Singapore - Our Home: May 2012

Monday, May 28, 2012

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Sunday, May 13, 2012

School - Inquiry based learning

Snippets of what the school is doing Term 3 (G4)…...

Next Unit: Goods and Services

We are very excited to be starting our final unit next week. Very soon the students will be

absorbed in their business ventures and will enjoy many opportunities to collaborate in their

business groups to share their ideas. Over the next three weeks in their business

groups they will be involved in designing, making and advertising their products ready for

the market days. As part of this unit the students will utilize many skills and they have time to

reflect on the opportunities they have to take risks, communicate and be principled learners.

In week 8 the students will be involved in market days to sell the products they design and

produce as a team. More information about the market day will be in the school ebrief next

week, as we would like to invite all of the UWCSEA East community to come and enjoy

this event with us.

If you would like to share your business expertise with the Grade 4 students please

contact your class teacher. This could be experience of setting up a new business; how

people get the idea for their business, as well as the things that any entrepreneur needs to keep

in mind.

Mr Home will also be giving the students tips from his experience of business and things to

consider if you are offering a service to consumers.

Look out Singapore; the Grade 4 entrepreneurs are on their way!

Reading Unit

Next week we will start the reading unit ‘Social Issues Book Club.’ Initially the students will

establish their book clubs and explore the social issues in texts.

Throughout this unit we aim for the students to think about the following questions:

* How do I read with the lens of Social Issues inside of texts?

* How can I deepen my reading comprehension by questioning, empathizing and interpreting

while I read?

* How will talking with my Book Club help me become a better reader and thinker?

Please encourage your child to consider these questions in the readers they bring home to

share over the next few weeks.

Maths

At this stage of the year the students are revising the concepts covered in all areas of

math. This may be through investigations, student challenges and group activities.

Good Parental Resource from School

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Resources to support parents

View Pure is a tool to help eliminate comments/related videos from YouTube when showing them to kids. This does require pre-screening videos, however is a much more pleasing interface to view from than YouTube itself.

Have you set up strict filtering as the default option when doing a Google search? This link to a quick video tutorial will walk you through the process.

For younger students, you may find exploring the parental controls available on a Mac to be useful. Parental Controls allow you to limit specific apps, or block access to certain websites, set time limits for usage and/or restrict access at certain times of the day. While these controls can be useful, we do encourage you to talk with your child about any concerns you may have as well.

For older students with whom you think distraction may be an issue, there are a range of tools to help track time and/or manage distractions when using computers. You may like to explore:
Self Control (for Mac)
Self Restraint (for Windows/Linux)
Rescue Time

Here is a blog post from the Digital Literacy team about Safety Online in the Early Years which has some useful strategies including a list of kid-friendly search engines.

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