Tirana International School 31 October 2018 Important Dates November 1-4 - CEESA MS Boys Football/Belgrade 15-18 - CEESA MS Robotics/Warsaw 15-18 - CEESA MS/HS x-country/Sofia 19-23 - Fall Into Reading 28-29 - No School/ Albanian Independence Day December 3 - Start of Second round of ASA 12 - Holiday Concert 12 - Preschool Winter Recital 12 - End of Q2 17(Dec)-4(Jan) - Winter Break Director's Desk Dear Parents, Students, and Friends of TIS, As a school, it is important for us to take time to celebrate our successes. With that in mind, let me give you one important number: 3007. That digit represents the number of kilograms that we raised during the recent food drive for Food Bank Albania. Our goal was to raise 3 tons of food and we not only met that goal, but beat it by 7 kilograms. This massive success was accomplished by another impressive number: 97%. That is the percent of TIS students that brought food to this important collection that will help dozens of families make it through the tough winter in Albania. Your donations will impact lives and that is what matters the most. Well done everyone! Another important success happens tomorrow morning as our first CEESA (Central and Eastern European School Association) traveling team heads to Belgrade, Serbia. Our MS Soccer team last year won first place at the CEESA soccer championship in Bosnia and will travel over the weekend to defend their title. Over this year we will send several teams and also host two CEESA events at TIS in the winter months. Our relationship with CEESA enables our students to reach out beyond the boundaries of Albania as they compete and cooperate with students in international schools across Europe. This relationship truly is a reason to celebrate. Finally, we should celebrate a wonderful time last week as our community got together and enjoyed Fall Festival. Thank you to all of the students, teachers and parents that contributed and made this event exceptional. Please check out some photos at the bottom of this email. Looking Forward, Robert S. Jackson, Director Food Bank 97% of the students and over 40 teachers contributed to the TIS food drive. Together we raised 3007 kilograms of food and broke all records at the Food Bank Albania. Thank you everyone!
Status Reports for Quintile 1 You should have received an email at your family@tismail.org account to notify you about your child's status report. If you did not receive an email, please contact it@alb.qsi.org Why does TIS use family@tismail.org accounts? Your digital data is important to us. To keep information safe about your child, we send all report cards, narratives, and MAP reports to you at your family@tismail.org account. By sending all important documents to one secure account within our school domain, we are trying to honor your privacy as we move toward compliance with GDPR regulations for schools. If you would prefer that all reports be presented to you only in hard copy, please notify the front office (email egla-lila@alb.qsi.org). If you are having trouble logging into your family@tiamail.org account, please contact it@alb.qsi.org. Science Survey As a part of our accreditation, TIS is conducting a survey on our science curriculum. Your input is appreciated and will be quite valuable as we make improvements to the school. Non-Fiction Texts The 5s are learning about Non-Fiction Texts and how to use their 5 senses to describe. As an introduction to our 5 senses, we described apples using all of our senses - sight, touch, smell, sound, and taste. The tasting was the best part! Learn with Colors The 6 y.o. German Class dive in a word full of beautiful colors and letters. This colorful time filler helps students build their vocabulary and spelling skills. They choose a word from the book than they have to find the letters and compose the word. Work with Colors help students to learn and memorize faster and in the same time encourage them to be creative and have a lot of fun. Who is the Most Villainous Character in Literature? “I am determined to prove a villain” (1.1.31), is the self-confessed role of Richard in William Shakespeare’s play Richard III. The deformed character in both physical appearance and morality is portrayed as the embodiment of evil, who will stop at nothing to achieve his goal of becoming king. The 13-year-old reading class have just completed their first Shakespeare play, which lead them on a journey of murder and betrayal! Fall and Leaves The Crickets class has been learning about fall, trees and leaves. We made a sensory bin full of leaves and pine cones. For art, we made fall designs on paper with glue. The students practiced their fine motor skills by helping crunch the leaves and spreading them over the designs to make pumpkins, acorns, and leaves. Concern for Others Concern for Others is one of our very important Success Orientations at Tirana International School. Shilo from 10 Black is encouraging Eva and all of 10 Orange the importance of Concern for Others and making positive over negative choices at school. Way to go 10's! Advanced Math We started the unit on polynomials by provoking curiosity. Students played with desmos applets, made conjectures and posed questions they were wondering about in posters we then placed on the Thinking Corner wall. Next class, when students mastered the B level practice they moved on to investigating their questions using desmos and writing up their conjectures in a google document. The goal was to get them to not only take bats but also play the game of baseball, as David Perkins at Harvard Graduate School of Education puts it when referring to the need for students to engage in the same work that professionals in the discipline engage with. In this case students are engaging the true work of mathematicians by posing their own inquiries, investigating them making conjectures and writing up their findings. Science Inventions Science has been so exciting in the 8 year old classroom! Our new curriculum is impressive. It allows for creativity, higher-level thinking, problem solving, and exploration. Students are not told the steps to an experiment and asked to simply complete them. They must determine their own research question, develop a model, plan and carry out investigations, and analyze and interpret their data. In the pictures, students were asked to build a bus stop for 4 counting bears. The bus stop would have to protect the bears from the elements, especially keeping them dry. They used science and engineering practices to develop a deeper understanding of identifying the problem, criteria (goal; I need to...), constraints (limitations; I may not...), and a solution. As you can see, science is engaging and fun! Still Life Drawings In the Pre-AP Studio Art class, students have been working on a series of still life drawings, aimed to develop their skills in observing edges, sizes of objects, as well as light and shadow. This is not an easy learning process; not only does it challenge student’s perceptive skills but also teaches patience. Nevertheless, the effort is paying off with some great results. Changes in Matter The 7 Year Olds have been studying changes in matter in Science. Students have explored how materials change when they are frozen, melted, cooked, and burned. One exciting lesson allowed them to observe the changes that occur when eggs and pancake batter are cooked. Throughout the unit students have made claims about what changes are reversible and which are irreversible. As a culminating activity, students will come up with their own scientific questions about matter and design their own experiments to find the answers. Numbers and Games In French class, the 7 and 8 years old students have been learning numbers, and what else is better for them to practice, that to play "le jeu de l'oie" after knowing how to write numbers and pronouncing them correctly in French. The first one who has the numbers correct is a winner, but we also have to be attentive not to repeat our mistakes and that's a challenge for everyone! C'est la vie! Pictures from Fall Festival 2018 |