Happy 2016 to the Thunderous Phoenixes!

Hello, and best wishes for a happy and healthy new year!  

We ushered in the new year with some class-building activities.  Trying to solve these challenging tasks as a group reminded us of the importance of skills such as effective communication and critical thinking.  We realized that asking for help, lending a hand, persevering, and sharing strategies helped us as a group as well as individuals.  Who knew teamwork could be so fun?

End-of-the-Year Celebration

Here is how your support and generosity helped the Thunderous Phoenixes celebrate the end of the year:

Full of Hot Air:

Face Cookie:

Noodling Around:

Pyramid Cups:

Passing Fruit:

And finally...food, glorious food:

Your Happy Thunderous Phoenixes:

Thank you!  

The Musical Thunderous Phoenixes

Mayim Mayim Rain Song & Dance

Creative Thunderous Phoenixes and Ice Monsters Unite!

Thunderous Phoenixes are Caring and Creative!

     Hello everyone!  Welcome back to our blog.  This is our first week back from October break and we have been learning so much.

     On Tuesday, we came to class and saw a brand new student in our class.  We were pleasantly surprised and quite excited to make friends with Aki.  Some of us learned to use Google Translate to communicate and support our new friend’s learning.  Others demonstrated their caring dispositions by helping her during buddy time that afternoon, as well as through PE.  From this experience, the Thunderous Phoenixes learned how to make a new student feel welcome and at home in our classroom. 

     Throughout the rest of the week, we continued to learn lots of new things.  In math, we focused on practicing multiplication.  We learned to use many strategies to multiply and identify factors.  We learned to prove what we know and to determine what stage of understanding we are at with different math skills.  We are going to continue to our journey to master multiplication.

     We also explored creativity within our classroom and with our buddies.  We finished reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and shared our understanding of the story by completing book reports.  Our class participated in a Gallery Walk of everyone’s work and we learned to give and receive constructive feedback on our work.  We also began to think about how we can become more creative.  We did this by reflecting on the positive and negative influences around us and by thinking about what we take or “steal” from these influences.  We will continue to explore creativity by reading How to Steal Like an Artist and discussing its ideas.

     We hope this update gives you an insight into what has been taking place in our class.  If you have questions and/or comments, please post a reply to this post.

     Have a great weekend!

IASAS at ISM!

Hello Fellow Digital Citizens,

Happy Friday!  It has been a long and successful week.  The Thunderous Phoenixes have learned so much, and we are excited to share with you.

This year, ISM is hosting athletes from five schools around Asia.  All week, football (soccer) games between the different schools have been taking place.  Some of our parents and teachers have taken us to these games to experience the thrill. 

In addition to having fun and being excited, we have learned a few important lessons.  We learned that the ISM girls’ soccer team has excellent and focused defenders.  We learned to practice sportsmanship-like behavior, whether we win or lose.  We learned how to be supportive cheerleaders for both ISM as well as the opposing team.  We hope participating in IASAS has made us better citizens of our school and our communities. We are looking forward to watching the boys’ game this afternoon, against Taipei American School.  We hope we win!  If we lose, we will still have had a great time cheering them on.

Please ask us what happened in the ISM vs. TAS game and it will be our pleasure to share the highlights with you.  Have a fantastic weekend!

Peace,

The Thunderous Phoenixes

The Reading Thunderous Phoenixes

     Happy Thursday to you, from the Thunderous

Phoenixes!  We are feeling marvelous that there is no school tomorrow, and we can rest from the awesome week of school.

     This week, one experience that we enjoyed was reading with our new first grade buddies.  We each chose books that we thought the first graders would like or love.  We knew they liked the books because they smiled, laughed, and some of them read back to us.

     We learned which level and genre of books our buddies prefer.  We learned that sometimes, we need to ask questions to check for understanding.  We saw their choice of books and realized our tastes might be different.  We learned that first graders have short attention spans, and some of us found it challenging to keep them interested.  Some of them had a hard time listening to us and were easily distracted.  Now we know how teachers and parents feel!   

     Overall, it was a great week and we had fun learning from and teaching others.  We hope you have a spectacular day!

Please copy and paste on the link below and with your child (because they have access to it), view the photos of us reading with our buddies 

(https://drive.google.com/a/ismanila.org/folderview?id=0B046f70E6clxbEVKUVFRU1pHbm8&usp=sharing).  Leave comments if you'd like.