Mr. A's First Grade ESL

It’s been a short 4 day week after the 3 day weekend celebrating Chinese New Year. Our decodable vocabulary this week has focused on words that end in –en and –et: pen, net, ten, met, hen, get, men, pet, den, and set. We have, as always, continued on with our dialogue journals and our songs that begin every pull out class. This week we have read the books: Ten Pets, What Mynah Bird Saw, and Our Granddad. We even created dramas out of some of the stories to aide our comprehension and also to have fun.

As part of our beginning friendship unit, we have been learning about emotions. We learn words like proud, angry, nervous, unhappy, happy, excited, embarrassed, confident, doubtful, disappointed, bored, shy, hurt, love, sleepy, scared, silly, surprised, thoughtful, confident, and confused. We have also been talking about what it means to be respectful, which is part of our rubric for our friendship day project. Working with rhyming words, sight words, sentence writing, blends, and beginning sounds have also found their way into our lessons. It may only have been four days, but it’s been a busy one for both students and teachers.

Another week of fun and learning in ESL. We have been focused on sentence writing ,rhyming words, and planning and writing descriptions of our friends during our inclusion ESL lessons that take place inside the home room classes.

Our new song of the week is Honey Bear, one of my favorites. This week’s decodable vocabulary words are got, Sam, tag, ham, had, fad, sag, hog, Dan, hen, peg, hot, get, fat. Our sight words are for, from, with, put, the, he, did, run, like, are, said, see, to, has, do, they, and gag. We rade the books Get the Gag, The Monster Mistake, and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. We have also been working on using the consent blends br, cr, sk, sp, bl, pr, st, tr, sm, cl, sl, gl, pl, sw, dr, fl, gr, and fr.

Dear Grade 1 Parents

 As you are aware, our After School Activities Programme (AFAC) for the second semester starts today.  As part of  a review of our how we are supporting our students in Grade 1 in this programme, we are putting in place some alterations in how Grade 1 students are being dismissed from these.  Our priority and goal is to ensure the safety of all our Grade 1 students and to ensure that we can account for their whereabouts at any particular time, given their developing levels of independence and responsibility.

 As such, I have met with all our AFAC teachers and discussed the new process, details of which are below.

 AFAC secretary (Toni Narvaez) will have highlighted any Grade 1 students on the activity registers. These lists are given to each of the AFAC teachers.

• AFAC secretary will print a Grade 1 absentee list each day and have this posted in the AFAC area, such that when teachers ‘time in’ for their activity, they have noted any Grade 1 students that are not here for the day.
• If a Grade 1 student does not turn up for an activity, a message is sent through to the ES office via text message or an older student, enabling us to quickly locate the Grade 1 student.
• At the conclusion of the activity at 310 pm, students in Grade 2 – 4 are dismissed.  Students in Grade 1 who have an adult picking them up from the activity are handed over to the parent / carer.
• Remaining Grade 1 students are walked to the bus area and handed over to bus monitors, or alternatively, those being picked up in the ES pick-up waiting area, are handed over to the campus supervisors there, while they await their ride.
• Any remaining Grade 1 students who are unaccounted for, are then taken to the ES office, to enable us to contact their parents / carers.

 Please note, if for whatever reason your child is not going to attend activities on a particular day even though they are at school, it is critical that the AFAC secretary is made aware of this.  Toni is located in the ES office and her contact email is narvezt@ismanila.org and her phone number is 840 8485. 

Ultimately we want all our Grade 1 students to be self-directed and independent, however we also acknowledge that we need to support them as they move towards these goals. 

Thank you for your support in this area.

 Kind regards

 Adam

 Adam Campbell

Elementary School Principal

International School Manila

www.ismanila.org

With the holiday over, we are off to an exciting beginning of Semester 2 in Grade One ESL. This week has been all about getting back into our patterns and routines of learning.

During pull out class, we learned two new songs: BINGO and Down By the Bay, which the kids have been enjoying singing at the beginning of class. We also read a book of Down by the Bay with all the song lyrics in it to help us understand what we are singing about. Other books we read this week include Snowball Fight and Nobody Got Wet, both of which we performed dramas of, not only to help us with comprehension and also because it’s a lot of fun!!!

Vocabulary words for this week have been: get, cannot, on, has, fad, are, is, to, fed, put, and, said, did, it, with, from, they, run, fan, leaf, fork, shelf, fish, giraffe, flower, and five. The last few words are to help us listen for the letter “F”.

Other pull out activities have included building sentences with our sentence puzzles, writing in our dialogue journals, practicing writing our upper and lower case letters of the alphabet, and practicing the sounds of our beginning blends.

During ESL inclusion students have practiced their sentence writing using this week’s vocabulary words, played with our phonics quiz show game, and Ms. Juteau’s class even got to be interviewed by their 9^th grade buddies who are writing stories about them as characters.

Our Grade One excursion for our unit on imagination was to visit Ayala Triangle Park and view the statues. ESL students participated in the trip with their home room classes. Students were asked, “How does my imagination help me to understand art?” They viewed abstract sculptures created by famous Filipino artist Arturo Luz. Student’s thought about what the statues might mean or what they might be. Then they drew an abstract sculpture of their own Here are some photos from our trip.

Last Friday was Filipinana, a day when we all come together and celebrate the culture and people of our host country, the Philippines. On this day of fun and festivities ESL students stayed with their home room classes all day to take part in all the fun and excitement. During Filipinana students came to school dressed in either the colors of the Filipina flag, or in traditional Filipino dress. They learned traditional games, words in Tagalong, how to make local food, and even took jeepey rides around the school. Here are some photos to enjoy from this flamboyant extravaganza.

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Dear Parents,

Just to reiterate and clarify Friday’s events for you:

• Students are asked to wear smart casual outfits – they can wear these all day, or change after outdoor play before the concert at 12.00

 • PE is cancelled that day

 • The concert is at 1.00 in the Little Theatre

• We have a celebration with food in our classroom following the concert

 • After school activities will be happening, but you are welcome to take your child home at 2.15

I am sure it will be an exciting afternoon! See you then!

This week students in Ms. Juteau’s inclusion class took a journey around the school exploring all the rich artworks we have here. We asked the question, “how does my imagination help me understand art?” Take a look at what we saw:

Mabuhay!  An important part of the school year at ISM is Filipiniana, an opportunity to celebrate and discover Philippine culture together as an international community of learners.  This year we will be celebrating this on Friday 25 November. 

We will begin the day with a whole ES assembly. This will be led by our ES student council and will include: the ES choir, a group of grade 4 students demonstrating a traditional dance, a demonstration of some traditional Filipino instruments and a grade 2 traditional performance. Parents are invited to the assembly, however, please be aware that there is limited seating, and you may have to stand. 

After the assembly each grade level will take part in a variety of activities to learn more about the Philippines and to celebrate the culture and place we all live in.  There is a description of the activities below for each grade level along with the schedule they will follow.  As part of the days focus, students will be involved in preparing and cooking some meals which will then be given to our entire service and support staff, as a token of our appreciation for all their support and hard work during the year to support our students. 

Please note that preschool is not included below, but they will be taking part in a modified version, including the assembly and Jeepney rides – more information is to follow from the preschool team.  Recess and lunch times will be on a normal schedule, and there will be no specialist classes on this day.  

At 12:00 students in MS and HS will follow a parade route around the school with students dressed in their Philippine attire. 

Parents are encouraged to come and participate throughout the day – if you would like to help out in any capacity during the day, please contact your child’s grade level parent liaison or class teacher.  Teachers will go through the centers with their classes throughout the day, and teacher assistants will take part in leading many of the centers. Students are encouraged to wear clothes representative of the Philippines or their school uniforms. 

We look forward to you joining us for a great day of learning about the Philippines.

Just a reminder that Grade 1 is going on a field trip tomorrow to Ayala Triangle Park. We hope to leave at 7.45 so please have your children to school on time tomorrow. Please make sure your child has a small bag to carry their snack and water bottle in during our time in the park. There are mosquitoes in the park so we recommend you put repellant on your child before they come to school. If it is raining tomorrow, we will have to postpone the trip. Everyone is really looking forward to this trip, so let’s hope the weather cooperates!