St Andrews Dusit Newsletter December Issue

12/17/2021

12/17/2021

Upcoming Events January

Message from the Head of School Dear Dusit Community,

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10th Term 2 start

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26th - 28 th Year 4 residential trip everyone a very peaceful and happy Christmas.

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As we come to the end of Term 1, I would like to wish

31st - 4th Year 6 residential trip

February 10th Dusit’s Got Talent 14th -18th Half Term Break

Having worked hard all term both online and in school, the children are certainly ready for a break and are ready for the opportunity to recharge their batteries. We've had a busy and productive term and the last week have been filled with just as much hard work; a lot of this has been Christmas themed with our Early Years and Key Stage 1 getting ready for their end of year performances.

On Thursday morning we received a message from Santa, and the area outside our school library was transformed for our Christmas visitor, Andrew the Bear! The children visited him in their classes and really enjoyed interacting with him and letting him know what was on their Christmas wish list! Each child was given a present to take home and left smiling from ear to ear.

*Please note that we will review the government guidance regarding social distancing, COVID-19 and watch to see if there are any spikes in local case transmissions over the Christmas break. If there are any changes regarding our Health and Safety regulations, we will reach out and inform parents.

Friday morning we came together virtually for an end of term assembly, shared all of the exciting things that have taken place across school this halfterm, awarded our last superstars and then watched the KS1 Nativity. Christmas performances are always very special events and this year, despite not being able to have our children come together, the Key Stage 1 children still managed to perform together through the wonders of technology and remind us of the important Christmas message.

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

Caroline Ratcliffe

12/17/2021

Health and Safety I would like to thank all our Dusit families as well as our Dusit Team for ensuring that the Health & Safety of our community continues to be a priority.

As ever there have been challenges and we have all shown flexibility in our approach and, importantly, the ability to reflect and learn as we continue to provide a safe environment for our students, staff and wider community.

As part of the Cognita group we undergo annual Health & Safety audits both external and internal. Previously we were visited by an independent external health & safety advisor and last year our audit was run virtually. As the health & safety at Dusit continues to improve this October we had an internal health & safety audit run by our regional SE Asia Health & Safety lead in Singapore. We are delighted to reveal that this went very well and we were congratulated on an “Extremely well run school.”

As we move towards Term 2 we will continue to monitor the Covid situation and adjust our approach accordingly and specifically in line with updated guidance provided by the relevant government agencies. We will also be keeping track of the AQI as we may need to manage increased levels of air pollution which has been typical at this time of year.

We are already monitoring the AQI on a daily basis and will adjust our activities in line with the Dusit Air Quality Policy.

One final note; As a school community, it is important that we continue to safeguard ourselves and each other and continue to follow the government guidelines outside of school. By doing so, we can continue to provide a safe environment for our children and reduce the risk of Covid-19 being spread amongst our school community.

You are of course welcome to contact the following staff; Ms. Caroline our head of school (caroline.ra@standrews-schools.com), Mr. Steve our deputy head (smcelhinney@standrews-schools.com) or Mr. Paul, our Health & Safety Coordinator (paul.ri@standrews-schools.com) should you have any further questions or concerns.

We sincerely thank you for your continued support during this time and look forward to seeing you all in the New Year.

For now we would like to wish you Merry Christmas and hope you get the chance to spend some quality time together as a family over the Christmas and New Year holidays.

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Nursery With Christmas quickly approaching, Nursery are getting into the festive spirit. Our toyshop role play area is gradually becoming Santa’s workshop, and the children are having a great time exploring the different continuous provision set up and are enjoying lots of stories together.

We’ve experienced some fantastic learning through sorting toys and objects by different properties. We’ve explored colours together, and been on a hunt around the setting, noticing detailed features of our environment and identifying

the colours. The children have also been exploring how colours can be changed by mixing paint together, and creating different marks by incorporating a selection of toys . Nursery have also sorted objects by collecting the same type of toys. We looked carefully at the toys, discussing their size, shape and even texture and how they feel, and began exploring different ways we can sort the same group of objects. More recently we have been exploring shapes and recognising key features of these.

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Nursery

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Nursery The children have been demonstrating some lovely language in our small world area and role play area as they have been retelling familiar stories and making up their own narratives for the small world animals. Nursery have also been enjoying our role play living room and kitchen, making lots of delicious meals for their friends, teachers, and the baby dolls. We are seeing some fantastic relationships being formed between the children as they invite their friends to join their play, respond to what each other are saying to keep the play going, and working together to find and share resources and toys that support their play.

Everyone in Nursery would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We can’t wait to welcome the children back into the setting in January.

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Kindergarten ‘Have you filled your bucket today?’ KG students have read a story together about all of us carrying an invisible bucket around, that keeps happy feelings about ourselves. Our students have started filling our big Nursery bucket with happiness. This made us realise that we can also fill up buckets by acts of kindness, helping a friend, sharing a toy or cheering up a sad friend. If a child did something kind, he or she could add a paper heart to our KG bucket. Let us all start filling our buckets with happiness! The Rainbow Fish story helped us to share with our friends and led to a lot of fun colour exploration activities too, such as ice -painting and creating coffee filter butterflies. We have found out that when you mix the primary colours red, yellow and blue, you can make new colours! We have also witnessed how our classroom caterpillars have turned into cocoons and then into butterflies.

We hope that you have a fantastic Christmas and a happy and healthy start to the new year.

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Kindergarten

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Reception We are all finding it hard to believe that the holiday season is upon us already!

Well, it certainly has arrived now in full swing and it has been such a fun and festive time for the Reception children. What a lovely grand finale to our ‘Celebrations’ topic this term! Both in the classrooms and in the Ocean Room, we have been busy constructing and creating our own signature home-made Christmas. The children have decorated the trees all by themselves and have been busy making all the ornaments that adorn them too. They have been wrapping presents to put under the tree, secretly showing us how well their fine motor skills are developing. Popular sub-topics of Christmas have been snow and snowmen, twinkling lights and fancy stars, the sneaky ‘gingerbread man’, the red -nosed reindeer and good ol’ Santa of course. We have been reading old favourite holiday stories, highlighting new vocabulary words and spotting some

tricky words too.

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Reception Preparing for our holiday song performances has been keeping us quite busy too, once again making our own ‘child-made’ costumes and props. We wish we could have you as a real audience but we’re sure you will have fun watching the videos, all cozy and comfy at home with your family too.

We are looking forward to our Christmas party and would like to wish all of our families a wonderful holiday season. The year 2022 is just around the corner and we hope the new year brings good news and a fresh healthy start for people worldwide.

12/17/2021

Year 1 What a fantastic final few weeks of term we have had!

In our English lessons we followed Sunny the meerkat on his journey as he tried to find the perfect place to live. Year 1 then wrote some wonderful emails from Sunny from his next destinations... he went to a restaurant in Japan, a beach in

Thailand, a hotel in Singapore and to so many other exciting locations! Alongside this we have been learning all about the continents of the world and countries along the equator in our Geography lessons.

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Year 1 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 have used printing, drawing and Venn diagrams to sort and classify the shapes according to their properties.

In science we have continued to learn about a range of animal types and we particularly enjoyed watching the tadpoles grow. We learnt that amphibians start life with gills and then develop lungs! We then 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 hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas and we look forward to seeing you

in the new year.

12/17/2021

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.

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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!

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Year 3 Creativity is the flavour of the month.

December has been a very creative month for us in Year 3. We have been very busy designing and creating our own non-chronological report on ‘Famous Figures of Flight’. The children’s ideas have been amazing! Putting writing inside aviator goggles and fitting titles onto a plane's wings are just a small few examples of what the children have come up with. We look forward to sharing these with you once complete. To help us write about these figures we have been spending some time practising our fronted adverbials, punctuation and past tense verbs alongside publishing our fabulous adapted stories. The children have all but finished and our class story book is also complete.

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Year 3 In maths, creativity has been evident in our work on times tables, multiplication and division. We have been exploring multiple calculations and methods to help solve a given problem. The children have used manipulatives, drawings, written methods and known facts to help them. The variation in approaches has been fantastic! Finally, in science we have been using creativity and critical thinking to conduct our very own fair test. The children discussed and eradicated as many factors that could affect the results and then carefully conducted an experiment to show a magnet's strength.

Well done on such a successful term year three! You have all done a great job returning to school and dealing with the changes that are in place to keep us safe. Have a great holiday and we look forward to welcoming you back in January.

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Year 4

How To Train Your Sea Monkey Over the last term, Year 4 have been reading the epic and enthralling story of ‘Oliver and The Seawigs’ by Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre. In this captivating novel, a brave hero encounters a strange moving island inhabited by the obedient but mischievous sea monkeys. The pupils puzzled over what would

happen if you could train a sea monkey: What would it eat? Where would it live?

How could you make it follow your commands?

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Year 4 With our brains alive with possibilities, we explored the features of instructional writing, learning from what other authors could teach us. Pupils found out about how to use time conjunctions and ordinal numbers to sequence events; they discovered how to vary pronouns in a text to add variety and interest; and they used conjunctions to connect ideas within a sentence.

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Year 4 After building their skills it was time to set to work, so pupils across Year 4 began writing incredible instructional texts describing how to train a sea monkey. It’s been wonderful to watch every member of the class engage in the writing process with such enthusiasm. From planning to publishing, pupils have pushed themselves and supported each other to write these incredible instructional texts.

I am sure you will agree, their final writing is truly outstanding!

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Year 5 November has been such an eventful month with the students' valiant return to the school campus. They have quickly adapted back to learning in school and we have been so pleased and proud to see how safely and sensibly they uphold the rules. We have hit the ground running this month and seeing the children’s progress face-to-face has been incredibly encouraging.

In English, the Year 5 students have been casting their ideas into orbit for our Planet Unknown story. They used their powers of imagination to visualize new uninhabitable places and even were able to innovate new ideas into their own version of the story.

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Year 5 What a merry month of December the Year 5s have had. As the classes buzz with excitement for the upcoming holidays, the Christmas trees stand proudly in our classrooms, adorning eco-friendly decorations and beautiful flashing lights, and the children’s stockings hang in breathless anticipation, full of presents the students have so thoughtfully given to one another. Let’s not forget the epic Year

5 assembly which saw the students successfully demonstrate a myriad of ways to show respect and kindness to others and ourselves. We will be dancing and singing along to their ‘Respect’ music video for years to come!

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Year 5 In English, the Year 5s have been inventing and designing their own ‘Cracking Contraptions’ to write explanation texts about. There were such an array of clever, creative and unique designs ranging from cat petters to water dispensers that also massage you!

In maths, the students have been reinforcing their knowledge of place value and then using this to make advanced mental calculations like multiplying and dividing by 10s, 100, and 1000s which also saw the reintroduction of decimal numbers.

12/17/2021

Year 5 Our science topic of force continued with some really fun experiments including further investigation into gears, water resistance and air resistance. The specific focus was on the importance of laying out a formal investigation and how to apply this to the outside world.

The Year 5 students tinkered with their amazing scribble-bot designs - ensuring that they had created a durable, aesthetically pleasing robot shell as well as a safe and secure series circuit. Before attaching their circuits to the scribble bot to create movement, the students were able to demonstrate a clear understanding of how the series circuit worked.

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Year 6 I’m excited to be back in the classroom after getting to spend some time with my family after the birth of my son, Arthur. Fortunately, the energy and enthusiasm of the Y6 Eagles students has more than made up for my lack of sleep!

Everyone worked incredibly hard on our Gratitude assembly and should be proud of themselves. The students took ownership of the presentations and chose how they would most like to demonstrate their understanding of these ideas. We had a wonderful mix of art, video editing and drama to help the rest of the school know the importance of being grateful for the things that we have. I’m certainly grateful to be working in such a wonderful school with such industrious students!

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Year 6 In English, we finished publishing our newspaper reports based on ideas from the book Runaway Robot. We spent a long time studying features of journalistic writing, and then self-edited and peer-edited to make sure we included them to make our writing as authentic as possible.

In Maths, we have finished our unit on fractions, including how to perform the four operations using fractions, and how to find fractions of an integer. We applied these skills to a number of fun and challenging investigations to push our understanding even further.

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Year 6 Science, Topic and Art classes have seen the robots taking over! In Science, we are using our knowledge of electricity to create a festive lights display that we can pitch to a ‘Dragon’s Den’ style expert. In Topic, we have been making Scribble Bots, small robots that can make interesting patterns when activated on a sheet of paper. This gave us the chance to use the design cycle of inquiring and

analysing, developing ideas, creating a product and then finally evaluating it for possible improvements. These skills have also been useful in Art as we have been making electronic robot cards using L.E.D.s.

Everyone has worked their socks off this term and deserves a long and restful break over the holidays. I hope you all get a chance to recharge your batteries and are raring to go next month!

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Year 6

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French What a challenging first Term in French lessons! After reviewing greetings and basics, pupils have learned through two different topics. We have been practising using European money whilst learning about shops and directions in the city.

New learners have shown curiosity and determination to engage work during our school topic, practicing phonics and reading, studying school furniture spelling and some verbs of instructions.

During the last weeks, it has been so lovely to see the pupils enjoying learning about French Christmas traditions. They were really enthusiastic about writing their cards to the French Father Christmas. ‘Joyeux Noël!’ Merry Christmas!

I am so proud of all your progress and looking forward to next term!

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Mandarin In Mandarin lessons there has been lots of excellent work taking place throughout the whole school. KG have been learning to say the colours and describe the colour of object. In Reception, the children have been learning to say the numbers and sing the number songs. In Year 1, the children have been practising introducing their names. Year 2 have been learning to say the food and drink,

they were able to order a meal. In Year 3, the children have been learning to introduce the interior of the house. Year 5 have been practising the weather forecast. It had been a fun and exciting first term, I’m looking forward to seeing you all next term! Have a wonderful Christmas holiday and happy new year!

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PE It has been incredible to have the children back in school for the remainder of this term and I hope this continues in Term 2 and we can continue to build on the outstanding work the children have put in recently.

In EY, we have been focussing on fundamental movement skills such as running, jumping, hopping, skipping and climbing. We have been looking at negotiating space and obstacles safely as well as providing opportunities to develop balance and coordination. We briefly touched on fundamental ball skills such as throwing, catching and kicking but will be covering this in Term 2 in greater depth.

In Key Stage 1 and 2 we have been looking at athletics. For the children lower down the school, the concepts of running, jumping and throwing events have been introduced as have the basic techniques. Children have been encouraged

to participate to maximal levels and the progress they have made has been exceptional.

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PE In Years 3 and 4 we have introduced more of a competitive side to the events and children have enjoyed competing against each other. Also, we added more difficult, athletic specific, events such as the push and pull throws and the standing long jump. Children were able to highlight their strengths and areas for development and some were able to assess their peers, giving feedback - this was very pleasing to see.

Finally, in UKS2, we introduced more events such as the sling and heave throws as

well as standing triple jump - some children progress to including a run up. We carried out a Heptathlon over 3 weeks that saw the children take the techniques they learnt in lessons and compete against their peers using them all. Finally, the students were introduced to the roles of officiating and measuring and did this for all 7 events superbly. I have awarded Gold, Silver and Bronze prizes to the children in each class who performed the most consistently over the 7 events.

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Outdoor Education Since returning to school Khun. Somkiat and Mr. Paul have been leading Outdoor Ed. Lessons.

Students from EY to Y6 have been involved in a variety of learning activities based around using the outside environment and natural items as well as

considering sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Activities Dusit students have been engaged in include play campfires and BBQs, investigating sinking and floating and shapes using sticks, searching for 2D and 3D shapes, practicing basic addition and subtraction through games. Making leaf art, investigating microhabitats and food chains and learning about waste

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Music What a term it has been! Looking back, it is amazing to see how far the students have come from music online to music in person. It amazes me everyday to see the dedication and excitement that the students have as they join me in our outdoor music class. Many students even “join” the music lessons during their play time - standing on the field and either singing or dancing along. I must say that I

have even caught some teachers participating in the music lessons during their duty times. I am so looking forward to next term and the great things that the students will do musically.

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Superstars of the Month

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Superstars of the Month