Dusit Newsletter November 2020

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

DUSIT NEWS

November 2020

11/27/2020

Upcoming Events 

2th Zero Waste



5th December HM King Bhumibol

St Andrews Dusit

Message from the Head of School Dear Parents,

Adulyadej’s Birthday / Father’s Day 

7th December Father’s Day in Lieu



9th KS2 Parent Workshop 8:15



10th KG Christmas Sing Along 10 AM



10th Year 4 Residential Parent info session



11th ;



Stay and Play 9.30 AM



Nursery Christmas Party & Play

10.30 AM 

Reception Nativity 13.00



16th KS1 Nativity 8.10



16th KS2 Nativity 13.30



18th December Term 1 end

( Christmas Class Parties information to follow ) 

11th January Term 2 start

A busy month has flown by and, although we have had to navigate our way through some pollution and road closures due to protests, nothing has stopped the learning for our children here at Dusit!

Our Year 3 and Year 5 children have been on their residential trips and we are so pleased that class assemblies with parents attending are starting back up again; this morning we enjoyed learning about Gratitude from our Year 3 children and last week our Year 5 student assembly focused on the importance of Empathy.

Today, I attended the termly ISAT meeting with updates regarding procedures for entering Thailand, the Data Protection Act (coming into effect in May 2021) and discussions around school accreditations—a very productive meeting!

I do hope that everyone has a wonderful weekend!

Head of School

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

Creating a Safer Culture: #Howdusitdoesit The Importance of Positive Discipline Last time we talked about positive reinforcement and encouraging any behaviours that we want children to repeat. This month, we will continue this theme and discuss how positive discipline techniques show a positive impact in the way children deal with their behaviours.

Managing your own feelings is an important part of creating a warm and loving family environment that helps your child behave well. If you can manage your own angry or frustrated feelings in positive and healthy ways – for example, by staying calm, taking a few deep breaths or even walking away – you give your child a great example of how to behave. Often we accidently reinforce negative behaviours by getting angry or aggressive, this sometimes comes out in physical aggression such as smacking. When parents smack a child, they’re often trying to say, ‘You’ve done the wrong thing – behaving that way is not appropriate’. However this isn’t the message children receive. A child who is smacked might think their parent is saying, ‘I’m angry with you and I don’t like you.’ There are a few drawbacks to using smacking as a form of discipline,

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit

Creating a Safer Culture Firstly, the risk that smacking might hurt your child. Secondly, it can give children the message that smacking or hitting other people is an appropriate way to deal with strong feelings. Thirdly, it can lead to longer-term problems in children’s health and development; research shows children are more likely to have challenging behaviour, anxiety or depression if they are smacked.

Positive Discipline and Positive reinforcement 1. Having clear family rules. Rules let your child know what behaviour you expect and can help you avoid difficult behaviour from your child. All family members should follow the rules and be a good role models and could include:  physical behaviour towards each other e.g. ‘Be gentle.’

 safety e.g. ‘Wear your seatbelt in the car, please.’  manners e.g. ‘We wait until others have finished talking before we talk.’  daily routines e.g. ‘We take turns setting the table each night.’ 

respect for each other e.g. ‘Knock before going into each other’s

rooms.’

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

Creating a Safer Culture Show your child how you feel - Telling your child honestly how their behaviour affects you, helps your child to see their own feelings in yours. If you start sentences with ‘I’, it gives your child the chance to see things from your perspective. For example, ‘I’m feeling upset because there’s so much noise and I can’t talk on the phone’.

Using consequences - A consequence is something that happens as a result of your child behaving in a particular way. Consequences can be positive or negative. Positive consequences reinforce behaviour and make it more likely to happen again. Positive consequences include positive attention and praise and rewards for good behaviour.

Negative consequences make behaviour less likely to happen again. T There are times when you might choose to use negative consequences for difficult behaviour – for example, to reinforce rules when simple reminders haven’t worked. You can use both positive and negative consequences to guide your child’s behaviour. For example: You praise your child for sitting and eating their meal at the table. This is a positive consequence that makes this behaviour more likely in the future. Your child throws a toy, and you put the toy away for the rest of the day. This is a negative consequence that makes this behaviour less likely in the future.

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit

Creating a Safer Culture Consequences work in the long term only when you combine them with positive strategies to encourage good behaviour. When teachers, parents and family members role model appropriate social behaviours along with focusing on the solution rather than the behaviour or problem/concern, this supports children to understand their feelings and to behave in appropriate ways.

As always, if you have any questions around this, please feel free to contact our Safeguarding Team:

Miss Sonal

Mr. Simon

Designated Safeguarding and

Deputy Safeguarding and

Wellbeing Lead

Wellbeing Lead

strivedi@standrews-schools.com

scullen@standrews-schools.com

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

Nursery

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit

Nursery Nursery’s learning journey has taken them into the magical land of fairy tales! We have been reading, acting out and role-playing lots of classic stories such as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘The Three Little Pigs’, ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ and ‘The Gingerbread Man’.

Our teachers helped us to understand the stories by dressing up as the characters and giving us live performances of each book - it was very funny! We used the language concepts from the books to help our focus for English development this term, such as ‘big’, ‘medium’, ‘small’ beds, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ chairs and ‘hot’, ‘cold’ and ‘delicious’ porridge.

The children are growing so confident in their ability to understand and retell stories and their listening skills are fantastic. It is hard to believe they are only two and three years old!

We are now beginning to look at all things magical in the run up to Christmas, thinking about magic spells, potions and the world of make-believe! Abracadabra!

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

Nursery

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit

Kindergarten KG has been busy with all sorts of activities, both in and out of the classroom. We have been exploring old technology with all of its buttons and lights, drawing a variety of intricate pictures and talking about them. We have also been thinking about our wellbeing by painting stones to decorate our beautiful outdoor area. We have also been making experiments with colours and making paper aeroplanes too!

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

Kindergarten We are so excited for our upcoming Christmas sing-along, and have been singing, dancing and using jingle bells to practice our songs that we will be performing for our families!

In the coming weeks, we will be making lots of lovely decorations to take home and will look at stories about Christmas and how it is celebrated around the world.

We will also make bird feeders to enhance our understanding of the world and show concern for living things, and continue to use our lively imaginations to create beautiful artwork!

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit

Reception - Gross Motor skills Reception classes have been busy building up their gross motor skills outside during this lovely, sunny weather. Following along with their interests all around the topic of light, we have been looking at rainbows. The children have enjoyed making real rainbows outside in our water area, near the water tubs. We have been so excited watching their increasing control of the water hoses, construction materials and tools and it has been great to see them navigate their way around the various outdoor areas.

Inside, we have been creating firework pictures with forks, and paint has been very popular! In turn, the children have been learning colour words to add to their writing pieces too.

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

Reception - Gross Motor skills These past couple of weeks, we have been focusing on helping our children enhance their oral skills by sharing their weekend/holiday adventures with the class. By adding new vocabulary and modelling sequencing strategies, the children are learning to organize and clarify their thinking. This is also giving our children an opportunity to share their interests and their unique skills. We are so pleased with their increasing confidence in this area; they really do have a lot to share!

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit

Year 1- Explorers Year 1 have started our topic lessons this term and are focusing on Geography.

We have spoken about our local area, our school and home and the things that you can see there. Our children’s enthusiasm and curiosity was broadened when we looked at the amazing, iconic buildings and places that Bangkok has to offer. Following this, the children created some of the buildings that they had learnt about in our construction area and made beautiful art pieces reflecting these buildings too.

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

Year 1 - Explorers After exploring Bangkok, we took a look at maps of Thailand.

We used different maps to find cities to help us in our activity of filling in a blank map of Thailand. We found Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Phuket, Hua Hin and Pattaya.

We will look at other iconic places of interest within Thailand that can be visited and then look at compass directions to discover more countries in the world for us to explore!

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit

Year 2 - Reporting from Around the World Just like the Snail and Whale, Year 2 have been exploring the world through Geography. We have been learning about the 7 different continents and 5 different oceans. We have explored warmer and cooler climates and learnt about the Equator, the Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer; looking at different countries in Asia and what affects their climate.

After that, we carried out a comparison right here in Thailand by looking at the similarities and differences between Bangkok and Chiang Mai. All the while we have been refining our geographical skills, learning to read and understand maps and note physical features of the land. The Snail wanted to explore the world and so do we!!

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

Year 2 - Reporting From Around the World We have not only been explorers but have become news reporters too! We examined the events that led to a whale being beached and gathered details of the dramatic event.

We then had to interview witnesses and hot-seated the reaction of key characters. Following this, we then collected quotes and kept them to use in our news report. We had to place events in sequential order and wrote several drafts and helped each other edit and improve each draft.

Finally, after several days of hard work, our news reports are finally published. Why don’t you pop into class to see our final product?

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit

Year 3 - Gratitude Assembly Year 3 have been working hard this week trying to get our assembly ready for the Friday’s performances - we hope that you enjoyed it! We included lots of different elements in our assembly and students have showed some fantastic acting, sharing some of the work they have written, used technology and the green screen room to accompany their videos, singing our gratitude song and showcasing some original poetry and artwork. We have worked on projecting our voices with clarity when on the stage and we hope we brought the meaning of ‘Gratitude’ alive for you!

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

Year 4 - Mathematicians!

Year 4 have been working really hard on developing their maths skills this term. They have been focusing on multiplication and division. Through their topics, they have learned how important their times table knowledge is, as it helps them access many other areas of the maths curriculum.

Pupils had a great time putting their skills to the test, as they took part in a variety of outdoor ‘times table’ challenges. There were big smiles and lots of laughter as the children developed their skills, whilst completely embracing errors as opportunities for further learning! They then worked collaboratively to come up with a set of rules for their own ‘outdoor learning experience’ based around maths skills covered in the classroom.

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit

Year 5 Residential Trip What a brilliant test of teamwork, determination and independence the last 4 days have been for Year 5 on their residential.

Embarking on Tuesday for our trip to The Rowing and Canoeing Association of Thailand the students were on an adventure from the get go! The first couple of days saw them learning to read a map to hike to Green Valley, finding out how to tie different knots and den building, all of which they rose to the challenge of. It was only a matter of time before we took to the water, learning about the different strokes and skills needed to stay afloat and row as a team or individually.

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

Year 5 Residential Trip Everything learnt and observed over the trip came to a fantastic end with raft building, racing and an ultimate team challenge. I am proud of how the year 5 students have challenged themselves to try new things, push their individual levels of independence but most of all how they have worked together to encourage and support each other. This has been a residential to remember, I know I am not going to forget it anytime soon!

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit

Year 6 - The Boy in the Dress Year 6 have had a wonderful November and have finished our book ‘The Boy in the Dress’. We found it fun and interesting talking about a different point of view from our own. We have been roaring with laughter at some of the jokes in the book and have said it has been one of our favorite books this year!

In our English lessons, we finished creating and writing ‘The Teacher Pleaser’, and many of these pieces of writing were aimed at making a teacher's working life more difficult and stressful rather than a helpful device to improve our lives watch out teachers!

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

Year 6 - ‘The Boy in the Dress’.

We have just started our biographical text work and this was requested by students themselves after showing interest in these texts in the library. We have been playing plenty of games in maths to help us in our understanding of multiples, factors and prime numbers and this has resulted in a competitive race for ‘king or queen of the prime’. If you have time, please play at home and see who comes out on top! We continue on with our wellbeing topic work by ensuring that our incredibly attractive eco-friendly bags are ready to sell for Xmas! If you haven’t thought of the ideal gift to get for family members yet, worry not - we have it for you already! It will make both you and your family feel great for giving and will inform you about which animals are endangered - did you know dugongs are? Help us, help them!

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit

One Day One Goal @ Green Valley 21st November 2020 We are very proud of our St Andrews Dusit football team who took part in the One Day One Goal charity football tournament at our sister campus, St. Andrew International School, Green Valley last weekend.

In total, we took 4 football teams to Green Valley, two U9 boys’ teams, one U11 boy’s team and one U11 girl’s team.

The students enjoyed playing football and cheering their friends on but a special thanks goes to our extremely supportive parents who also attended the tournament to cheer on our team, take photos and support the children off the pitch.

We are pleased to announce that our U9 boy’s team finished 3rd place in the tournament with a brilliant 4 games won out of 5! The boys only lost one game and this was to the overall champions of the tournament so we are really proud of them as there was a lot of tough competition on the day!

Well done to all of our players and thank you for being such great ambassadors for our school last weekend.

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

One Day One Goal @ Green Valley 21 November 2020 Under 11 boys finished 7th place of 10 teams that joined the U11s boy.

The Under 11 Girls finished 7th place out of 9 teams that joined U11s girls.

And U9s boy B team finished 8th place of the teams that joined U9s boy.

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit

Early Years Superstars!

11/27/2020

St Andrews Dusit news-

Key Stage 1 and 2 Superstars!