Moshi Campus News – 12 Jan 2018

It is always good to start the semester with a short week to ease us back into school.  I must say however, that for students taking the Mock exams, it probably does not feel like a slow start.  This is a longer semester, but there are a few breaks.  Our first is a long weekend from February 16th to the 19th.

You may see a few new faces around campus this semester.  Ms. Elke has moved to Hong Kong to take up a teaching position and has been replaced by Alexandra Ooms. We wish Elke good luck in her new adventure and hope that Alexandra will be very happy with us.  As well we have five student teachers from the US and Norway.  One will be working in P2/3 and the others in different secondary subjects.  We also have nine new students joining us this semester from EC up through M5. 

Please note the following events:
Primary NTAA Swimming Competition – Friday January 19th
Secondary NTAA Swimming Cometition – Saturday January 20th
OP Trip to Socialist Peak – January 25th
Farmers’ Market – Friday January 26th
Book Week – January 29th

For D2 students, the mocks exams started off well on Thursday and continue through Friday January 19th and in a pep talk they were reminded how important these assessments are.  Thereafter, D2s will have an array of other coursework deadlines this month including language orals, literature written assignments and their math exploration.

The D1 students returned to regular classes and the renewed focus was great to observe.

Parents of D2 students will want to mark their calendars with the date of Saturday May 19th which is the ISM DP graduation day and other related events will occur that weekend that you will not want to miss.

Friday March 23rd will be the next parent-teacher meeting so please plan to attend.  This will also be the last conferences for D2 students.

A total of I57,488 IB DP students from 2,666 schools worldwide took the May 2017 IB DP exams. Learn more stats on the IB at https://bit.ly/2mtQ4Rz.

Rick Fitzpatrick

Welcome
We welcome all students to school this semester. It is going to be a very busy one for every student. Other than the usual assessments, M1 will be off for a trip to Lake Eyasi. This trip involves Design and I&S while M3 will be going to Tumaini University later in April for a trip prepared by Kiswahili and I&S teachers. Both trips include both Arusha and Moshi campuses. M5 students will take the eAssessment Mocks in March while their eportfolio and predicted grades will be sent to the IB in April.

M5
Personal Project
The M5 class will submit their second Draft report on Monday January 15 for the final feedback. The final reports are due on Tuesday January 23.

Work Experience
M5 students will undertake a one-week work experience from May 21-25, 2018 after their IB examinations. We advise parents to begin the search for institutions and/or organisations for this exercise based on their child’s career goals. We need the names and contacts of the organisations by Feb 1, 2018 in order to prepare introductory letters.

eAssessment Mocks
The M5 students will take their Mock examinations on March 6-8, 2018. As part of the preparation, teachers may give eAssessment assignments to students which may include timed home supervision. Parents are requested to support in this supervision.

David Ochieng

Outdoor Pursuits sign up is occurring with the students currently and you will receive emails about their choices in the next week.  You may have seen the past articles with the list of available trips. Particularly if it is an early trip, could you make arrangements with accounts soon and complete the medical forms.

Almost all boarders have come back to school and are already settled in for quarter 3. The few remaining are expected to come in soon

Friday 12th January was a holiday, and the boarders had activities outside class. There was study hall on Thursday evening as usual and Arusha boarders had a chance to travel back to Arusha for the weekend. Our next long weekend will be from February 16th to the 20th, please plan ahead if you would like your child to come home.

We do not charge boarders for transport to and from Kilimanjaro Airport on the scheduled closing day and opening days. However, we charge $60 per child if transport is provided on any other day. We are not able to provide transport to/from Arusha airport. We therefore encourage parents to book flights that land in Kilimanjaro and Moshi airport respectively.

Rosemary Bango

HOME OF THE LEOPARDS

Welcome back to the students. Hopefully the start of the new semester has been good for everyone. Some teams began practices during this past week of school and all other teams will begin practices the week of January 15th. All students are strongly encouraged to continue with their sports from the first semester. Students should only be looking to add a sport to their current load. During Quarter Three the following NTAA teams will be competing:

• U15 Boys and Girls Football
• U19 Boys and Girls Basketball

The first NTAA Tournament for these teams will be Saturday January 27th at Braeburn.

On Friday January 19th and Saturday January 20th ISM will be hosting the NTAA Primary and Secondary Swim Galas. We are looking for parent volunteers who could help as marshals, timers and other duties. If you are interested please contact Scott Hibbard at scotthibbard@ed.ismoshi.com.

As the season and year progress please keep up with all the info, news, and sports reports by reading the Moshi Campus News.

Go Leopards

Scott Hibbard

The children have made a very positive start to Quarter 3. It is heartening to see that they are already working enthusiastically in class and enjoying their after school clubs. The EC children are just beginning their interesting new unit of inquiry about communication and using their senses. Meanwhile, the P1 – P6 children are inquiring more deeply into the units which they began last quarter.

If, for some reason, you were unable to attend the parent-teacher conference at the end of Quarter 2, please arrange a time to meet with your child’s class teacher in the next week or two. It is important that home and school continue to communicate regularly and work together for the benefit of each ISM student.

On Friday 19th January, we will be hosting the NTAA Primary Swim Gala on our campus. If any parents would be able to assist with timekeeping, marshalling or other jobs between 9am and 2pm, please could you let me or Scott know.

Kate Schermbrucker

Welcome back.

We have just begun a new unit based around exploring, observing and using our five senses.  We’ll be starting with the sense of smell. Over the long weekend, please encourage your child to explore the smells around your house and garden. They should bring any particularly strong smelling examples (dry or fresh herbs, powders, liquids, extracts, foods) into school on Monday for us to experiment with. We’ll be attempting to capture the essence of a smell and use it to produce ‘scratch n’ sniff’ paints for later artwork.

Owain Evans

We looked at abstract paintings this week and the children had a chance to develop their own pieces using straight and looped lines. They looked at the relationship between colour and form.

Next week, we will be looking at how to create models using various materials. If you have old newspapers or magazines, please send them our way as we will need them for our projects. We have various small boxes that we will use and if you have anymore, please send them in as well. Some children are thinking about creating robots and the more we have the better.

We have begun to learn and review our knowledge of time using the analogue and digital clocks. This week, we learned how to tell the time to the hour. Some went further and looked at half an hour. We will continue next week.

• Tuesday: P.E.
• Wednesday: Swimming
• Holiday Show and Tell: Cody, Jasmijn and Gabriel

Mboka Mwasongwe

Dear P2/3 Parents,

The children have settled back into school this week. They have made an excellent start when it comes to bringing in their school materials. Well done and thank you.

This week the children will be continuing with their family history scrapbooks. If you have not yet brought in photographs or information about your families’ history, there is still time. The children will be including poetry and an autobiography as a creative scrapbook feature.

In Math, the children will be reviewing telling time. We will also be continuing with subtraction and how we use this concept on a day to day basis.

In reading the children are working on reading with expression. We will be focusing on reading out loud so that they can focus on intonation.

• Monday: Homework goes home
• Tuesday: Library and PE
• Wednesday – French
• Thursday: Swimming
• Friday:  Return homework. P2/3 primary gathering

Clare Hibbard

We are all excited to be back in class and despite the short week we have jumped right back into our forces unit and are developing science experiments to explore friction and look at how different materials affect the motion of an object. We will carry on with these projects throughout the week ahead.

The students have set goals for the remainder of the year and in English we are creating video book reviews to inspire other children to read books.  In math we will finish up our memorization of the basic multiplication facts and begin to look at more complicated problems and division.  We are also looking at how distance can be measured and students will apply their understanding as they record data in their science experiments.

Julie Bowen

This week we were pleased to welcome a new student, Mark, to P5. We hope he will be very happy with us at ISM.

Despite it being a short week the children have been busy. They have worked on multiplication,  made a calendar page for January and completed some calendar comprehension work. The children have set themselves some goals in the form of New Year’s resolutions. Our main UOI focus has been the importance of checking the validity of information gathered from the internet. The children used one website to research the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus but the website was subsequently revealed to be a hoax. Hopefully the learning objective of not believing everything you see online will stay with the children for many years to come. Be sure to ask your child about this activity as it provoked amused, perplexed and outraged reactions!

Next week we will continue with our work on multiplication and division. We will focus on identifying parts of speech in our writing. In UOI we will look at the role of bias in the media  and how it influences our perception of the world.

Deborah Mills

Compliments of the New Year. I hope all families had a great break and that your child is well rested.

This quarter will be exciting with the Exhibition retreat the end of January and students learning about the Exhibition process bit by bit. Hopefully, this will allow them to smoothly embark on their journey.

The students are working on their Summative Assessments and so far they are coming up with very creative ideas.

In Math we will be focusing on algebraic expressions using number patterns and rules. The students will identify, describe, extend and create a wide variety of patterns.

In Language Arts we will be looking at vocabulary related to the unit, and students are focusing on finding key works in articles.

Homework will begin on the Monday, 15th of January.

Have a great weekend,
Cathy Wambua