November+Newsletter

= **November Newsletter** = Important dates and notices

Due to the limited amount of space in many classrooms we will begin insisting that students keep their coats, shoes and PE clothes in their lockers. Those students who have lost their locker keys will need to purchase new ones through the secretary’s office. On Monday we will be checking lockers to make sure this problem is remedied.
 * Locker Keys**

**Parent Workshop** On Tuesday 29th November from 18:00 - 19:00 there will be a parent workshop on Process Writing run by Lauren Lundin and Jill Craig in the Computer room in the WIS wing of Zielinskiego campus.

Wednesday 30th November is the joint ATUT/WIS Disco. For grade 5 & 6 student, it runs from 4:30 - 6:00pm For grade 7 & up, it runs from 4:30 - 8:30pm
 * Disco**

On Thursday 1st December, the parent conferences will run from 17:00 - 19:30 in the Zielinskiego Theatre and Music roo. We look forward to seeing you there.
 * Parent Conferences**

Winter WOW will take place on Saturday December 10th from 3pm.
 * Winter WOW**

**Physical Education**

All MYP students have recently started their basketball unit. In MYP 1 and 2 they will be practicing and improving their dribbling, passing and shooting skills. They will also learn correct man-to-man defensive positioning. The MYP 3-5 students will also be working on the above skills but will get into zone defense and rebounding as well as more tactics such as picks, pick-and-rolls and traps. The younger group will participate in modified matches, often with special rules that focus on a certain skill. The older students will participate in full basketball matches, which will be used to assess the transfer of their skills and tactics from isolated exercises to authentic basketball matches. All students will be assessed on MYP Criterion A, C and D during this unit. If you would like to know more about these units please go to the following WIS PE wiki page links:

http://wis-pe.wikispaces.com/6th+and+7th+Grade

http//wis-pe.wikispaces.com/8th%2C+9th+and+10th+Grade

** Language B Polish **

** MYP 1 ** We are in the middle of the unit „My place”. During it students have learnt vocabulary such as school tools, furniture, and colors. They also learnt how to create plural forms of nouns and adjectives. More advanced students were introduced to the accusative form of nouns and adjectives, in the structure „I have+noun”; they also got to know verbs „lie”, „stand”, and „hang”. All this knowledge students used to describe their place. Right now they are working on two big projects: make a room tour and create a Polish lesson for begginers. More information about projects and products can be found on my Wiki.

**MYP 2** Students are in the middle of the unit „Friendship”. They have learnt already new adjectives to describe friends and conjunctions they should use to support their opinions. Students also were introduced to conditionals and and we've been practicing their use. During almost every class we have short 2-minute speeches about friendship. During this exercise students are preparing for the final assessment, which is a 5-minute speech.

**MYP 3** We are in the middle of the unit „My place”. During it students have learnt vocabulary such as school tools, furniture, and colors. They have also learnt how to create plural forms of nouns and adjectives. More advanced students were introduced to the accusative form of nouns and adjectives, in the structure „I have+noun”, and to the genitive form of nouns. They also got know the verbs „lie”, „stand”,and „hang”. All this knowledge students use to describe their place. Right now they are working on two big projects: make a room tour and create a Polish lesson for begginers. More information about projects and products can be found on my Wiki.

**Language A**

**Independent Book Project**
All grades in MYP are working on an independent book project. Between now and January 18th, each student needs to read a book in English and complete one of the three project options they were given last week. The information about the projects can be found on my wiki site (WISLA).

We will hold an exhibition of projects during Book Week in the last week of January when the WIS community will have the opportunity to look at everybody’s work. Each student will also give a short presentation about the book they read to their peers.

The idea of this project is to encourage students to read independently, report on what they are reading and hopefully motivate others to read! They also need to demonstrate time management and self-organisation skills and, of course, they will have the chance to develop their presentation skills through the book talk. I will give you more information about when the exhibition will take place nearer the time, when all the details of Book Week have been fixed.


 * MYP 1**

The MYP 1 students are coming towards the end of the Autobiography unit. They are still working on making their writing engaging by using interesting vocabulary and similes, adding dialogue and illustrative detail, showing not telling and describing feelings. They are practising using the writing process to plan, revise and edit their work so that their final product is something they can be really proud of. When they finish their third piece, they will put their stories together with photographs and illustrations to create their own autobiography!


 * MYP 2**

We have just started a new unit on Science Fiction. During our reading of some short stories from the Science Fiction Genre, we have been discussing our vision of education and homes in the future and the possible consequences of these developments. We will be starting the novel __The Giver__ next week which brings up interesting issues about the possibility of a utopia and freedom of choice versus ‘sameness’.


 * MYP 3 & 4**

The MYP students have just finished their web page advertising Wroclaw and WIS to families and teachers who are thinking of coming to live and work here. They did a fantastic job and produced an extremely attractive, well organised and well written website which will be used to promote our school. Please click on the following link to see their work:

[|www.wix.com/wiscommunity/wroclaw]

We have now started our new unit about leadership and Society. Our unit question is:

//What is the impact of an individual on the survival or destruction of a group of people or society?//

To help us answer this question, we will be reading the novel __Lord of the Flies__ by William Golding and conducting research into leaders, both past and present, that have impacted both positively and negatively on society.

The students began the unit by taking part in a simulation activity with the grade 5 students. They had to imagine that they had survived a plane crash and had ended up on a deserted island away from civilisation. Their task was to figure out how they would survive and how they would be rescued. In the next lesson we reflected on the activity and discussed what rules might need to be put in place in such a situation. The next step will be to discuss the possible consequences of not following the rules. As we read the novel, we will compare the students’ ideas with those of the characters in the novel.




 * MYP 5**

We have now started a new unit about dramatising history. Our unit question is:

//In what ways do historical events lend themselves (or not) to dramatization?//

To help us answer this question, we will be studying Arthur Miller’s play, __The Crucible__ which dramatizes the Salem witch trials of 1692. The students will be conducting research into the real events and characters using historical documents and court transcripts and then analysing how and to what effect Arthur Miller alters the facts.

**World Studies**

**MYP 1**

Grade 6 just completed their country reports, finishing off their unit on world geography and mapping skills. This week we began our study of ancient Greece, with the boys preparing a presentation on Sparta and the girls one on Athens. Using the five themes of geography that they learned during the last unit, the students will take turns next week educating the rest of the class on their assigned city-state.

**MYP 2**

Grade 7 continues their study of globalization by exploring life along the ancient Silk Road. We began this unit by putting on a classroom bazaar during which students honed their bartering skills as they fought for the best deals. In the offing were such sought-after gems as a Build-a-Bear, Gummi Bears, Korean noodles and the Indiana Jones trilogy on one DVD!

**MYP ¾**

The Eight/Nines began their new unit on terrorism and conflict this week. By referencing international coverage of the same acts of violence, students will integrate their study of current events with their research into the origins and objectives of many of the world’s most widely-known terrorist groups and get a better understanding of the role perspective plays in defining exactly who and what terrorism is.

**MYP 5**

The Grade Tens are finishing up their unit on the global economic meltdown this week. They made some well-researched and very creative cartoons that track the securitization process of a home loan, a sample of which I’ve included here because they did such an amazing job. 

All students have just finished their last units of study, having critiqued their work as a class. They looked at what the goals were for the project, their own and the ones assigned, and discussed how well they accomplished those goals. The tenth graders have begun working out their own experiments in showing motion in their work. The eighth and ninth graders have started their planning sketches for Future Self-Portraits. The seventh graders have started creating tessellations, and the sixth graders are working on how to use the principles and elements of design to make eye-capturing artwork.
 * Art **

MYP 1 students are finishing evaluations for their current work, using feedback from the rest of the WIS community, who were taste-testers for the recipes they prepared for our cookbook. MYP 2 students are creating advertising for our arts festival in the spring, using computer graphics, silkscreen and video. MYP 3/4 students have just begun researching the development of their next project, a Language Learning Game to help each other learn and remember what they are studying in their Language B classes. MYP 5 students are completing their analysis of the Library Guides they made using the feedback they received from the other students who used them.
 * Design Technology **


 * MYP Science News **

Students just completed our scientific method unit where students made final posters demonstrating their knowledge of how to create and perform a scientific investigations. We have started our unit on the solar system. Students have been studying the different planets and how scientists discovered each. Students are working on scale models of the solar system and are researching different space exploration missions.
 * MYP1: Solar System **

Students have just completed a brief unit on the digestive system. We are moving on to the circulatory system and respiratory system. We started the unit by creating a model of the how the lungs work with the diaphragm muscle. We will continue studying how the heart works and distributes nutrients and oxygen throughout the body. Students are still the in the middle of our chemistry unit. Student took a test on the introductory topics: moles, periodic table, ionic and covalent bonds. We are now focusing on different types of chemical reactions and how to balance chemical equations. We finished two labs: copper penny and the double replacement reaction of barium chloride and sodium carbonate.
 * MYP2: Circulatory System and Respiratory System **
 * MYP3/4: Chemical Equations **



Students just completed our unit on protein synthesis and DNA replication. We have started on our unit on mitosis and meiosis. Students are working on posters explaining both of these vital processes of life. Our next unit will be on how does the mechanisms of photosynthesis and chemical respiration allow the earth the sustain life.
 * MYP5: Mitosis and Meiosis **



**Mathematics**

MYP 1 students are finishing their unit about directed numbers. At the beginning of the unit, they focused on examples, where we need to use negative numbers to describe situations from real life effectively. They have also been practicing operations with directed numbers. Their final task is to choose a creative way to teach a friend about operations with directed numbers. They can use a game, mnemonic, play, song or any other method that will help them better understand addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of negative numbers.

<span style="display: block; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; text-align: justify;">MYP 2 students are finishing the Fractions unit. They have been learning how to perform calculations with fractions and how to use them to represent real-life situations. Now they are investigating how to recognize whether or not fractions written in decimal form will be recurring or terminated, and what other properties of decimals we can find out by looking at the denominator of a fraction.

<span style="display: block; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; text-align: justify;">MYP 3 / 4 students have been learning how to calculate the sizes of sides and angles of right-angle triangles using trigonometry ratios. Some of the students also used the unit circle to find equivalent ratios for obtuse angles and applied the sine and cosine rules to solve problems. At the end of this unit students will calculate the heights of different objects (trees, school building, etc.) using trigonometry.

<span style="display: block; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; text-align: justify;">MYP 5 students are still working on their Equations Unit. They learned many methods to simplify algebraic expressions and solve equations. In their last assessment task, they had to maximize the flow along an open channel made from a folded sheet of metal. They considered how to get the biggest flow rate from a given piece of metal sheet.