St Andrews Dusit Newsletter December 2022

Upcoming Events

December

16th: Term ends

January

11th-13th: Primary Dodgeball

Tournaments @ Lunchtime

16th: Reception Park Trips tbc

16th: 9-10am - Dr. Brian Nutritionist session for parents

18th: U11 and U9 FUTSAL TISAC

20th: - Lunar New Year assembly at 8:15 am Rec-Y6 (assembly), 8:15am Nursery and KG (parent activities in classrooms)

23rd - 27th: Y6 Residential

30th: U11 Boys and Girls Basketball at SIS

31st Jan - 3rd Feb - Y5 Residential

Message from the Head of School

Dear Dusit Community,

Over the past few weeks, the school has been filled with the sights, sounds and smells of the Christmas season! Well done to the Early Years children for their Wriggly Nativity and to our confident KS1 children in their fantastic Christmas Nativity - it has been a fun and exciting time at Dusit! Thank you to our Dusit staff who assisted the children and provided new experiences and learning opportunities for them. Thank you also to parents who supported your children, provided costumes and help learning lines and attending the performances to see the children shine and grow.

Thank you to those parents who donated gifts for the children at Rajvithi Home for Girls – your kindness is very much appreciated. Also, thank you to the PTG for providing the presents to the children from Santa!

It has been a busy term at the school with new initiatives being rolled out such as our new EY curriculum, the Talk 4 Writing program and embedding our maths and phonics schemes. We have continued to improve the teaching and learning provision, revised our assessment practices and continue to work on bringing our community together more often.

This morning, students from KG to Year 6 came together for our end of term Christmas assembly and we enjoyed hearing all about the favourite moments from each year group. Please see slides from the assembly here and a little video which gives a flavour of all the exciting things that have taken place across the school this term.

Stay safe over the Christmas period and enjoy this special time with your family.

Caroline Ratcliffe

Nursery

We have had a fantastic time in Nursery. The children have made so much progress during this half term and it has been so lovely for their teachers to see them growing in confidence, supporting their friends and continuing to develop lovely relationships with one another. We have been engaging in lots of sensory exploration and messy play. The children have been interested in playing with lots of different materials, exploring the textures and different ways these can be manipulated. We’ve also been engaging in lots of physical activities both in and out of the classroom. The children have really enjoyed starting the day with our morning exercise and yoga routines, and we’ve seen such fantastic progress as the children have all built up their confidence when playing with water and during their swimming lessons.

Nursery

Over the last few weeks Nursery have been learning a very special Christmas song and choreography which they are all excited to perform during Early Years’ Wriggly Nativity show. We’ve been working together to make lots of lovely costumes, Christmas decorations and joining in with Christmas crafts. The children have explored lots of different stories, talking about what we can see on each page, what we think will happen next, and even shared some familiar stories with one another.

Congratulations on such a wonderful start to your first year in school, Nursery.

Kindergarten

Wow! What an amazing first term in KG we have had. We have been having so much fun in KG with lots of special events and opportunities to welcome parents into our learning in the classroom. We all enjoyed our Wellbeing Picnic with the KG families, the International Week lunch and EY performance, singing our nursery rhymes for World Nursery Rhyme Week and celebrating Loy Krathong. Together, we have grown so much and settled in well to our new school life. Throughout the term we have had a big focus on mark making and pre-mark making skills, which we will continue to focus on in term two and three. We have particularly used ‘storymapping’ as a tool to learn new songs and stories as well as practising drawing our own storymaps.

Kindergarten

At the moment, we are practising our Christmas songs and we are getting very excited about our performance of ‘A Wriggly Nativity’. Our classrooms are all Christmassy too! We have been developing our fine motor skills by making Christmas playdough, wrapping up presents to put under the Christmas tree and creating our own Christmas decorations.

Reception

It has been such a busy first term in Reception that we can hardly believe that Christmas and New Year are upon us! This term we have been busy at work and at play. We have begun learning phonics, and we are making lots of wonderful progress learning new letter sounds and how to decode to read words. We are enjoying being able to use different learning spaces in the school, but we especially like the swimming pool and the big Key Stage 1 and 2 playground! This term we have also had the opportunity to go on two outdoor learning visits to Suan Rod Fai. On our second trip we were challenged but very proud of ourselves after we were able to walk over 3 kilometres! We have had a lot of fun participating in school events and especially loved performing for International Day and Loy Kratong. We have also been busy at work, perfecting our voices and dance moves for the Christmas nativity performance didn’t we do well!

Reception

Reception has had an amazing start to the school year. We have learned and grown so much in just one term, we can’t wait to see what wonderful things await us in Term 2!

Early Year Nativity

Santa Visit

Year 1

We are soaking up so much new information and using our new skills with confidence in Year 1 at the moment. We read the book ‘Disgusting Sandwich’ and after learning the features of instructions and how to use bossy verbs, time adverbials and adjectives we innovated on our own recipe for a ‘delicious’ sandwich.

We got the ingredients and followed our recipes to make and then eat our sandwiches. They were super tasty!

We let our imaginations run wild by creating our own disgusting ingredients, using interesting adjectives to describe them.

In maths we have been extending our knowledge of place value up to 20. We have also explored 2D and 3D shapes and thought about their properties; we took part in a 3D shape hunt on the pitch, we made 2D shapes using strings and sticks, we described the properties and had our peers guess the shape.

Year 1

In science we have continued to learn about a range of animal types. We enjoyed looking at the fish and tadpoles in the fishtank. We learnt that amphibians start life with gills and then develop lungs! We also thought about what animals like to eat and sorted them into carnivores, omnivores and herbivore categories. The children then created a fact sheet explaining how to take care of a pet. We went on a school trip to Moori Moori farm and we had a brilliant time; learning how to make food for the ducks and geese, decorating a pot and planting some mint in it. We hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas and we look forward to seeing you in the new year.

Year 2

It has been a busy last month in the Year 2 cohort! Children have worked extremely hard on their Nativity performance and managed to do some incredible work alongside all our practices. In our English lessons this month, the bear cubs have been learning different writing skills such as prepositional phrases and extending our sentences using conjunctions such as ‘with’ and ‘that’. We have even challenged ourselves further by using a thesaurus and extending our bank of vocabulary by incorporating new and exciting synonyms for words.

Year 2

We have taken all our new learning to write some incredible pieces of writing on habitat descriptions! In our maths lessons, we have been learning all about making equal groups as well as arrays. Children enjoyed some outdoor maths learning as they showed off their knowledge on arrays and used their wonderful drawings to create addition and multiplication number sentences. It has been absolutely incredible to witness all the growth our cubs have gone through this term and we look forward to all the incredible learning that will take place next term!

Year 3

Soaring Through December

This month has been all about flight. The children have explored how flight has changed overtime and learnt about how aircrafts fly. They applied this knowledge to design, create, test and evaluate their very own gliders. They have used their knowledge from topic and science lessons but also drew inspiration from our hands-on experience at the National Thai Air Force Museum. This close interaction with planes and helicopters really helped the children understand the proportions and science behind flying machines. They also showed off their knowledge to the Museum Guides, we were very proud of them! It was a wonderful experience and one they will not forget I am sure.

Year 3

Our English lessons have also helped reinforce the learning from the topic as we planned and wrote our very own explanation text on flying machines. The children learnt a text map all about the Space Voyager which was a made up flying ship. The children innovated the Space Voyager text to create their own flying machine and explained how it worked which gave them the opportunity to showcase their new topic vocabulary.

We have been very proud of Year 3 this term and the progress they have made. We look forward to Term 2 and the beginning of a new year.

A very Merry Christmas to you all, from the Year 3 team.

Year 3

Year 4

As we edge ever nearer to the end of this first term, it is a fantastic opportunity to reflect upon the students’ progress. It has been so lovely to observe the children in class and see how far they have come in such a short space of time.

For English, the children have been showing off their text-mapping skills by creating their very own for our latest explanation text - How To Take Care of Your Sea Monkey. Exercises like this act as a mirror to reflect exactly how deep each child’s understanding of what they read truly is as they create pictures and actions for each word or phrase. It was fun to see them teach each other the actions to their paragraph and have ownership over what was written.

Year 4

In maths, the children have been using a multitude of multiplication methods to calculate different equations. By the end of this week, they have been able to apply what they know to certain types of questions, choosing the most efficient method to do so. They particularly enjoyed playing our new times tables game - Rock, Paper, Time Tables. Please ask your child how to play and see how well you can do against them!

Year 4

For science, as part of our ‘animals and their habitats’ unit we studied classification keys in much more detail and became taxonomists for the afternoon - learning to ask important questions about a creature’s characteristics and using the answers to sort and organise them into groups, families and classes.

Year 5

Year 5 are truly in the swing of things in our second month and have just finished our work on our Jemmy Button text. We are so proud of our students and the debates they have had, discussing and sharing ideas. We had some interesting and innovative perspectives and were truly wowed by the way in which Year 5 presented themselves so professionally.

We have also been conducting an extremely exciting science experiment in the classroom. For weeks now we have been observing vegetables grow in our classrooms and during this time we have had to endure some… interesting smells. Students have shown so much curiosity in how these asexual vegetables have grown and are asking inciteful questions during our learning time.

Year 5

Year 5 have had a successful first term and we are so proud of our learners as they come to the end of it. They have worked hard, learnt many new exciting things and have explored new friendships. This term we have pushed our written work in English and are so pleased to see that not only are our learners now using the grammar focus, but that when writing there is a real sense of pride and ownership in their work. This is so exciting to read both as a teacher and as the reader. We are so excited to get back into the writing after the Christmas break and into our new topic!

Year 5

Our Maths has truly excelled this year and we have been working speedily through our units, with our students often completing the challenges and pushing themselves to question their methods of working. This is extremely complex and shows just how dedicated they can be.

We have so many amazing things planned for Term 2 and can not wait to get started on them with you all. We hope you have a wonderful Christmas break and come back in the New Year ready to continue on with the fantastic progress you have already made. Merry Christmas everyone!

Year 6

The Eagles have had a wonderful month packed full of learning experiences. We presented our class assembly on the 2022 FIFA World Cup which included a variety of multimedia such as animations, paintings, models and drama. We have also had our hands full creating festive lights projects in science that we will be presenting to the Dragons’ Den next week! We have delved deeper into this theme of futuristic technology by reading Runaway Robot by Frank Cottrel-Boyce and writing some exciting newspaper articles based on the story. This has connected to our topic unit on global citizenship as we have learned about energy, water and how we need to behave sustainably to protect our future. We are looking forward to a well-earned rest over the winter break with lots of exciting opportunities right around the corner in Term 2!

Year 6

KS2 Choir

Key Stage 2 Choir Spread Christmas Cheer!

The festive season got off to a wonderful start for our KS2 Choir as they set off to entertain an eager audience at Bumrungrad Hospital on Wednesday 7th December. The children were delighted to see so many happy faces waiting to hear them sing.

Taking to the stage, pupils performed a collection of well known Christmas classics such as Jingle Bells; Santa Claus is Coming to Town and We wish you a Merry Christmas to name but a few. They even performed Rudolph the RedNosed Reindeer using British Sign Language.

Our audience were so happy to see the children and to hear the songs, that it was only fair to let them join in. It was wonderful to have them joining in so enthusiastically with the actions for ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ and to have them jingling bells and shaking percussion instruments along to ‘Jingle Bell Rock’.

With smiling faces, twinkling tinsel and Christmas hats, the children really wowed those who had come to listen. Sharing music and happiness with those around us is such a wonderful way to start our Christmas celebrations. We are really proud of our pupils and the performance they gave.

PE Department

Over the last term, we have competed in a range of different competitions, and we have had over 60 students represent the Dusit Dragons in the following sports athletics, football, basketball and swimming. We had great success in them all and students have played the different sports with huge smiles on their faces and have shown the Dusit values throughout the different tournaments and matches.

PE Department

U9 and U11 football have had great success in friendlies before the TISAC festivals, having over 40 students’ representing Dusit. The U11 Boys were the most successful team in the TISAC competitions, November they won the TISAC tournament going the whole day undefeated, during the tournament all members of staff from other schools complimented their footballing skills and attitude. In November, we also attended the 1Day 1Goal tournament at St Andrews Green Valley and our U9 boys came third in the competition, a superb performance by all the teams throughout the day. Both girls' teams finished fourth in their competitions too.

Swimming Gala

Swimming during term one the Dragon swim squad has been training hard to develop their strokes and endurance to be able to build a solid base to then develop their different strokes throughout the year towards the galas. In December we hosted a Cognita Bangkok swimming gala here at Dusit and all of the swim squad took part and thoroughly enjoyed the day with the team finishing in 2nd place for the relay competitions and all students gaining a different colour rainbow ribbon.