Movie Madness in Drama Class!

(by Philipp O. MS 3 grade 8)

At the International School of Neustadt (Weinstrasse), learning partners are preparing for filming a movie. They are writing their own scripts, choosing music and designing outfits. Learning partners got together in groups discussing and brainstorming their movie ideas. The finished films will be shown on the Open TV Channel in Neustadt.

Our Drama mentor Jacques will show students how to use studio equipment properly to make a fantastic movie. The movie will be filmed around the Neustadt area. The Neustadt Offener Kanal TV Studio has agreed to lend their equipment to the Drama class for 2 days at a time providing that they produce material that can be broadcasted. The whole ISN Middle School is looking forward to this amazing event. This project will be assessed on broadcast quality, creativity, camera use, movie content, use of video effects and credit reel.

Good luck, all!

(N.B: Our philosophy at ISN is to engage our students in a child-centered, challenging environment where they take ownership of their learning experiences, becoming more knowledgeable, autonomous and creative in the process. Jacques, Middle School Coordinator, ISN)

Exhibition Day!

On Wednesday, October 24, middle school set up their projects all over the school to present them to the parents. The parents graded them between a one and a seven. It was called Exhibition Day, and did not get many parents. There were posters of what the learning partners were doing in school, projects that they had done in the past, and a few Cinderella plays. It had projects from social studies, and posters from English. The posters showed letter writing, false friends, and more. There were also projects from business studies and mathematics on display. In maths, some people presented projects on famous mathematicians, and others presented their projects on recipes. There were some presentations in German which included poems. Some people were talking about their presentations, and one group of people was giving out food. The students worked hard, and had fun.

By Christina (MS1)

The Sad Goodbye

On Tuesday, the 6.11.07, our favorite kitchen woman Ulrike said she has quitted. We are all very sad about it and hope that she will come back next year. She will leave us next week Thursday on the 15.11.07. People of the middle school were going to Sanjay and asked him if she can get another job on the school. He agreed but now we will hope the best for her. So Ulrike, please don't leave us! We will miss you and we will hope that we see you soon.

By Nora (MS3) and Laetitia (MS3)

Jokes!!

How bad is the teacher?
He’s so bad he makes the chalk bored.
He’s so bad he gives aspirins a headache.
He’s so bad, his students compare test snores.

Meet the world’s toughest teacher
How tough is she?
She sends other teachers to the principal.
She grades students on fire drills.
Her tests are tougher than the roast beef in the cafeteria!
Math Problems
Young Larry stopped by the corner grocery store and read the following list to the clerk:

10 pounds sugar at $1.25 a pound
4 pounds coffee at $1.50 a pound
2 pounds butter at $1.10 a pound
2 bars soap at $.83 each

"How much does that come to?" asked Larry.

"Twenty-two dollars and thirty-six cents."

"If I gave you three ten dollar bills, how much change would I get?" said the boy.

"Seven dollars and sixty-four cents," stated the clerk who appeared to be irritated by all the questions.

Larry said, as he disappeared through the door, "I don't want to buy the item...that’s our arithmetic lesson for tomorrow, and I needed some help with it."
Would you please move your cars?

It had been snowing for hours when an announcement came over the intercom: "Will the students who are parked on University Drive please move their cars so that we may being plowing." Twenty minutes later there was another announcement: "Will the nine hundred students who went to move fourteen cars return to class."

Geography Class
Teacher: What is the axis of the earth?

Student: The axis of the earth is an imaginary line which passes from one pole to the other, and on which the earth revolves.

Teacher: Very good. Now, could you hang clothes on that line?

Student: Yes, Sir.

Teacher: Indeed, and what sort of clothes?

Student: Imaginary clothes, Sir.


By Phillip S. (MS1)

ISN Food Still the Same?

Since the start of this school year, the ISN has a new caterer, “Maximillian”. All students were amazed about the variety and quality of food. The students said:
“Wow, this food is much better than the food from the previous caterer!”
Maximillian served us warm and tasty food. The previous caterer’s food was not tasty and not well presented. Now students feel like in a Gourmet Restaurant!
But, two weeks later the food started getting worse and worse. It is still a bit better than the previous caterer but Maximillian can and should improve their food. Sometimes there is not enough food for every one. Now there are two questions we should ask ourselves. The first is: Do students who don’t pay for food eat at ISN? Or do they don’t bring enough food for all children? We hope that Maximillian improves because otherwise sadly we will need to look for another caterer.

By Amandine (MS2) and Lilli (MS2)

Bullying at ISN?

In many schools in Germany bulling is a big problem, but also at the ISN Middle school?
We will find out!We asked 7 people from MS1, 2 and 3 if they think bulling exists and if there is bulling at the table tennis. Because table tennis is very popular at ISN and there were complaints about bulling there. We also asked if the MS1 are the outsiders in the middle school. Because they came new into the middle school and the other classes were already together last year and became good friends

Are the MS1 really the outsiders in the middle school?No! 3 people out of seven thought that the MS1 are the outsiders and 4 people thought they are not. Also if they are new in the middle school people don't think they are outsiders. One of the people we asked was from the MS1 and he also thought that they are not the outsiders.

Is bulling really existing, or just exists in the imagination of the teachers?Bulling really exists! Everybody thought that bulling really exists. A lot of times teachers spoke about bulling and many bullies already have warnings.

Is the table tennis a place of bulling?Yes! 2 people thought that the table tennis is not a place of bulling and 5 thought bulling exists at the table tennis. Also about bulling at the table tennis the teachers already spoke about. Now the teachers take a look at the students when they play. There where complaints about bulling at the table tennis and Jacques asked people if they want to have table tennis times for each class. He said that they could make times for the MS1 and the MS2, 3. But the students voted that they don't want that because then they would have less time to play.

From this Survey we could see that bulling exists in the ISN. But our teachers are very strict and give warnings, luckily. One time a student was expelled from the school because of bulling. The teachers give first three verbal warnings and then they write a letter. If it still carries on they will have a talk with the parents of the bully how they are going to change the behavior of the child so that he doesn't bully anymore. If all this doesn't help then the child will be expelled from the school.

At the ISN bulling exists, but the teachers are very strict and the bully hasn't got a chance.




From Sarah MS2 and Delia MS2

Top Subjects!

By Hannes and Philippo

Yesterday, 7th November, Middle School students of English Group 2, voted to see which are their favourite subjects.

The results of this survey were hard to evaluate. From the top 3: “Drama, Business Studies and Sports”, only one could be selected as most popular Middle School Subject. The group had to vote which is their favourite subject of the top 3. After the second vote the results were clear! The most popular subject is: Drama!


The teacher of the most popular subject was very obscure. But he gave us a smile. Congratulations, Jacques!

DNA Extraction

Grade 8 (MS 3) learning partners at the International School of Neustadt (Weinstrasse) have discovered how to extract DNA from a living organism.

As part of their inquiry into genetics the MS3 learning partners were challenged by their Science mentor to extract DNA from a living organism to study under a microscope. “But how are we going to do that?” some of the LP’s asked.

As an inquiry based school that values autonomous learning and independent inquiry, learning partners were encouraged to research various methods to extract DNA and to write up a Scientific protocol to solve the problem.

LP’s researched and brainstormed ideas and started their investigation yesterday. They worked with enthusiasm and dedication and were rewarded with ample samples of DNA, which they studied under a microscope. Well done, MS3, with a job done well!!
To see a slideshow of how the MS 3 LP’s done the extraction visit our Middle School Web Blog (www.isnms.wordpress.com)

Changes to ISN online

ISN learning partners are discussing and suggesting a new format and structure for the ISN Times online. They want to give more learning partners the opportunity to be involved in our newspaper.

Learning partners are engaged in voting to choose a new editorial staff. We will be up and running in the near future.

Dear Parents

The time has come for us to say good bye and to wish all of you and the children a pleasant, restful and exciting summer break.

This has been a very exciting year indeed, with lots of ups and downs, but very successful nonetheless in terms of school development and student learning. In spite of having to catch up with a year’s work (undone or incomplete), there have been remarkable achievements by all children, both in terms of social, emotional and academic development. There is a lot of work ahead of us, both in terms of IBPYP implementation and monitoring / support of student progress. We will continue to develop and fine-tune our programme, continue to invest in teacher development and continue our acquisition of resources and equipment necessary to build a strong IB/SBW school. All of our work depends on your support for which I am extremely grateful. Your support this year has been a key element in all aspects of school development. Knowing that we can count on your wisdom, advice and positive criticism gives the strength and motivation to aim higher all the time. Thank you!

My thanks to all the Mums (and Dads!) who helped organise the end of year show, which I am sure, all of us enjoyed very much. We look forward to working with you again next year. Thank you to all the other Mums and Dads who helped support teachers in class, during play, in the cafeteria or during field trips.

Special thanks to PY4/5 children (led by Anna von Guradze and Jelena Strubel) who raised 450 Euros through after school cake sale and donated the money to the school. Play / leisure equipment have been purchased to improve the quality of student life at our school. A further donation went towards the purchase of fiction and non-fiction for our library. Well done PY4/5 for such initiative and caring attitude.

Thank you for your generous donation of books and tapes, Hi-Fi, Fridge and next year, even a billiards table !

A warm welcome to all the 22 new children who will join us next year. They are from Hong Kong, India, the UK, the USA, Thailand and of course Germany. We wish all those leaving us well at their new school or in their new jobs. We will miss the children very much but we respect your decision.

That will be all for this year. I look forward to another exciting and challenging year in your company. Have great holidays!

Kind regards,

Sanjay.

A healthy hunger?

by Amandine (MS1)

A group of learning partner’s from the MS 1/2 class started to sell vitamin bombs to the ISN community!

The “Sweet and Sour” group sells fruit kebabs, sweet and sour fruit salad and other sweet specialities. The best thing is that your lunch is made in front of your eyes and that the lp’s are going to donate the profit to the SOS- Kinderdörfer and WWF charity organisations.

The customers have choices between the sweetest and most delicious fruit creations you can dream of. They can also create their own combinations. Just follow the tasty, delicious and sweet smell and you reach the “Sweet and Sour” stall!

Musical Rythms and drum making with Doris!

by Amandine (MS1 - grade 6)

Big, small and colourful are the drums that MS1/2 are making. Every Friday is a new experience for the Middle school learning partners as they are creating drums in Doris’ Creative Arts class for the summer break show.

The lp`s are working in pairs or individually creating a drum. Doris is using a very simple technique to build the drums. You first have to form some rolls from clay and put them on top of each other, but you have to join the rolls with each other, so that no air can come in while Doris bakes the drums in a kiln, otherwise the drums would collapse. After the drums dried out you can paint them in any colour you want. Then, Doris bakes the drums at a temperature of 1200°C.

Today we covered our drums with leather, to produce sound. In our music lessons we are practicing our rhythms for the summer break show. Next week we will actually use our drums. I will update you on our progress and add some pictures of our musical instruments.

New games room

by Dan (PY5)
In about two weeks time the library/welcome room area will be changed into a new games room. It will have a ping pong table, a baby foot soccer table game and a chess table, but the room will still have the library resource books in it. These books and resources will move to the Lern atelier. On Wednesday, 6 June, they started to put new shelves into the lern atelier/media center.

Dolls out or not?

By Leatitia Gerbes (MS2)

Are dolls in or out? That is a really good question. I have asked some people from the kinder garten, the PY 1/2 and some older students and teachers if they play or have played with puppets and dolls.

All the little girls from the kinder garten or the PY 1/2 are playing with dolls. Some from the older classes haven’t played with dolls but the most have played with them at some time. Even most of the boys have played with them sometimes.

So to answer this question I think dolls are still very much in if you are younger.

Library is sparkling again!

Thanks to Clara’s and Valentine’s initiative
by Amandine Hegner (MS1)


Is that room shining? Oh, yes it is. It’s our library!
Clara and Valentine, two learning partners from PY 2/3, have been sorting books and looking after our library.

They even sorted our big encyclopaedias according to size. “It’s just fun sorting the books in our library”: both said “We are helping our community and environment.” Actually, they didn’t want to sort the library, it just happened by chance! They were searching for a book for their “15 minutes’ silent reading session” and came up with the idea to sort the library books when they saw the mess on the shelves. They still have not finished sorting the books, maybe because some people destroy their work, but it’s fun for them to sort them again. From time to time they read a book, which is very, very good, reading is important!

Thank you Clara and Valentine for being caring and principled.

A grand concert

by Tazzio Teeluck

More than a hundred people attended a concert in Hambach on Saturday. About 50 musicians, from the age of eleven to fifty played in the orchestra. One of our musicians that took part was Anna Lena, an ISN middle school student, who played the drums at the concert. She played with a lot of concentration on her instrument and during the parts that she had to play in the concert.

After the concert she gave a demonstration of her musical talents by improvising on her drums. When she demonstrated her improvisation skills, I felt that I wanted to study music as well.

I wish that there were other children from ISN who could see Anna Lena play that evening. It was really an exciting concert.

ISN first parent open day, 9 May

by Delia (MS2)

At yesterday’s open day for parents the ISN Times reporters were busy and interviewed parents. I interviewed PY 4/5 parents and one parent from PY 2/3. Parents said that if they could change something in the school they would like to see one teacher per grade level and also more resource materials. Most parents can see improvements in the way English is learnt at school. Tazzio’s mother said that she can see improvement in her son’s German. Tazzio, one of our foreign students studies German as a Foreign Language.

I used the opportunity to ask the parents what they would like to see on our ISN Times parent’s page. They said that they would like to see events, projects their children are doing at school and also advice on how they can help their children at home.

Does Global Warming exist?

by Jacques

In our former unit of inquiry we have debated whether global warming will influence our health. Capital Area Technology Center a high school in Augusta in the USA, has made a CD for us about Global warming. In turn we are currently busy doing a power point presentation on Global Warming and Health that we want to send to them within the next 2 weeks. In our Science lesson last week we decided to try and prove that Global Warming does exist with an experiment. We are currently analysing and interpreting results and will publish our results next week in the Middle School- Science Blog.

If you would like to see a power point photo show about our investigation please visit the Middle School Science blog at http://isnscience.wordpress.com/

ISN on TV

By Dan Whiting (PY5)

On the first day of the new term the ARD TV came to interview Sanjay and see what our school is like. They brought a field journalist, camera man and a sound man. First they just filmed us and then they interviewed Sanjay. They asked him about what he thought about our school. He said that our school trains us to be ready for the future.

The TV crew also filmed Jacques´ curriculum planning meeting with the middle school group. A few days later Benedict brought a disk to school with the recorded program on it. The whole of PY 4/5 watched themself on TV.

If you are interested to see the recording of our school that was broadcasted on the Tagesschau, click on this link.

www.tagesschau.de/sendungen/0,,OID6629306_VID6629744_RESreal120_PLYinternal_NAV_,00.html

Angles;shapes and Power Point?

By Victoria Tann (PY4)

You may ask what angles and Microsoft Power point have to do with each other. But PY 4/5 have connected the two together to make a PowerPoint presentation on angles and shapes. They have partnered up with a classmate and created a PowerPoint presentation each. They have shown these creations to Sanjay and the rest of the class on the 26th, 27th and 28th of March.

The deadline was supposed to be on the 26th of March but only one pair managed to finish by that time so Sanjay has had to extend the deadline to the 27th and the 28th. By the end of this week they will have finished this maths unit on angles and shapes and are frantically finishing off last minute reflections. The things they had to include were: The use of a protractor, Different triangles and calculations.
We will gather up more info on what PY 4/5 are getting up to in maths in the next issue

Guided tour on the move

By Dan Whiting (PY 5)

PY 4/5 are taking on the challenge of creating guided tours of Neustadt in English. It was Sanjay’s idea, but the class thought it was brilliant. Sanjay and Wolfgang have made an agreement with the town council on making the tours and they said that it was a very good idea. In the future they will be showing people around Neustadt and its landmarks. They will now be working for the tourist information bureau. It will be a challenge that will be continuous and will last for over a year.

A bite at meditation

By Tazzio Teeluck (PY5)

Meditation classes at ISN were initiated by a boy, in MS 1, who thought that we needed more time to relax. He also thought that teachers had to relax themselves from time to time.
If you would like to participate in the meditation program you could contact us at ISN. This activity happens every school day except Wednesdays. I have taken part in the meditation class and I thought that is was a marvellous activity because this kind of activity has to do with breathing and making the brain work better by relaxation and concentration. After this meditation activity my brain was refreshed.

If you would like to take part in the meditation classes it starts at 12:30 to 12:45. The names of the leaders are Philipp Oberbeck and Delia Appelt. Good luck and I hope you will have a wonderful relaxing time with the gurus

Changes to the ISN Times

by Jacques

The ISN Times (edition 1) was posted to all parents at the end of the previous term, by email, which caused the school server to crash.

I thought it a good idea to have an online edition of the “ISN Times” and have created this blog on behalf of the editorial staff.

I will meet with the ISN Times editorial staff this coming week so that we can decide on the layout and format of our e-news.

Is our school different from others in the community?

by Dan and Tazzio

We have interviewed Sanjay on how our school is special and different from other schools. Sanjay said that our school runs an international program called the International Baccalaureate program. This program is run in more than 2000 schools in the world and more than half a million pupils study this program. In our school, here in Neustadt, the medium of instruction is English where as in other schools the medium of instruction is German or Dutch. Our school is also different because we have to follow some basic international school rules like small class sizes for example 15 in early years and not more than 25 in other years.

In our school we value positive attitudes like independence, cooperation, respect etc and attributes such as being principled, caring and open-minded as much as knowledge and skills. We found out that because our school is an international school most of our teachers here studied at universities abroad and they have also worked in many different international schools in the world. Our school accepts students from many other schools and many other countries without having the children take any special entrance tests.