxes: On Monday, November 16th, we will begin our lunch-box initiative. The four food providers who serve BIS have been given different coloured lunch-boxes and metal cutlery. These lunch-boxes will be collected daily, so that they can be cleaned and re-used. If this initiative is successful, we will roll it out to the rest of the school. As always, we will continue to encourage children who bring packed lunch from home not to throw their leftovers away. This is so that  you can see how much they have eaten when they get home.

Lost Property: Our Grade 4 students are busy designing a lost property station as part of their summative assessment for their unit of inquiry. We hope that the winning design will be constructed by our students and used as a central collection point for our school.

Community Recycling Centre: We are in the process of establishing a partnership with a local company to help us manage our waste more efficiently. If all goes to plan, we will select a handful of materials that can be collected here at school, such as cans and plastic bottles, and then distribute these recyclable materials to genuine markets around Bali. We will keep you posted on the progress of this initiative.

Writing: The primary students are continuing to develop their writing skills. Building on the success of our recent author visit, children have been creating compelling story characters. This year, our students will be learning to look at writing through different lenses such as sentence fluency, word choice, conventions, organisation, ideas, voice and presentation. We hope to be able to display a developmental continuum of narrative stories using these criteria in due course.

As always, thank you for your ongoing, positive support. Remember you only have 3 days of school next week, as Thursday and Friday are professional development days for teachers. I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible later this month, at our workshop on International Mindedness. Please mark you calendars for Monday, November 23rd.

Warm regards,
Mr Alan Lorenzini
Primary Principal