Today I wanted to put the spotlight on some of the wonderful things happening at Ellesmere Muscat. First we take a dive into Ibrahim Tiam’s grade 5 classroom. This week Ibrahim features as the teacher in the spotlight for the Concept-Base Inquiry Maths programme that the school has undertaken this year. Please take the time to read the interview with him below. There have been some questions around why the school is not using textbooks this year. For those of you who don’t know the teachers are effectively following a textbook that is presented in an online platform. As Ibrahim mentioned, as as many teachers have noticed, the pre-assessment clearly show where students are in their learning journey and what they need focus on. Another very valuable observation teachers have made it is that the students are approaching maths with greater enthusiasm and confidence as the year progresses. We see across students the decrease in anxiety that tends to come with mathematics and an increase in the level of engagement. This can only be a good thing! I have also spent some time this week in Ms Caroline’s grade 5 class where she has been engaging students in Strategy Talks. A strategy talk is short, interactive discussions where students explore various strategies for mental calculations. As part of this we often ask students to use whiteboards to show their thinking. Strategy Talks encourage students to develop other flexible ways of solving these types of problems – we often see that students are only familiar with the standard algorithm which we know can lead to confusion for students when working with bigger numbers, if introduced too soon. Strategy Talks encourages students to develop other flexible ways of solving problems.
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If you have any questions about Mathematics at Ellesmere Muscat please let me know.
Another area I wanted to dive into this week is Design. This subject is often underrated by both parents, teachers and students, however I would like to draw your attention to what is happening in this subject in MYP. You can check out the website created by Mr Paul to see more details but here are a few snippets from the site. https://sites.google.com/ellesmeremuscat.com/myp-design/home
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And then there are the dreaded exams which got off to a flying start today! Please make sure that your child gets some outdoor time, good food and sleep over the weekend in preparation for the exams next week. We also ask that you let the school know if you are taking your child early or expecting them to return to class. This helps us to prepare for supervision and teaching and learning.
We will be holding a Coffee Morning on Wednesday next week, 22nd January. If you have any questions you would like answered please come along and get those questions answered.
Have a great weekend and see you next week!