St Andrews Dusit Newsletter January 2023 Issue

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Upcoming Events January 31st Jan - 3rd Feb - Y5 Residential

February 3rd 100 Days of School ( Rec ) 10th Dusit Got Talent 13th - 17th Half Term Break 22nd—24th Year 4 Residential 27th - 3rd Book Week

Message from the Head of School Dear Dusit Community, We began Term 2 by welcoming 28 new students and opening a new Nursery class. It has been wonderful to see the new children settling into our school community, starting to build relationships with our staff and returning students.

Although the Christmas holidays were over and the decorations came down they were quickly replaced by an array of bright red paper lanterns in the front entrance and more colourful decorations in our big hall ready for the Lunar New Year celebrations.

We had a wonderful celebration of Lunar New year at all levels in the school and the next few pages gives a glimpse of the many exciting and enjoyable activities parents and students took part in to welcome the year of the Rabbit!

Thank you to those of you that joined us for the assembly led by Titan and Vinnie in Year 6. Well done to all of the performers from Reception to Year 6 and of course our thanks goes to Mrs Xin and Ms Zoe! Thank you also to Sean and Kinlay who joined in presenting the cheque for 312,000THB Operation Smile. This money was raised by Fun Day in November and will go towards least 10 life changing surgeries.

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The climax of the celebrations arrived at the football field where we were visited by the exciting Dragon Dance for the enjoyment of all. I hope that everyone had a fantastic day!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Caroline Ratcliffe

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Lunar New Year

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Lunar New Year

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Nursery Happy New Year from Nursery! We are having such a fantastic start to the new year with the addition of a new class and lots of happy new faces in our setting.

A huge welcome to Miss Paula, Kru. Ice and Kru. Meekyo, our teachers in Nursery Rainbowfish Class. We would also like to welcome the new children who have joined us on our adventures in Nursery this year.

We’ve had a lovely start to Term 2. The children have been engaged in lots of sensory play, exploring different materials such as playdough, shaving foam, rice and flour. The children have been adding in water to these and noticing changes in texture and smell, while also exploring different ways of manipulating these with cookie cutters, rolling pins, stamps, whisks and their hands.

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Nursery The children have also been engaging in lots of fine motor activities such as threading the wooden beads onto string. As always, we follow the children’s interests and have challenged them to use small plastic beads, pieces of cut up straws and other materials that have been threaded onto pipe cleaners, elastic and ribbon to make jewelry.

It’s been so lovely to return back after Christmas and see the children so eager to learn and explore. Great job, Nursery!

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Kindergarten Happy New Year, or should I say ‘Kung Hei Fat Choy’? In KG, we have been busy preparing for Lunar New Year. Some of our activities have included using our fine motor skills to use chopsticks when scooping up rice and noodles, making a lion and a dragon to parade around school, working on our phonics and listening skills using Chinese drums made in class. We are looking forward to dressing up, welcoming parents and taking part in our whole school celebration.

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Kindergarten Our theme for this term in KG is about exploring our natural environment. We have plans to visit the local park for a nature walk which will be our first ever class visit out of school - how exciting! We also hope to learn about recycling and composting; making our own composting bins. We look forward to sharing our news with you in the next newsletter.

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Reception We’ve had a splashing return to school this term with another exciting field trip!

This time Reception expanded on their exploring skills and visited Suan Chatuchak. We got to climb, balance, run, and hop, whilst looking for squirrels, birds and insects! We love visiting the park. It’s such a great way for us to connect with nature and see our wider community.

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Reception Reception have also been excited to return to the swimming pool, where we have gained more confidence in floating, kicking and blowing bubbles. For our topic, we’ve been talking about New Year's resolutions, and we have come up with some lovely goals for 2023; learning new skills in football, being kind to our parents, and reading were at the top of our goals list. We are also super excited for our upcoming ‘100 Days of School’ celebration which will take place on Friday, February 3rd. Stay tuned!

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Year 1 Year 1 has had lots of fun with our new topic Pirate Adventures! First we learnt how to talk and act like pirates.

In English we are following Flinn on his adventure to help Captain Stubble to find his stolen pirate ship. The children will be innovating this story to create their own versions and we cannot wait to see where their imaginations take them!

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Year 1 In Maths we have been consolidating our understanding of number bonds to 10 and extending this to 20. Some children are even working on number problems and are really pushing themselves with difficult mastery challenges.

In History we are looking at the life of pirates, answering questions about who they were, how they lived and where they came from. We have discussed some of this already - ask your child about this, they may have some new knowledge you haven’t yet heard of!

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Year 2 Trip to Antarctica To kick off the term with a bang and to get our students truly involved in our new topic, ICE, we thought why not take them to Antarctica? Through our learning, we took the children on a journey to the South Pole and they got to visit the coldest, driest and windiest continent on Earth. All from the comfort of their classroom! They got to see penguins up close in their natural habitat and leopard seals resting on the ice.

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Year 2 The children were surprised to see the number of human tourists

that visit

Antarctica and the permanent research bases that are there. We have been fortunate to have a visit from a real life Antarctic explorer as well as find out about the first ever Antarctic explorers and what they needed to survive. A class trip to the Sealife Centre offers us the opportunity to learn more about the life

found in and around the Southern ocean and how they survive the freezing temperatures.

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Year 3 Pharaohs at Work!

Year 3 have had an immersive start to the new year. Year 3 Gorilla’s kicked us off and got the whole school dancing and talking about their dreams, goals and aspirations for the year during their assembly. Which leads us into more learning about how to set and achieve our dreams and goals in future PSHE lessons.

Pharaoh Tiago was our mystery guest on the first day back for our BIG BANG. We had to solve clues and crack Egyptian codes to discover where our mystery guest was hiding.

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Year 3 This got us very excited about learning more about the Ancient Egyptians in the weeks ahead. Pharaoh Tiago also set us a goal for the term…Year 3 must set up their own museum to display all of their learning and showcase it to parents and other classes. How exciting!

On top of this, we have learnt about Egyptian

Hieroglyphs in art, tackled some larger multiplication sums and begun developing our movie making skills in ICT. We look forward to continuing our learning this term, especially with 2 more Year 3 assemblies coming soon.

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Year 4 Marvellous Machines In English, Year 4 were introduced to the incredibly powerful story of ‘The Iron Man’ by Ted Hughes. They were able to write sentences describing the Iron Man, using noun phrases, prepositions, similes and possessive apostrophes. The children

enjoyed bringing their descriptions to life by drawing some very life-like pictures of the Iron Man under the guidance of Chris Mould - the illustrator for the Iron Man himself!

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Year 4 To really bring this story to life, we finished off our immersion week by venturing out into the school corridor and drawing a life-sized version of the Iron Man. This gave us an idea of the sheer scale of this magnificent machine and led to the creation of some wonderfully descriptive sentences!

However, as we delve further into this story, the question still remains…Who is The Iron Man and what does he want with this small town?

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Year 5 We have had a great start to our second term in Year 5, starting off our Topic unit with a cooking bang as we have made Tea Leaf salad to introduce Burmese food to our learners. Our new topic focuses on Myanmar and the relationship between Thailand, looking at land type and history and we are so excited to delve into this more.

We have also started a new English and Science topic, both focusing on Space.

We are writing letters as if we are astronauts whilst also learning about the planets, incorporating our Science learning into our writing. We are fascinated by the world around us and what other forms of life might exist. We have many questions and are always eager to research these.

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Year 5 As well as new learning, we are always keen to go back and ensure we are secure in our previous learning. We are revisiting fractions learning in maths, applying kinaesthetic learning styles and bringing this conceptual knowledge to the page.

We have had a great start to the year and can’t wait to go on our residential trip at the end of the month!

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Year 6 Year 6 Eagles are going back in time this month to explore ancient civilisations and brave the wrath of the gods and monsters! In English, we are reading The Adventures of Odysseus and writing about his trials and tribulations as he journeys back to Ithaca following the Trojan War. In Science, we are using our knowledge and understanding of light to solve a celestial crime as one of the gods’ precious

artefacts has been stolen! In topic we are discovering how these ancient civilisations have influenced our society today. In art we are going to create our own stop motion models of mythical Thai creatures as influenced by the Dynamation of American animator Ray Harryhausen. It’s sure to be a half-term packed with danger, excitement and discovery!

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Year 6

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Parents Art Workshop On the 14th of December, an Art workshop took place for parents led by Ms. Emilie, with a movie night running at the same time for children organised by our Dusit student council!

We were pleased to invite parents to our first Christmas Art Workshop and are

grateful to be able to have our community come together to connect while painting and learning new skills. We have some very talented parents who created beautiful masterpieces!

We are looking forward to having our next Art Workshop during Art Week in April

and this time both children and adults will have the opportunity to follow along with the live painting guided by our Art teacher, Ms. Emilie! More information and registration will be shared very soon on Class Dojo. We hope to see many of you there!

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Movie night While the parents were being create in the Big Hall, Reception and Primary students were enjoying their

movie event! Students council representatives

consulted with their classes and then planned this activity with Ms. Louise, Kru Nui and Ms. Karen, to raise money for the ‘Operation Smile’ organisation. We raised a total of 12,000 Baht! Thank you very much to the Dusit community for supporting the school in making this a successful fundraiser - the Student Council can’t wait to organise another event for this term.

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Lunar New Year On the 20th of Jan, we are celebrating Lunar New Year with our students and parents. This week in the Mandarin class, we have explored the culture of Lunar New Year in China and how Chinese people celebrate this big event. We also experienced how to make New Year decorations by using brushes, ink to write

the word “blessing” in Chinese character, and using scissors to cut out the word “spring” in Chinese characters.

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Superstars of the Month