Dear Parents and Students,
As we complete another great week of learning please see below for notices and highlights.
Notice:
Swimming/ PSPE
For next week only, Boys will need to bring their swimming kit on Monday for their PE lesson. Girls will not be swimming and will need to bring their Normal PE kit instead. This change will be for next week ONLY.
Thank you
This week students have continued their swimming programme as part of PSPE. They have made a great start and have enjoyed the use of the amazing ABIS school pool. When one group of grade 6 students are swimming the other is doing PE.
Please see below for some pictures of Swimming this week
Homework
Today we completed our homework set for the week with positive results especially in the area of spelling development. It has now been some time since we began this programme and we now have a number of students who will be moving up a level in their spelling. This is great news. Thank you for your continued support in this area. Again the method of learning spelling words that I have shared with our students is; Look, Cover, Say, Write, Check.
Reading and writing
This week learners have continued to work on developing reading and writing skills in the area of reading with expression and reading to punctuation. This means for example, when reading aloud and you come across a full stop, stopping to take a breath, when reading dialogue, changing your voice a little for effect. The students have focussed on reading one book for the entire week, and as they have become more familiar with the text through reading and rereading this, they have noticed that their fluency has also increased with this text. Great work!
Mathematics
This week in Math, students have continued to work on developing their working understanding of place value as well as basic facts. Students also worked on developing their understanding of rounding. For this we learnt about when rounding a number, if it is 5 or above we round it up, if it is 4 or below we round it down. This is a bit tricky when looking at decimals and fractions but certainly a work in progress.
Please see below for an example of the kind of learning engagements students worked on. Challenge yourself, are you able to quickly answer these questions?
Rounding
¾ to the nearest whole number =
9.4 to nearest whole number =
23.49 to the nearest whole number=
49.91 to nearest whole number =
106 to the nearest 10 =
3,556 to the nearest 100=
692,106 to the nearest 10,000 =
Integrated UOI
This week we really started getting into our unit on flight and how it has inspired innovation. Students learnt to take summary notes as well as the criteria and format for writing a scientific report. Students also had a lot of fun beginning to learn about fair testing using the scientific method. They did this by creating a flying machine that I had designed, testing this and then making modifications to improve the machine. We still have not decided what flying really is because there are things that glide and slowly decent back to earth, things that go up and come back down as well as things that go up and never have to come back down and there are things that are naturally aspirated versus those that require some kind of external power source. This is a great unit for promoting critical thinking skills as well as scientific conversation.
Please see below for samples of this work.
Social Studies
This week students began a project on the importance of the Date Palm in Oman. So far we have tried to research the value of Dates, the different types of Dates, the place of dates in Omani culture, where they grow, how long they take to grow before they produce fruit and so on. We even tried to work out the percentage that dates contribute to the GDP of Oman. We are becoming Date experts. As part of this project students are also working on their observational drawing skills by drawing some of the palms we have here on campus at ABIS.
Please see below for some samples of this work.
Worth Repeating
Please remember Swimming and PE. For this unit, when the girls are swimming, boys are doing PE. When the boys are swimming, Girls are doing PE.
At this stage please do not bring sports equipment such as soccer/footballs to school as there are certain activities we are unable to participate in due to Covid mitigation measures. Should this situation change, I will of course update you on this.
Thank you for your continued support in keeping us all safe, happy and learning together.
Please remember your…
- Hat, Water bottle, Ipad charged, PE Kit and Spare Mask…
Thank you.
As always, if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me.
Sincere regards,
Your partners in learning.
The Grade 6 Teaching team
Glen Nicholson, Eman Al Qasmi, Maryam Al Muqbali