Tirana International School 26 September, 2018 Important Dates September 13-25 - MAP Testing 28 - TIS Iron Chef at 6:00 pm October 8-12 - Fall Break - No School 18-25 - Digital Citizenship Week 23 - Picture Day 26 - Fall Festival 31 - Traditional Parent/Teacher conference TIS will provide: grills for cooking, olive oil, basic spices, ovens and clean surfaces. Parents bring: food ingredients, their own cookware and knives. Don't bring: your kids! This is an adult only event. Please contact Judith Visser (devissers@live.nl) or Robert Jackson (robert-jackson@qsi.org) with questions. Dear Parents, Students and Friends of TIS, The Parent Support Group (PSG) is starting off with a bang this year with a parent evening out on Friday, September 28 at 6:00 pm. The theme of the evening will be healthy food and all parents are invited to come and participate in our first ever TIS Iron Chef competition. If you don't want to cook, then you can come and cheer on your favorite dish as you watch 8 teams prepare healthy meals. Era is providing wine and cheese for chefs and spectators some come and have a good time getting to know some new people. If you want to participate and cook, then Register here to reserve your spot by Thursday at noon. Winning dishes will be featured during the school lunch rotation in October. Looking Forward, Robert S. Jackson, Director
MS Literacy Class News The 12 YO Writing class recently finished a unit on narrative writing. Drawing on real-life events for inspiration, students employed the powerful tool of writing to transform ordinary summer experiences into exciting summer adventures in narrative essays. In addition to writing their essays, they created mobiles to use as visual aids in oral presentations of their summer adventures. Fall Activities The first session of activities has gotten off to a great start! As always, we have done our best to accommodate student requests for their preferred activities. At this point, changes to the activities are closed. If your child would like to drop an activity please email Mr. Stalker (matt-stalker@alb.qsi.org) to let him know so that homeroom teacher, club teacher, and the transportation coordinator may be notified. Our 5, 6, and 7 year old students are having so much fun during the activities. Last week some children created beaded necklaces, others practiced rugby skills, and a few went out on a picnic in our school forest. TIS is a fun place! Mrs. Collova's Class The 7 Year Olds have been learning about the steps of the design process that engineers follow. Students were tasked with creating a design that would protect an egg when dropped out of a window. Students worked together to plan, build, test, and improve their designs. On Friday their parents will come and watch them test their final designs. In the 8 year-old class, we are learning in many different ways. Some examples include exploration, projects, and hands-on experiences. It is important to allow children the opportunity to examine new learning and discover relationships between this material and concepts they have learned in the past. Students are even asked to teach the material sometimes! Small groups are a great way for the teachers in a classroom to connect more deeply with the students. Amazing 8's! German Vocabulary Basketball Eins, Zwei, Drei los….The 11-year-old German Class had a competitive warm up time playing German Vocabulary Basketball. The aim of the game is to practice and memorize the new vocabulary in a challenge fun way. This is a great active game that students enjoy playing while reinforcing important learning concepts. Elementary French In French class, the 6 years olds are learning vocabulary of numbers and colors. They are matching written numbers and with their corresponding digit, allowing them to have practice in decoding in the French language. Tres bien! In the Photography/Yearbook class students have been learning about basic camera settings and photography composition. Recently they have been experimenting with various vantage points to take unusual pictures of everyday scenes. Shapes and Colors In the Ladybug's Class we have been learning about shapes and colors! We have been searching for shapes in our sensory water table, separating them by type and identifying them by type of shape and by color. We also have been searching for shapes during a shape search in the preschool hallway, also identifying them by type of shape and by color. Last year, was our most successful year for achieving award winning essays with Teen Ink. Therefore, this year we will be encouraging more students to participate in publishing their work. Teen Ink is a monthly tabloid-format magazine which is marketed to, and written by, teenagers. It is based in Newton, Massachusetts, and published by the Young Authors Foundation, a non-profit organization. By November, most students from 13-year-old to Secondary 1, will have an account and will be eligible to participate. This will provide students a safe environment to prove that their academic assignments are also worth reading! Early Culture Mr. Smith's 11 Year Old Cultural Studies classes have been discussing Early Humans in their first unit. In recent weeks they have talked about how the earliest communities in the world were form and began learning about one such community at Catal Huyuk in modern-day Turkey. They spent class on Tuesday discussing how early groups traded goods with one another and then played a trading game to see what some of the challenges of trade would have been back in those days. English and Albanian Lessons for Parents Do you want to learn some conversational Albanian? Would you like to brush up on your English skills? We have had many requests for language lessons for parents at TIS. We would like to offer this to our school community. TIS is calling for volunteers who would be able to teach one or two classes a week? If you are interested in teaching a course like this please let me know. Stop by or send me an email at matt-stalker@alb.qsi.org. |