Tirana International School 14 November 2018 Important Dates November 15-18 - CEESA MS Robotics/Warsaw 15-18 - CEESA MS/HS x-country/Sofia 21 - PSG Meeting - 8:00 in Cafeteria 19-23 - Fall Into Reading 23 - Reading with Parents Night 6:00 pm 28-29 - No School/ Albanian Independence Day 30 - No School/ PD Day December 3 - Start of Second round of ASA 12 - Holiday Concert 12 - Preschool Winter Recital 12 - End of Q2 14 - Last Day Before Winter Break (1/2 day - dismissal at 11:30) 14 - Term II Tuition Payment Due 17(Dec)-4(Jan) - Winter Break Director's Desk Dear Parents, Students, and Friends of TIS, Recently the QSI school in Astana, Kazakhstan had a child protection issue that is addressed in the letter below. Over the last couple of weeks, QSI has undergone a top to bottom evaluation of hiring practices and safeguards for students. We in Tirana have had several calls with QSI regarding how we can create an even safer environment for our students and you should see some changes over the next few months. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about this situation at robert-jackson@qsi.org Another area of security that we are actively working on has to do with our cyber security. Although Albania is not in the European Union, we are actively working toward compliance with GDPR so that you might know that your data is secure with TIS. The process has us evaluating our internal systems for records and how we communicate sensitive information. Thank you all for your patience as we work toward full compliance. Looking Forward, Robert S. Jackson, Director Student Services Satisfaction Survey One area that was identified in our research for school improvement had to do with our student services. Please help us by taking this satisfaction survey so that we can know how best to improve the quality and number of services offered to you as families. The first round of activities will be finishing at the end of this week on November 16th. There will be no activities during the week of November 19th and the week of November 26th. The exception would be for CEESA activities for Middle School and Secondary students. Teachers will be in contact with students who attend those CEESA activities so that transportation can be arranged for those students who stay late. I would like to extend a big thank you to all of our teachers who work hard to provide these activities for our students. Round 2 Important Dates: Round 2 of activities will run from December 3rd until March 8th. Sign-up for Round 2 will go live on Thursday, November 15th at 5 pm. Sign-ups will close on Sunday, November 18th at 8:00 pm. Please visit our activities website. There you can view a list of activities and sign-up. We realize how important activities are to your children. TIS works to provide a wide variety of activities that are suitable to your children. Not listed on the activities list is our school performance of Alice in Wonderland. Practices for this will be held on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you intend on being part of the performance, please do not sign up for other activities on those days. Family Reading Night Dear Students and Parents, To conclude our Fall into Reading Week, the Parent Support Group (PSG) invites you to Family Reading Night on Friday, November 23, from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm. Join us for:
Book Exchange: Bring in books you don´t want anymore to your classroom from Monday November 19 to Friday November 23. Come to the music room on Family Reading Night and get „new“ books that other people have brought. The amount of books you bring in equals the amount of books you´ll be able to get! If you want to participate and read a book or help with a literacy game, then register here by Wednesday, November 21, at noon. Please contact Klara Olsakova (olsakova.klara@seznam.cz) with questions. Scholastic Book Order We are happy to send you some information about our fall Scholastic order. The online order is open between now and November 26, so please check out the website and make your selection. We are including the most current Scholastic advertisement, but the prices online may differ from what you see in the catalogue. However, all the books are available along with hundreds of other titles. Please visit our school page at scholastic. Once there, you can fill up your basket and check out online with your credit card. The books will be delivered to the school by the week of December 10, so that you can have the books for holiday gifts for your child. MSA Accreditation This week I wanted to take some time to talk about standards for the middle states accreditation. MSA breaks the areas of the school down into 12 separate standards so that we might better evaluate and plan for improvement in each area. The 12 standards are: Mission, Governance and Leadership, Planning, Finances, Facilities, School Staff and Organization, Health and Safety, Educational Program, Assessment of Student Learning, Student Services, Activities, and Information Resources. As a school, we are taking time to review each of these areas to ensure that students, families and staff are in the best possible environment. We thank everyone for their contribution to the discussion through surveys and meetings. Determining the Meaning The students were using context clues to determine the meaning of their new vocabulary words. They had to use the glossary to see how close they were to determining the meaning. PoP art is back on high demands by the middle school art students. They have been learning about art movements, influential artists and their styles. The artists of choice that were most influential during the 50’s were Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Pop art started with simple and bold images of mundane everyday items painted in bright colors. This movement was a challenge to traditions of fine arts, because it represented consumer product labels, photos of celebrities, comic strips, and animals. The middle school students recreated some the famous artwork by adapting them based on their favorite subject matter, developing the pop art style and finding their voice through the art making experience. Exploring Art in more languages Did you know that our students explore art in more than just one language? Ms. Anisa’s Spanish 3 class is working on their third unit, which is centered around art. This week they learned about the renowned Spanish painter Francisco Goya and his different artistic periods. They used the Preterite and Imperfect past tense verb forms to share their ideas with the class and formulate written responses to their reading. Practicing Adjectives In Albanian Language the students have learned about adjectives and everything related to them. They were focused and eager to achieve the best! They made amazing projects,applying all of the concepts learned in class. Homes and the three little pigs Last week the Bumblebee class learned about homes. We spent some time talking about the three little pigs and their houses as well. The children loved making their homes, playing in them, and acting out the story together. AP Calculus Some people think that Mathematicians live in their own little world. Sometimes that is true. They speak their own language. They have their own symbols for communicating. They seem foreign to most people. It does seem that Mathland is its country, but not this week. Sometimes Mathlanders get out into the physical world and that’s what’s happening in AP Calculus. The students are finding out where the rubber hits the road, literally. The first derivative of displacement and the second derivative is acceleration and we all know what acceleration is. Ask anyone of them and they can tell you how long it will take to fill that blimp shaped like an ice cream cone, if you give them the parameters of your pump. "How To" Their youngest authors have learned that they can use writing to teach someone how to do something. They are all experts at doing something, right? :) What a way to share their enthusiasm for telling how something is done. In order to culminate and celebrate this unit of study, each Five year old student got a chance to sequence the steps and make their own delicious ham/or cheese sandwich. Yum yum☺ Closed and Open Syllables Students in Literacy Support class are learning the difference between closed and open syllables. They used the houses to explain that closed syllable occurs when a syllable ends with a consonant, resulting in a short vowel sound, e.g., men,him,not and is. An open syllable occurs when a vowel is at the end of the syllable, resulting in the long vowel sound, e.g. me, hi, no, I. Knowing the syllable types will help the students be much better spellers and will help them spell multisyllable words as well. |