Moshi Campus News – 3 Feb 2018

I find this an interesting part of the year.  The students at the end of the programs, those D2, M5 and P6 students, are busy trying to get through their big end of program events; the PYP Exhibition or the MYP and DP Exams.  At the same time their eyes are starting to get drawn to the future.  I have had a number of D2 students talk to me about their university choices and the future.  In the MYP they are starting to think about what DP courses to take and what they wish to study in university.  In the PYP, those question about secondary school start to arise.  “How much homework will we have?”; “What’s it like traveling between classrooms?” and “Why are there so many different subjects?” among others.  There is always a bit of eagerness and apprehension about what the future will bring.

Which is not to say that we, as parents of these kids, don’t have our own questions and apprehensions. Despite having worked with students for a fairly long time, I am sorry to say that I cannot give you all the answers to ease the future transitions.  I will say that in my experience, good communication is key.  Discussions that involve teachers, parents and students can help.  It is also sometimes reassuring just to know that this is natural and common. Just look below to how much fun our current M1 students are having.

Please note the big events below.  This week we have:

• Sunday: Cancer Walk
• Monday: University Fair in Rafiki starting at 2:30pm
• Tuesday: Personal Project Exhibition
• Wednesday:  Visit by Alliance Francaise
• Friday: Variety Show
• Saturday: ISM Presentation in Dar; Tennis Tournament

On Saturday February 10th, we will be in Dar es Salaam for a presentation about ISM.  The presentation will be at 10am at the Sea Cliff Hotel. The presentation is open to anyone and we will be discussing the school and all three programs we offer.  If you know anyone that is interested in attending, please let them know about this event.

Nineteen DP students (see photo) this weekend helped construct a classroom, taught English to primary school students and listened to oral histories of the Meru Lands’ Case role in the independence struggle on an overnight field trip to the East Meru community school (https://www.eastmerucommunityschool.org/) founded by Ian Horne, the ISM Visual Arts teacher.

Late afternoon sports team practices continue to serve as a wonderful break from the rigors of classes, and also prepare for this coming Thursday February 8th Secondary Sports Day.  In the DP Life Skills classes, students have been focusing on the importance of academic honesty and avoiding plagiarism – a key aspect of both study in the IB and in today’s universities across the globe.  The D2 students have been working diligently to finalize their Theory of Knowledge essays and Science coursework assignments ahead of an imminent deadline.

Rick Fitzpatrick

Our M1 students have spent three days with the Hadzabe people near Lake Eyasi this past week.

Ours students spent time with learning various skills.  In one of the pictures below you can see the men making brass and copper bracelets as well as arrowheads.

There is a variety show planned on campus on Friday 9th February at 6.30pm. This is expected to be a time of entertaining performances from the ISM community. Boarders have started signing up for this big day that starts on Friday at 6.30pm. Kindly mark this day on your calendar.

The following weekend from Friday 16th to Monday 19th will be an ISM holiday. There will be no classes on Friday 16th and Monday 19th. The boarders have a trip planned for that weekend. They will leave for Pangani on Friday 16th and return on Sunday 18th.  This trip is planned for all boarders, but all Primary up to M3 boarders will be expected to go. The trip is free of charge for boarders.

Parents who wish to have their children return home that weekend are free to make the arrangements, and let the school know in good time. Parents are encouraged to make these arrangements early, and let us know what the plans are.

The boarding houses will remain open for those who wish to stay in school for the long weekend.

It may look early, but parents have started enquiring about the Easter break. School will break on March 23rd, and boarders return on Tuesday the 4th of April.

Rosemary Bango

HOME OF THE LEOPARDS

On Saturday February 3rd our Ultimate Frisbee team is taking part in an NTAA Invitational Competition. This is the first for the NTAA, hopefully there will be more. Let’s go Leopards. Check back here next week for a short report.

On Saturday February 10th our U15 Football and U19 Basketball teams will be in action at SCIS for the 2nd round of the NTAA. Teams and coaches are looking forward to getting back into action. 

This coming February 8th will be the 2nd Interhouse Sports Day, this will combine swimming events in the morning and sports in the afternoon. Come out and watch the students compete for the houses in what should be a fun event.

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

PP Exhibition

As communicated earlier by email, the M5 students will exhibit their projects in Karibu Hall on Tuesday Feb 6. The exhibition begins at 10:30 am with a brief opening session and thereafter continues in sessions of 20 min each.  We invite all members of the ISM Community to attend any of the sessions below at their convenience.

Personal Project Reports and ePortfolio

The Personal Project final reports are due on Feb 14. Similarly ePortfolio assessments in Language Acquisition (English, French), Arts (Drama, Music, Visual Arts), PHE and Design are going on and the grades will be submitted by mid March. We ask your cooperation in encouraging and motivating these students during this stressful time.

eAssessment (On-Screen) Mocks – March 6-8

In order to give the M5 students adequate preparation for their final examinations, we have scheduled an on-screen mock examination session in English Literature, Integrated Humanities, Integrated Science, Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Learning subjects starting March 6. Students will also do paper based Kiswahili Language and Literature.

Work Experience Location Details
We are grateful to M5 parents who have so far submitted the Work Experience location details for their children. We are now embarking on preparations for the requisite introductory letters to these institutions/organisations. We will hand these letters to all students whose submissions have been received by Feb 15.

In order to set the tone for this exercise, we have arranged for a Careers’ Day on March 22 featuring different professionals within the ISM community. We are grateful to the many prominent professionals who have since accepted to guide and counsel our students on this day. However, we could always use more people, so if you would like to be involved please contact me.

M3 Language Selection
Under the guidance of the language teachers, M3 students have begun making firm choices for which language they plan to study in M4. Parents are requested to discuss these choices with them before final decisions are made.

David Ochieng

In July the UWC offers a short course in Bali, Indonesia entitled; International Biosphere Stewardship Program.  The Biosphere Foundation offers a once in a lifetime experience that brings together teenagers from all over the world to the spectacular island of Bali, Indonesia. Our unique program intertwines adventure and learning to inspire young people to be intelligent stewards of our planet. For 15-18 year olds and if you need help with the application, Rabail, our UWC volunteer in Moshi is happy to help. If you have any funding questions come see us and we can disscuss possible funding support options. gemmamay@ed.ismoshi.com or rabailhabib@ed.ismoshi.com

Teaching assistants at ISM regularly participate in workshops.  In the most recent one, they had a session on Essential Questions and how to help students develop these during the inquiry lessons. We had a great session seeing the difference between closed questions and open-ended ones, reminding ourselves of the benefits these provide to students and working together to practice developing Essential Questions.

This past week we celebrated the wonderful world of books and reading. Hopefully you noticed the amazing book door covers (see below for some pictures).  Stay tuned for the announcement of the winners. We also had the Book Swap organized by P4; the book sale; Surprise Readers; DEAR and other reading focused activities.  On Monday the winner of the Kilimanjaro Book Award will be announced as well.&nnbsp; On Wednesday we will have Alliance Francaise in to have sessions withwith the students who study French in the different primary classes.

Kate Schermbrucker

Dear all,

What a fantastic Book Week. We welcomed three new class members and really enjoyed the activities set up by Miss Julie, Miss Debbie and Miss Kate. The week came at the perfect time as our EC2 class members have recently received their first class reading books – a real milestone. The week definitely helped get everyone fired up about books and reading. Thanks also to our visiting reading buddies and all our surprise readers! Next week we will be moving back into our focus on the senses.

Have a great weekend,
Owain Evans

Thank you to all the mums and dads who came to share books with us this week. It has been a week full of wonder, visiting different worlds, meeting different characters and making connections with our world. If you missed this opportunity and want to come in and read a book, please come!!

We began tuning in to our unit this week by exploring answers to questions. What is a community? What is our responsibility? Who do we depend on? What is a learning community? The children shared differences between this school and their parents’ old primary school. Next week, we will continue to explore our learning community and find ways to make our classroom community thrive.

In math, we explored how numbers are organised and how their place gives them value. We will continue with exploring patterns in numbers next week.

• Tuesday: P.E.
• Wednesday: Swimming
• Show and Tell: Colin and Cody

Mboka Mwasongwe

Dear P2/3 Parents,

What a wonderful Book Week the children have had. They took part in many exciting activities.

The children enjoyed voting for their favourite book this week, as well as, working hard on creating a character and writing their comic strips which they will publish.

Next week Ms. Makayla our student teacher will be teaching the class. The children will be working in their book clubs in reading, and also will be developing their measuring and data handling skills in math. The focus of our new unit will be: How transport systems are organized.

Please feel free to contact me at clarehibbard@ed.ismoshi.com  if you are able to be a guest speaker for our unit or if you have any connection with transportation.

• Monday: Homework goes home.
• Tuesday: Library and PE
• Thursday: Swimming
• Friday:  Return homework. Permission forms and money for P2/3 camping trip TO BE RETURNED.

Have a great weekend
Clare Hibbard

Book week has been excellent again this year. We have read stories to younger students, written comics and were exposed to a lot of great writers.

We especially enjoyed our mystery reader. Simon from D1 was our French secret reader yesterday. He read On a volé Jeannot Lapin  by Claude Boujon.

For our Unit of Inquiry, we set up the Barter Bookswap and discussed the economy of trade. It was a great provocation for our new unit and is getting us thinking about the marketplace.

Next week in Math, we will begin to look at money and strengthen some of our basic computation skills. We will also look at the role of a decimal in dealing with money.

Julie Bowen

We had a wonderful book week in P5. We made bookmarks, listened to guest readers, read new books, judged a book competition and  made video book reviews. We did some book related maths which is displayed on the breezeway. Many thanks to those of you who came into read to the children – they really enjoyed listening to you.

Next week we will continue our maths work related to the book “Just A Second” and will make graphs showing the results of the PYP wide vote for the Kilimanjaro Award book. We will start our new maths topic of fractions.

We will begin inquiring into our new Unit of Inquiry which has the central idea: “Understanding energy transformation allows us to utilise its power.”

We will consider:

• How countries source and use energy. (FORM)
• Energy usage and the effects on the environment. (CHANGE)
• Pros and cons of energy usage. (PERSPECTIVE)
• Making energy usage sustainable (CHANGE)

Deborah Mills

The week was exciting; having surprise readers visiting us, having the Kili Book award activity running everyday and best of all the Door Cover competition. Through the door competition, the P6s got a taste of working on a big project as a class group with the pressure of time. The level of collaboration was high and the results are indeed beautiful.

In the coming week, we will unpack the Central Idea, create questions that will help up delve deeper into the inquiry and find new words related to the unit of inquiry. The students will use different thinking routines to share their understanding of articles related to the line of inquiry they will be addressing. Using atlases and other resources, they will identify different sources of energy and their distribution across different regions and look at what causes the different distribution. this ties in with data handling and division word problems which we will continue with.

Cathy Wambua