Greg and Declan's Weekly Update...

Welcome to the Weekly Update, written by the much-noted Declan and the influential Greg. We are going to talk to you about Art, Puzzles, and the Grammar Challenge. We learned many things from these topics, such as how to convert a mixed number into an improper fraction, and how to make clay mugs. We hope you enjoy reading this piece as much as we enjoyed writing it.

On Monday, our class had art. Everyone was thoroughly enjoying making animal mugs. Last week, we started our clay mug project. During that week, most of us completed the first three steps. The first step we did was cutting out the bottom of the clay, then writing our name on it. Second, we took a long strip of clay, and wrapped that strip around the piece that will be the base, that way making the sides. On Monday we went on to make the handle, and making some of the facial characteristics of our animals or people. By this time, all of us knew what we wanted to make our mug look like. The most popular choice was to make the owl, four people chose that. There were many other interesting choices also. The other choices were: A rabbit, a person, a pig, an elephant, a puppy, a dolphin, a boy, an eagle, a tiger, a cheetah, and a cow. The first thing most of us did on Monday was make the handles. First you had to decide which kind of mug handle you wanted (Straight edged or round edged). After that, you would scar both connecting sides of the handle, then paste it on using water to the mug. The we had to make the face which we are working on now. Only a few of us finished their faces. So far, this has been an enjoyable and enriching art project for everyone, and we look forward to continuing on Thursday.

In Puzzles, we continued our topic ten. We are doing fractions, which are hard if you didn’t know how to change an improper fraction into a mixed number, and visa-versa. In Puzzles on, we changed mixed numbers into improper fractions and improper fractions into mixed numbers, which was hard for some of the class, and was really fun for some of us. We hope that we learn more about fractions, because fractions are going to be very helpful to us in the future. We also worked on regrouping the whole number to the fraction. For example, you can’t take 1 11/15 from 3 10/15. So, You would have to regroup the three in 3 10/15 to 2 25/15-1 11/15 equals 1 14/15.  We think that everyone did really well at the puzzles on Tuesday. We hoped that everyone enjoyed working on our math as much as Declan and I did.

On Thursday, the class competed in the Grammar Challenge. The Grammar Challenge is a game where two groups, the boys and the girls, compete against each other. The teams need to correct sentences and answer grammatical questions for points. The team with the most points gets a Subway party. The score was a heart-stopping 18 to 18. The second time around, at end score, the girls were two points ahead. This competition helps you learn how to use grammar properly, and is fun in the process. Good luck to both teams in the next competition, and good luck to the new speakers.

Hopefully, you enjoyed the Weekly Update. We hope you were interested in Art, Puzzles, and The Grammar Challenge. Tune in next week to read the fantastic Anushka and the marvelous Alexa’s Weekly Update. We hope to see you at the County Fair on Saturday!

Mr. Tiger Goes Wild...and Other Silly Tales

The Primary and Intermediate Divisions are thrilled to welcome author and illustrator Peter Brown to Singapore American School this March. He will be working with all students as the PTA sponsored Author-in-Residence.

Peter’s books have earned him numerous honors. His latest picture book Mr. Tiger Goes Wild is a New York Times bestseller and an Indie Bound bestseller. He received a Caldecott Honor (2013) for Creepy Carrots!

To order signed copies of Peter Brown's books, please use this order form.  His specific schedule will be posted to the Elementary Library pages soon.

Yummy!

A HUGE thank you to Alexa's dad for thinking about our class last week.  How wonderful was it to enjoy some tasty rice crispy treats before our math test.  I think we all became a a little bit smarter after eating these.  Yummy, indeed!  Thanks again!

Rock Star of the Week, Declan!

Declan's Rock Star Wordle

Johan and Kasym's Weekly Update

Hi, and welcome to this week’s Weekly Update. We will be talking to you about starting our Fantasy writing, learning fractions in math, and Science Lab with Mr. Kimzey. They were all fun, some were interesting and some were challenging, but they were all part of our week.

In writing, we started our fantasy story. There were some limitations, one of them was to only write up to 5 pages. If you go over that, you are going overboard and your writing can get really confusing. One more limitation was that we only could have 3 characters, one protagonist, one antagonist, and one side kick. If you go over that, then your writing can be harder to write. We started off by getting our ideas by relating to our own experiences. For example, if you were scared of heights, you could write a story about jumping off a plane and going into a magical world! We had to come up with a couple of storylines that we could choose later on for our story. Then we wrote some things our characters will be going through in our story. For example, John had to destroy the wand of power, because it made the sky dark. But, it was protected and hidden in the forest. So, he went and fought for the wand. Yay! He broke it. This helped us know what our stories were about. After planning our story, it was time to think of our protagonist. We drew our character on a piece of A4 paper and wrote down his/her traits. We could only draw our protagonist. When all of us finished our protagonist, we started thinking of our setting. We started by reading some extracts. An extract is a short bit that has been taken from the book. We read an extract from Narnia, The Wizard Of Oz, and Peter Pan. Then each book club wrote an extract from their book. That’s where we are in our fantasy writing.  

For maths, we learnt how to add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators. The denominator is the number on the bottom of a fraction. What you have to is change the denominators so that they are the same. For example if you had 5/6 + 2/5,  you would have to change the denominators so that they are the same by finding the LCD, the least common denominator. For example, the LCD for six and five is 30, because if you list down the multiples six and five, the lowest number that is the same is 30. After that you have to multiply the numerator, the number on the top, by whatever you multiplied the denominator by. Six times five equals 30, so you multiply five by five and get 25. You do the same to ⅖ and you end up with, 25/30 + 12/30 = 37/30. That is an improper fraction which can be turned into a mixed number. We haven’t learnt how to change them though, so that is what we would leave it at. After all our lessons were done we had a mock test. This is a test that is nearly exactly the same as our real test but it doesn’t count for our grade. Mock tests are so that you can see what you have to work on. We found it quite helpful and I think that we will now be better prepared for our test.

In science lab, we learnt about the plant’s vascular system. The vascular system is the way that plants get water and minerals to flow throughout their body. It is nearly the same as the human’s vascular system but the plants don’t have hearts to pump the water. We tested it on celery, first we cut about a centimeter off of our stock of celery. After that we studied the cut part with a microscope to see the vascular tubes. Some of us ate it, but it wasn’t washed so that might not have been such a good idea. After that, we scraped off the first layer of the celery using a scalpel. The scalpel was VERY sharp, so we had to be really careful. When we had cut off enough to see the vascular tubes, we had to remove them from the celery. To do that, we had to pull the scalpel down on either side of the tube. After that, we had to pluck out the tube. It was really hard and a lot of people only got a little bit. Some of us tried to eat the tube but, it took ages to chew and swallow. Even after the investigation we are were not how the water got sucked up. Next science session, we will find out how it is done.  

We hope that you have enjoyed reading about our amazing week. It was really fun to write about our Fantasy writing, learning fractions, and Science Lab with Mr. Kimzey. If you would like to hear more about next week, you should come back next week to read Declan and Greg’s Weekly Update. Please leave comments on what you think about our week.       

Don't Try This At Home

He calls himself an ambassador of lions...he plays rough with them, talks with them and sometimes even sleeps with them.  

Zoologist Kevin Richardson (aka The Lion Whisperer) in South Africa, spent many years studying Zoology at University.  He's established an amazing amount of respect amongst the animals there, understanding their needs and behaviors, sharing closeness that could be deemed as insane.  But this man knows exactly what he's doing!

Check this out!

Wall of Words...

It seems like forever ago that we were talking about Wonder and creating our precepts.  Here's a reminder of what some other folks thought were important to remember in life.

Rock Star of the Week, Mychal

Mychal's Rock Star Wordle

60 Epic Facts

Join the Earth Unplugged crew to give you 60 epic facts that show why the world is awesome, just for YouTube Geek Week. For instance, did you know it's possible to make diamonds from peanut butter? Or that 99% of Earth's gold is at its core?

IXL Topic 9

Here's a review of the concepts from Topic 9.  There's two more lessons and then we'll due for our assessment on Thursday.  Practice up folks!

L.2 Equivalent Fractions

L.3 Lowest Terms/Simplified Fractions

L.5 Least Common Denominator (LCD)

M.4 - M.8 Adding and Subtracting Fractions (with models)

Luis and Johan's Weekly Update...

Welcome to Clayton Network™. Starring the super cool Johan, and the really famous Luis. Today, we will be reporting about what happened during this crazy week, a lot of crazy things happened during the week. First, we had an awesome game of soccer with Mr. Howitt’s class in P.E. Then, we finally started Book Clubs! We wrote a picture prompt. On Thursday, we had the Christalite Methodist Home! Now sit back and enjoy today’s Weekly Update.

On Monday, Team Clayton had a tough match of soccer with Team Howitt in P.E. There were a lot of games. All of those games were same gender games. The girls kept the ball on the ground, while the boys punted the ball everywhere! There were a lot of tackles and outs for the boys. One technique was to always pass if the person was open. Thankfully, there were no major injuries.

On Monday afternoon, we started Book Clubs, there were 5 groups of 4 or 5 students. We got to name our groups. Those groups are: The Squidgies, Violet Pizzas Love Jellybeans, The Crazy Chickens, The Book Worms, and Nyan Dogs. All of those names are just crazy! After we named our group, we made rules for our book club and made our goal. All of us pinky swore that we wouldn’t read our books at home on that day. After that, our groups went to the group room to choose which books we would read. All the books look so cool, I hope everyone is enjoying their books!

The next day, we wrote another picture prompt. We haven’t written a picture prompt in a long time, so now it was about time for another one. This time, we had two picture prompts to choose from. One of them was to choose which superpower would you want, invisibility or flying. The other choice was to choose where you would be forced to live in forever. The zoo, the library, or the museum. I (Luis) chose the first picture prompt and picked to have the power of invisibility, so did Johan. More people chose flight than invisibility. We thought that was really fun.

On Thursday, we went on a service learning trip to Christalite Methodist Home. The reason we went there was to brighten their day and make them happy. One of our goals was to brighten their days and to make them feel really happy. This was our second time going there. This time there were less people that joined us because most of them were eating their lunch. I (Johan) felt that the people were very nice. We did two activities, they were decorating hearts and making pasta necklaces. Each of the students had a job to do, like cutting and bringing in glue. The people who stayed there made the hearts by using glue to stick materials on it. They made the necklaces by adding pasta and beads on to a long string. There were many kinds of pasta, from penne pasta to macaroni. We thought that this was a great experience for us to help the people.

Thanks for tuning into Clayton Network™.  We had a lot of fun playing fun matches of soccer, reading in Book Clubs, writing a picture prompt and going to the Christalite Methodist Home. That is all we have to share with you. Tune into next week’s Weekly Update starring Johan and Kasym. What was your favorite part of the week?

February Service Learning Trip

Can't wait to chat about how our Service Learning trip went!

Rock Star of the Week, Alyssa!

Alyssa's Rock Star Wordle

Nate and Young Seo's Weekly Update...

Welcome back to Clayton Network™! This week, we have your host Young Seo and our guest star Nathaniel, talking about this week’s Weekly Update. We would like to tell you about our week, which includes Counseling, Principal Lunch, Tech, and a rugby game. So sit back, relax, and enjoy! During Counseling, we took part in two very interesting activities. One activity was continuing our mindfulness lessons. We’ve been working a lot on keeping calm, but today we worked on mindful eating. Mr. Filice gave each of us a raisin, and he told us to first observe the raisin. Then, we put the raisin in our mouth’s and felt it with our tongues. Next, we each took ten bites of the raisin, and then swallowed it. It taught us to slow down, observe food, and be thankful for what we have. In the second activity, we played a game kind of like musical chairs.  If you didn’t have a chair, Mr. Filice would give you a statement. You had to tell him if it was rational or irrational. Rational means realistic, and of course, irrational means the opposite.

Later that week, we had Principal Lunch! Principal Lunch is where Mrs. Graham and Mr. L’Heureux (pronounced Lora) come to eat lunch with us. Sadly, Mr. L’Heureux couldn’t come because he’s looking at schools in the East Coast, America. Most of us ate pizza, while others ate hamburgers, sandwiches, or brought their own lunch in. We all got half of our plates full of salty french fries. While we were eating, Mrs. Graham asked us if we had any suggestions for recess. The american football players suggested that we turn one of our soccer fields into a football field, because they don’t have much space to play football. Another suggestion was that we cover the whole swing playground with a roof. Everyone agreed, but Mrs. Graham said that it would cost a lot of money.

During Tech, we learned about visual literacy. We watched a video to show how we can make non-living things, such as lamps or computers, look like they have feelings. It’s called personification. We first watched a commercial about a lamp getting thrown away, and the camera angles, setting, etc. It made us feel sorry for the lamp (to find the video, search ikea lamp on YouTube). After that, we got a camera and took photos to show the emotions of anger and happiness. We eventually uploaded the photos onto our computers and put them in a presentation called Visual Literacy Emotions.

And now for the sports on Clayton Network™. TAS (Taipei American School) won to ISM (International School Manila) 6-0 in rugby. Our class made posters to cheer for our teams, because half of us rooted for TAS and the other half rooted for ISM. Many people don’t know the rules of rugby, but it was still very interesting to watch and cheer. Taipei won by kicking two field goals (worth three points each). Manila almost got a try (worth six points each) in the end, but Taipei managed to tackled Manila out of the field to end the play. The end of the game was very exciting, and we all got to give our posters to fans of the team. We even got to stay an extra ten minutes to watch SAS (Singapore American School) play against JIS (Jakarta International School). That was a fun way to end of the week. Thank you for tuning into Clayton Network™, and reading our Weekly Update about Counseling, Principal Lunch, Tech, and rugby. We thought we had a very interesting week, and we hope you did too. Tune in next week to hear from our guest stars Luis and Johan. Tell us in the comments which part of the week was your favorite!

Does Anyone Else Ever Feel Like This in Math Class?

Fun Friday with Kendamas...

It seemed like the perfect way to end this week...
having some fun with Kendamas!

Want to see how the pros do it?
Have a peek at this video!

It's Time for Valentines!

Grammar Girl to the Rescue: Versing

In honor of the Super Bowl, here's a relatively new word that is
driving some parents batty: versing.

Have you heard it? Instead of saying "Seattle is playing Denver in the Super Bowl," some kids would say "Seattle is versing Denver in the Super Bowl."Versing appears to be an age-related word rather than a regionalism (expression of a geographic region):
People say versing everywhere, but they're nearly always kids.
It may have started in New York about 30 years ago and then spread in the 1990s because of video games. 

Landfill Harmonic

Not a bad way to spend 11 minutes of your day...

Rock Star of the Week, Nandita!

Nandita's Rock Star Wordle