6/2/2021
St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
DUSIT NEWS
May 2021
6/2/2021
Upcoming Events •
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31st May - 4th June Science Week 3rd June HM Queens Birthday school closed (unless in school)
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7th - 11th June Art Week
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School Reports Sent to Parents
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23rd June Transition Day
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25th June End of Term 3
St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Message from the Head of School Dear Parents, At school, we regularly speak about instilling the Dusit Values in our children and often look for ways in which we can build opportunities to demonstrate these values in our daily interactions. As we wait for confirmation regarding school reopening, it can be difficult continuing to display values such as enthusiasm, determination and resilience and one can even feel a loss of hope. Visualizing an exciting future is a great way to build hope so in this month’s newsletter I am sharing some exciting information regarding new teachers joining us next year. There is much to look forward next year as we will be adding two new classes; Year 2 and Year 5, and renovating the Year 2 floor. We have also just finalised plans for our new canteen and it is great that school will have a new catering provider with on-site nutritionist next year! In addition, we are renovating the EY playground over the summer break ... Lots to be excited about at Dusit! This weekend, please take some time to talk with your child and discuss the things that you are looking forward to as a family when life returns to normal.
Have a restful weekend.
Caroline Ratcliffe
6/2/2021
St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Creating a Safer Culture: Dusit tips for safer gaming. In this digital world we live in, gaming is popular with both children and adults and can help to cure that lockdown boredom! If your child is gaming, you may have some questions about how to keep them safe. Online games are social activities, and most have features that allow children to chat with others whilst they play. For information about the positives of gaming, the risks of in-game chat and measures you can take to help protect them, watch this short video: In-game chat: a guide for parents and carers.
Talk with your child about gaming: Talk with your child to learn what games they like, what the content of those games are and what features the games have. This will help you to understand more about how your child plays games and how appropriate different games are. Once you know which games your child likes, you can use NSPCC’s Net Aware to search for apps and games to find out more about them and how safe they are. Learn together. Work together to understand all the features of the game. You can play a few games with each other to test out the safety measures!
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Creating a Safer Culture: Set boundaries and safety settings: Spend time setting these up with your child and make sure they know how to block and report on the games they are playing. You should also talk with your child to create an agreement for gaming; think about how much time they can spend, which games they can access, if you will allow in-app purchases and what spaces they can play in. It is advisable to have them play in shared spaces/the same room as you.
How risky is in-game chat? Gaming is often a social activity for children and talking with friends is part of their enjoyment. However, in-game chat can pose risks such as: Chatting with people they don’t know. This can include adults that are seeking to make contact with children with inappropriate intentions. Inappropriate or unmoderated chat. Whilst a lot of chat is moderated, chat is live and there is a risk of exposure to inappropriate language or bullying.
Requests to make chat private. Once chat is moved off a monitored platform, no one is moderating it. This can be used to pressurise children into sharing personal information, photos, video or chat that they don’t want to.
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Creating a Safer Culture: Consider Individual needs: It is also important to consider your child’s individual needs, emotional maturity and experiences to support the decisions you make around gaming. For example, a game may be rated age appropriate but have content that you know your child will find frightening or won’t understand. Trade’s: Items such as game currency, tools and weapons are often used in games to help a player progress through the game or give increased status amongst other gamers. Often these require in-app purchases, which many children won’t have access to, or require your permission for, so accepting trades or gifts may be tempting.
If you have any questions or need support with any topics covered in the newsletter, please contact our Safeguarding team.
Miss Sonal – Safeguarding and Wellbeing Lead
Mr. Simon – Deputy Safeguarding and Wellbeing Lead
6/2/2021
St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Kindergarten We have been shooting bottle rockets into the sky, creating mission control stations and thinking about questions to ask an astronaut living in space.
6/2/2021
St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Nursery We are continuing our adventure in Nursery, exploring the world around us from the safety of our own homes. To do this, we are having to be very creative and develop our imagination skills. We have dived into the depths of the ocean in our pretend submarines and discovered lots of creatures and facts about the underwater world.
This week, we have been inspired by Little Bear’s journey in the story ‘Whatever Next’ and we are now embarking on our own adventure to space! Here, we are making lots of crafts to set up role play areas which are sparking our interest in space, supporting our imaginative play and developing our investigation skills. First, we thought about how we will get to space, learning about rockets and even making our own. We also learnt about the stars, sun, moon and planets in our solar system. The crafts we are making are not only allowing us to show our creative sides, but also supporting us in developing both our gross and fine motor skills. We are listening to many space songs, stories and having engaging conversations all help to enhance our communication and language skills too!
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Nursery
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Kindergarten We have also been practising our mark making in a variety of interesting ways such as our phonics through scavenger hunts and interactive games, and numbers by making our own analogue clock!
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Kindergarten We have also been dancing while learning the names of the planets, singing while exercising, and reading lots of imaginative stories. Our learning has taken us to infinity and beyond!
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Reception The Reception classes have become such experts at online learning. They are always ready and on time, eager to begin our daily sessions. We are so lucky to be teaching such an awesome group of children. After our fun dinosaur adventure, we briefly stopped by to check out the cave man period. We learned how some of the first humans lived, with frequent reminders of how different life was way back in those caves. We created some cave man art and we even built our own little caves with bits and pieces from our homes.
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Reception Ahoy! We have now entered the world of pirates and mermaids; a life centered around the sea. Together with our mateys, we are learning a new lingo and hearing about life aboard a pirate ship through stories, songs and poems. Pirate hats, pirate ships, pirate flags are just a few of the things we have created; experimenting with design and texture. We are discovering that life aboard these ships was a little rough and not only with the waves! Using our written and oral verbal skills, we have designed and shared treasure maps, pointing out obstacles along the way. We are searching for the treasure chests full of gold and gems, waiting to be counted and sorted.
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Reception Student reading and writing has been progressing amazingly as we continue blending sounds to make longer words, using our digraph sounds too. The children can make complete sentences using proper writing conventions with handwriting that shows accuracy and care. We are so proud of their confidence to take on so many new activities and challenges as they learn virtually from both their teachers and their peers.
6/2/2021
St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Year 1 This term the children have produced some stunning, colourful and fantastic artwork inspired by a variety of famous artists from the past. In Science we have been finding out about different plant types, so we focused on artists who created famous nature or plant and flower paintings. The children learned about the works of Henri Rousseau and Vincent Van Gogh. Year 1 were also challenged to make a Wassily Kandinsky inspired piece and use his techniques to create a tree or flower piece of art. The children were free to use a range of resources. Here are some of the amazing examples of watercolour paints, crayons, pens and pencils used in the children’s artwork.
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Year 1 We started off Term 3 reviewing our skip counting skills. The children used objects, manipulatives and whiteboards to practise their step counting in 2s, 5s and 10s. We then moved on to thinking about making equal groups. We focused on grouping objects before looking at actual numbers. Again children used resources such as cubes, dried pieces of pasta and coins to make equal groups from a given number. After this, the children were introduced to arrays as a means of an easier way of thinking about grouping and sharing. We have also begun learning about fractions and started with understanding halves. In our lessons, we
have applied our knowledge of finding half of an object to finding half of a small quantity. We will continue to work on fractions for the remainder of the month by moving on to learning about quarters.
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Year 2 ALIENS!!!! Not here, but in the wonderful writing the Year 2s have been producing this term. We have been absolutely blown away by their writing. As they have been able to apply all the skills we have learnt and are showing that they can be truly wonderful creative authors. Check out some of their published work...
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Year 2 This past 2 weeks, Year 2 have also been getting to grips with measure. We have been learning to measure, weigh and find out the volume and capacity of containers. Keeping maths practical, children have been measuring the lengths of their bedrooms and estimating the capacity of containers in their houses; carrying out investigations at home and applying their maths skills. Children even got a chance to estimate and record how many litres of water they use each day. Do you drink your the required 2L a day? Next up, we will be tackling temperatures. Hot, hot, hot in Bangkok!!
Please click on photo to see the video
Please click on photo to see the presentation
Please click on photo to see the video
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Year 2 For our science lessons this term, the Year 2 classes have been learning all about plants. We learnt about why plants disperse their seeds and the various clever ways in which they do this. Last week, we planted beans using hydroponics. We made predictions and discussed how a bean in a dark cupboard might grow compared to a bean placed in sunlight. This week children will be planting cress seeds in different environments and tracking its growth throughout the week! For our Topic lesson, we have been learning all about the first man who set foot on the moon – Neil Armstrong – and why he remains a significant individual today. The children produced a skit about the moon landing to showcase their knowledge on this historic event that captivated the entire world.
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Year 3 We have chosen to celebrate Year 3’s wonderful story writing in this newsletter. Take a look at some of the authors' narrative writing pieces they have been working on for the last 5 weeks. The writing process is a long journey and we run through the stages of imitation, language, planning, writing, drafting and publishing and editing. Due to the fact that we have been completing these stages online, the writing process may have taken a bit longer this time, but the quality of writing we are seeing is absolutely fantastic so we are glad that we have totally emersed the children in this writing process.
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Year 3 We have been reading the story ‘The Little Island’ which has been helping teach Year 3 about friendship, conflict and resolution. We have seen the children explore some different situations where conflict may happen and in their stories they have shown a way to solve these. It isn’t easy to write a story, but our children have the most creative ideas and have made us very proud with all their hard work! We are seeing Year 3 really show they are ready for Year 4. Keep up the creativity, Geckos and Hornbills!
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Year 3
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Year 4 Year 4 have just finished their unit on ‘Time’. They have learnt so much and really impressed their teachers with how quickly they grasped some very tricky concepts. They learned to use to 24-hour clock, to read analogue clocks with great accuracy, and even applied their knowledge to some very difficult problem solving activities! We had lots of fun with time activities over Zoom… for example, pupils had to do jumping jacks until they thought a minute was up! Many were right on target as they carefully counted to 60 in their heads to try and get the closest time. Lots of laughing, smiling and breathless children by the end of that fun session!
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Year 5 Year 5 have been focusing this month on applying their knowledge and learning to real life situations in every area of the curriculum. Our science project this term has seen Year 5 set out on a mission to use their knowledge of forces to help a team of scientists move a massive meteorite! They have designed parachutes; used levers to move objects; built pulleys to change the direction of a force and boats to harness the power of buoyancy! At each step, we have explored how forces shape the world around us and how humans have harnessed the power of forces to do incredible things!
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Year 5 In mathematics, we came to the end of our long unit on fractions, decimals and percentages. The Year 5s have taken a long look at working with numbers that are less than a whole. Last week they finished their unit by making amazing revision board games that feature all of the topics we have been working on. What a great way to revisit our old learning!
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Year 6 This month in Year 6 we have continued with our online learning. We have been trying our hardest to keep each other motivated and always come to lessons excited and eager to learn which is lovely to see! Friday breakfasts are going well and it is both exciting and incredibly fun to see each other, discuss what we are eating and to talk about our week together. This month Miss Caroline joined us for our Year 6 virtual breakfast! In English, we have finished writing our new text ‘The Boy in the Tower’, which was so much fun. I spent a lot of time watching some very serious news reels and either laughing or hiding behind my couch from the scary details. I was so amazed by the commitment shown during this piece of writing! We have now started to reflect on this year and prepare ourselves with some Year 7 style tasks
in addition to writing our report comments. We want to make sure that this report will be one to remember!
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Year 6 In Maths we propelled ourselves through algebra and many of us found that this was our favourite maths topic of the year! Every single one of us not only passed our maths assessments but did so with incredibly high grades - we hope 107 is ready for the Dusit mathematicians! We have started working on decimals and will soon move on to percentages. Now that we are confident in our work in fractions, we can see patterns and relationships form and are able to connect them together with ease! Our Topic on ‘Food Truck Festivals’ continues and we are preparing to become world class chefs! We have been delving into the past with foods that our grandparents ate, looking at how foods have changed Thailand and in particular
Bangkok and discussed how our life might be different without our favourite foods. We have enjoyed all of the cooking videos and pictures that our learners have sent in - it is really wonderful to see our children doing some hands-on activities at home and hopefully helping lighten the load with cooking chores!
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Art What an incredible month it has been for Art from Year 2 to all the way up Year 6. We have been working on a step-by-step tutorial illustration, and their final masterpieces are all looking amazing! In Year 2, the children have focused on aquarelle techniques to create a 3-dimension galaxy and they should be so proud of all their engagement and creativity in this work. Using oil pastel and crayon techniques, Year 3 have sketched a colorful bird scenery, while Year 4 have illustrated under the sea pictures using mixed techniques. In Year 5 and 6 we have recreated a farmer's landscape inspired by Van Gogh. That was a challenging design, well done for your determination! Looking forward, it is clear that our upcoming Art exhibition, with its link to eco art, will look wonderful with all the nature inspired pieces!
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Art
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
EAL Our EAL team has been intensively working and supporting the students during online learning. In Reception, we have been learning about clothes and patterns. The children dressed up in their favourite outfits and, at the end of the lesson, we all joined in for a special catwalk. We also looked at places to go for a holiday and the children named the places in Thailand and in different countries. To finish off, we discussed the means of transport they would like to travel by with their family members. In Year 1, we have been learning all about birthdays and we have been planning our own birthday parties. We have been using the present and future tense to think about how old we are now and how old we will be on our next birthday.
In Year 3, we have been extremely busy planning our own story. The children drew the main character and the setting of the story. We have been using powerful descriptive language in our writing to make the stories even better.
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
French In French, we have ended our topic about emotions and feelings. We’ve also practised describing clothes. After some excellent work, if you were to ask the French learners if they have pain somewhere or how they are feeling, they will be able to answer it superbly. The French version of Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes song was also a really fun way to memorise some vocabulary.
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
French We have now started a new topic about Food and French meals! Pupils have been waiting patiently for this one to start as, if we are allowed back in school, there will be a chance to cook, taste and talk about them. We have already learned how to name cutlery and drinks in French. I really hope that we get the chance to cook some French recipes!
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Mandarin In Mandarin lessons there has been lots of excellent work taking place throughout the whole school. In Year 1, the children have been practising making self-introductions and Year 2 have been learning to describe their clothes. In Year 3, the children have used the vocabulary they have learnt to design meals and menus. Year 4 have been learning lots of information on many cities in China such as Beijing, Shanghai and Hongkong and were truly fascinated to learn of the culture and tourist attractions in each of them. Finally, Year 5 and Year 6 are learning about writing the words we learned in Hanzi and how to order a sentence on measurement.
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Music Music at Dusit has changed drastically since the introduction of online learning. Not only have teaching styles been tested, so has student learning. Being online brings about many challenges when it comes to music instruction - a subject that relies heavily on personal interactions. To say that the Dusit student population has risen to the occasion would be an understatement. The work and interaction that I am experiencing, as a teacher, is mind-blowing. Students who have been too shy to perform in class are now turning in amazing recorded performances, opening my eyes to a whole new world of talent among our students. The amazing thing is that the talent and wonderful work is coming from all Key Stages across the school. Things may not have gone according to plan and events and performances may have been canceled, but that doesn’t mean that every day can’t be a show! Take time to enjoy the talents of your siblings or parents. Put on a talent show in your living room! The one things that this pandemic has taught us is to be resilient and find solutions in the most unexpected of places.
6/2/2021
St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
PE As we continue with online learning, the PE and Swim team have been having the children participate in a selection of fitness or skill activities that all students are able to take part in using minimal space and items they can easily find in their own homes. Last week Early Years and this week Key Stage 1 have been taking part in several skill or fitness activities which can be done in a small space with a bath towel. The activities have focused on fitness, coordination, balance, and problem solving.
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
PE In Key Stage 2, the children took part in some daily activities that saw them working on their agility, fitness
and throwing accuracy. During our live
sessions, our KS2 parents would have been very happy as we not only worked on agility, balance and reaction speed but played a game that also had our students pairing, sorting and putting away their socks. Every class was so much fun and they all tried extremely hard to do their best and improve.
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Thai What a fantastic time we have continued to have during online learning. All of the children have enjoyed their lessons and cooperated well in their classes. Our KG children have been having so much fun learning their Thai numbers and can now recognise each number very well. They have also loved singing and dancing along with Thai children’s songs. In Reception, the children have continued their learning on long vowel sounds. They can blend words and read simple sentences superbly. They have also been practising writing words and simple sentences. Well done!
We are so proud of our children in KS1. They have tried their best and have been fantastic participants in all lessons. Year 1 have been learning about words with transformed vowels with and without final letters. They have also been learning
about Southern Thailand’s tradition - Thai shadow play (Nang ta-lung). In Year 2, the children have been learning about words with tone marks (low tone consonants). Even though it’s quite tricky, they all tried their best when practising. Well done, Year 2!
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Thai
In Year 3, the children have been learning about words with simple final letters (consonants)
มาตราตัวสะกด ตรงตามมาตรา.
All of the children participated well in class
and always demonstrated excellent perseverance. Well done, Year3!
In Y4, students have been learning about Thai culture - particularly about the history of Thai boxing and Sepak takraw (Rattan ball). Unfortunately, we can not play these historic Thai sports together right now. However, the children thoroughly enjoyed showing their rattan ball to their friends and had so much fun trying to improve their technique by practising with a paper ball at home. In Year 4 non-Thai group, the children have been learning about asking for and giving directions in Thai. They use the prepositions of place to help them give correct directions. They now know how to say the places in Thai and they created their own map during the lesson - it was such a wonderful lesson full of excellent learning.
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St Andrews Dusit Newsletter
Thai In Year 6, the children had a chance to practise their speaking skills by passing on knowledge from what they have seen and heard. They all tried extremely hard and did very well in lessons this month.