School News

From Primary School:

Information letter from Mr. Paul, Head of Primary School

Dear parents,

Today, the Primary students visited Kidzania on their first excursion of the year.  Kidzania is an interactive city made for children that inspires fun and learning through role-play.  The students all said they had a fantastic time pretending to be in lots of different occupations and professions, and even one of our teachers said it was 'the best school trip ever!'.  There will be lots of media of the day coming soon on Edupage and Instagram.

Also today, Early Years had a visit from the unusual musical outfit Playtronica.  Playtronica's mission is to explore, inspire and provoke curiosity using music, play and creative possibility.  The children interacted with different fruits and vegetables to create their own musical compositions!  It was an amazing experience, and everyone really enjoyed the strange sounds they were able to create.  There will also be lots of media from this event too.

Rehearsals for the two Christmas concerts continue to go well, and there will be more details about them during next week.  Mr Simon is very happy with the progress made so far.

Mr. Paul Curry

Head of Primary
 

Now, here is some information from one of our newest teachers, Mr Joshua Prinsloo in the Nursery class: 

Dear Parents, 

We have successfully completed week 3 of this term. It may be getting darker and colder outside, but it doesn’t prevent us from having exciting activities to brighten up our days!  

Our topic this week in Nursery was shopping. We discussed the idea of shopping and how one goes about it. We explored a variety of objects related to shopping, such as a trolley, money and a shopping bag. We even made and decorated our own little paper shopping bags! 

In Phonics, we discovered the letter ‘h’. Because this sound is absent in the Russian language, it is very useful to learn the proper pronunciation of this letter. We learned some common words starting with h while developing the ability to recognise and identify them from other words.  

One very basic, but vital skill to master from an early age is the understanding of patterns, a repetition of 2 or more things. The concept of patterns forms part of mathematics, although it is the foundation of logical thinking and reasoning which is used in everyday life. This week we learned to complete AB patterns – where there are only two variables.  

Thank you for your continual support and care you put into your child’s development.   

Have a great weekend! 

Mr Joshua 

Nursery Teacher 

In addition, some news from Year 4J and Mr John Veshi:

Good day parents and patrons of CIS Gorki,

We are off to an exciting Term 2 with our Year 4 students. Here are some of the engaging activities we are doing in class this week:

During our English lessons, students are given an opportunity to rewrite a story they were presented at the beginning of term during our Talk to Write lessons. After being given the story "Elf Road" in previous weeks, students had to write and retell the story by changing the main character. This provides the opportunity for students to use adjectives and descriptive language to make the story more interesting. It is also a way to show their creativity in their story elements.

After beginning our new term, we continued learning about habitats in our Science lessons. We investigated the habitat of a snail and discussed what it needs to survive. Students were actively engaged when asked if one or more things were changed, would the snail survive? This brought thoughtful discussions and understanding of the necessities of an animal's environment.

Have a great weekend -

Mr Veshi

Year 4J Teacher

 

From Secondary School:

 

Information letter from Mr. Christopher, Head of Secondary School

I hope that you are all well,

This week we have been going through the minutes of our most recent student council. Based on the meeting minutes, we will be incorporating a wider ranger of educational activities into our lunchtimes. More details to follow soon.

For assembly, stunt divers visited us who explained deep-sea diving and how underwater videography works. This insight was fascinating for staff and students alike. We plan to have several different guests visit the school throughout the year to give children unique perspectives of the world around us.

With our theme of the month being Perseverance, this trip to the facilities of the Modern-Day pentathlon will give our students insight into what it takes to be a world-class athlete. The students will have the opportunity to meet and talk with some of the athletes. They may also see them participating in some of the events. On-site, there is also a museum, where the children can learn about the history of the discipline.

I wish you all a great weekend.

 

Christopher Kingshott

Head of Secondary

 

Message from the Mr. Vinicius Scofield (ICT / Computer Science Teacher)

Dear Parents, Students and Guardians,

First of all, for those who don’t know me, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Vinicius Scofield and I am the new ICT teacher that has just arrived in Moscow. I am not so new to the school as I have already been teaching some lessons online. 

I am very impressed with the school campus and students. We have a brand-new campus with huge growth potential. 

As I have just arrived, this week I am trying to get to know my students and colleagues, along with the surrounding area. I will overlook all aspects of laptops usage and the educational aspect of technology use in the school.

For the ICT lessons specifically, I bring new approaches where students have more practical and hands-on lessons. From now on, the focus of ICT lessons will be on how to use computers for problem-solving, and connecting such to computational thinking. We have a lot of web applications, gadgets, educational software that will be introduced throughout the year.  The lessons will also focus on building the necessary skills to use a computer wisely for school research, projects, data presentation and many other aspects of teaching and learning. 

It’s noticeable that our children show excitement and engagement within the ICT lessons, along with myself. I love ICT and I can’t wait to show the new format of the ICT lessons.

I will keep you posted in regards to the ICT curriculum and cool projects we have coming in the future.

Regards,

Mr Vinicius Scofield (ICT / Computer Science Teacher)

From Primary School:

Information letter from Mr. Paul, Head of Primary School

Dear parents,

Sickness caught up with me this week, which is unfortunate but unavoidable at times.  When unwell, it is better to think about the positives in life and not dwell on the negatives - if we all concentrate on what is good, we can overcome anything.  I hope to be fighting fit again on Monday.

Mr. Paul Curry

Head of Primary
 

Year 6 details from Ms Stacey:

Dear all, 

What an excellent start Year 6 have had to Term 2. Everyone came back well rested after the holiday and we kicked off our learning by jumping into new topics in all our subject areas.  

In English, we are looking at ‘Science Fiction’ and this has quickly become a class favourite. We have examined the features of science fiction texts and are more confident that we can recognise this amongst other types of fiction. We are using the Talk for Writing process to learn, model and begin writing our own science fiction stories. Our main focus is on character description, setting and openers. 

Our new topic in Science is ‘Living Things in the Environment’. We began the unit by examining habitats and food chains. We are pretty confident identifying consumers and producers and we understand the difference between predators and prey. We are moving on to deforestation next week. 

Negative numbers, perimeter and area and been our major focus areas in maths. We are confident when adding and subtracting negative numbers and have developed our understanding of area, particularly when working out the area of composite shapes.  

We are very excited to be learning about our international month country Japan. We have already conducted some research into our country, and we will be comparing it to Russia to see what their similarities and differences are. 

We are looking forward to the rest of the term! 

Thank you for your continued support. 

Miss Stacey

Year 6 Teacher

 

Year 1 info from Mr David:

There has been a lot happening in Year 1 this week!! We have been looking at instructional writing in Literacy, where the children have been writing down the steps on how to bake a cake and what ingredients are needed to succeed. 

In mathematics, we have moved onto 2D shapes and the children have been completing activities on the names of these shapes and their unique properties. This has been an exciting start to our term because we have begun our new topic of Ancient Rome (following on from Ancient Egypt). The children have been thoroughly encapsulated by this topic and this week we have been paying attention to the Roman Army and Gladiators (following on from our introductory lesson last week). 

Once again, I want to thank you for your support and I am very excited to continue our educational journey this term. 

Take care, Mr David

Year 1 Teacher

 

From Secondary School:

 

Information letter from Mr. Christopher, Head of Secondary School

I hope that you are all well.This week we have had our second Parent-Teacher Association Meeting, where we shared many of the exciting things happening in our school. Thank you to those that attended. Please feel free to ask questions and contribute to our agenda for the next meeting.

Shortly we will be announcing details of our first school trip of the year, which will be to the modern-day pentathlon training grounds, where students will have a tour, with some having the opportunity to try some of the events.You may have noticed a Christmas tree in our foyer.

Over the coming future, students will help decorate it, ready for advent Sunday.

I wish you all a restful weekend.

 

Christopher Kingshott

Head of Secondary

 

Message from the ESL Department

Dear Parents, Students and Guardians,

We are honoured and happy to announce that we started this school year with new ESL Department on board! The main priority of our school is high level of the English language knowledge and if there is any help needed, we are right here for you!

Our English as a Second Language team would like to share how additional English support is provided across school.

Communication is key! Therefore, students are strongly encouraged to use only English language to express their thoughts. CIS Gorki ESL department firmly believes that communicative approach will enhance students’ abilities to communicate in real-life contexts, express their feelings and explain things in English. ESL teachers seek to develop language skills in 1) vocabulary through extensive reading, 2) speaking in terms of fluency and comprehensibility, 3) academic writing, and 4) listening for details. Inevitably, our ESL learners have been increasing their awareness of correct usage of English grammar as well, throughout all language aspects mentioned above. Additionally, ESL department fosters a positive learning culture which helps students to acquire higher motivation that leads to wonderful learning outcomes.

Every lesson is thoroughly planned and concentrated on filling those knowledge gaps that students might sometimes have. ESL teachers are in a very close connection with all class teachers, and that means that every child who goes on ESL lessons has a personal programme and personal approach.

This week with KS2 we concentrated on our school environment and everyday timetable. We also started discussing different countries, their geographical and cultural peculiarities. We paid attention to the correct sentence structure, practiced making questions and improved listening skills. Our priority is to make a child feel comfortable in English-speaking environment and not afraid of using tit actively throughout the day.

KS3 students are focused on vocabulary building, reading and grammar. Our ideas for literacy and English this week encouraged students to think about how language is used to promote a particular sport, to describe personality and to how we can use our communication skills during shopping time. Technology is an important component of the ESL KS3 curriculum. We use a variety of websites as it correlates to the grade level instruction, as well as the needs of each individual student. Students love using different learning apps during ESL lessons, especially when we are building and improving vocabulary skills.

CIS Gorki ESL Team consists of amazing teachers who have many years of experience, fresh and creative vision of how a modern lesson should look like. They want ESL lessons to be informative, entertaining and engaging. The teachers try to make every English lesson truly beneficial and remarkable. So you can confide in them and be sure that your child will get the best English support that you could ever imagine.

ESL approaches, methods, and beliefs are consistent and, consequently, highly effective! CIS Gorki ESL students have already made good progress. That is why, ESL department ensures that they will keep up this excellent learning pace.

Regards,

Ms Valerie, ESL Coordinator, KS2 ESL Teacher

Ms Tamara, form tutor, KS3 /KS4 ESL Teacher, Tutor

Ms Anastasia, ESL Teacher and Russian Curriculum Coordinator

From Primary School:

Information letter from Mr. Paul, Head of Primary School

Dear parents,

Welcome back, and we hope everyone had a pleasant vacation (despite the lockdown).

Term 2 has got off to a pleasing start.  The weather may have turned, and winter has arrived, but we at CIS Gorki don't let that put us off!  The Value for this month is a suitable one - PERSEVERANCE.  Or, in other words, the value of 'never giving up'.  When it is cold and wet outside, sometimes we can be forgiven for wanting to stay in the warmth of our homes, but we PERSEVERE and we achieve what we want to achieve through never giving up.  Nothing is easy the first time you do it - and if we all gave up on something we couldn't do first time, not a lot would ever be achieved.  This term, we want our students to persevere in their lessons, and to not give up when things get difficult.  

Mr. Paul Curry

Head of Primary
 

This week, we have class information from our two newest members of staff.  Firstly, Ms Pauline is working with Year 2 at the moment, and she has this to say about her short time with the class:

This week we have spent time revising addition and subtraction in mathematics and using a 100 number cube accurately to solve problems.  Children investigated the concept of perseverance in Understanding the World and saw a short, silent clip about a young boy who aspired to become an astronaut.  Eventually, as an elderly man he succeeded and the children designed their own cartoon to illustrate this before deciding what their life goal was and whether they would work hard and not give up to achieve this aim.  In English we are reading Stories from Around the World.  Our first story was about How the Bear Lost his Tail and the children have been reading aloud, sequencing the story, predicting the ending and talking about their opinions of the characters.  Additionally they have tackled comprehension questions and written in full sentences to answer simple content question based on the text.  We have explored Pollution in Topic and Project and focused on the importance of recycling and how important it is to use water sensibly.  The children have been researching their ideas, designed a recycling poster and used a COP26 activity to decide what our planet will look like in 50 years time. 

 

It has been fun getting to know the children in class this week and I look forward to seeing them again next week.

Ms Pauline

Year 2 Teacher

 

Also, Mr Ian joined us before the holiday and became Year 5's class teacher.  Here are some of his observations about his time with the class so far:

 

New term – new teacher! Year 5 are raring to go and all geared up for Term 2

In English we have just completed our poetry focus having compared and reflected on poems with a natural theme. We’ve been able to extend this idea into writing our own haiku and cinquain, focusing on the correct syllabic structure for each type of poem. 

We’re currently moving onto a fiction topic that is all about myths and legends. We will immerse ourselves in examples of each text type and identify the features associated with each one. Once we are more familiar with the text features, we will attempt to write our own myth/legend. 

Moving on from a brief focus on reading timetables and also calculating perimeter more efficiently, Year 5 are practicing their subtraction skills by looking at the values involved and then deciding on the best method to use in order to do the calculation more efficiently and, of course, with accuracy.

Our unit on plants is coming to an end. Pollination was the key word and process that we explored this week. We learnt about insect and wind pollinated plants. Children had fun throwing screwed up paper at their teacher holding a ruler to demonstrate how their paper balls represented pollen grains and by collectively throwing them in one direction, there was a possibility that one paper ball (pollen grain) might actually connect with the ruler (representing a wind-pollinated plant). Unfortunately accuracy was not great and no ‘pollination’ occurred but also no teachers were harmed in the making of this activity!

In Global Perspectives Year 5 will be embarking on a unit that is essentially geographical in content. It’s titled ‘Working with other countries’ and will link with the International Month focus that all classes will engage in. Using the skill of research as a main feature, Year 5 will explore such questions as: What is a country? How do countries differ? How can we find reliable information based on various countries? We’ll have the opportunity to focus on a specific country once the International Country For Each Class Draw has been made and will link this into our GP topic.

It promises to be a very productive term with plenty of learning at the very heart of it. 

 

Mr. Ian

Year 5 Teacher

 

From Secondary School:

 

Information letter from Mr. Christopher, Head of Secondary School

We have reached the end of our first week for term two, and I have been impressed with how hard our students are working. This month's theme is 'Perseverance', which is especially apt for our examination takers this year.

This week we have had a famous street artist from Nizhny Novgorod visit the school. He talked to the students on this topic during assembly, which was very insightful. We also had the live draw for International Month streamed,  where each class had a country to represent selected for them. The children will create a gallery containing these countries for everyone to view on the day of the Christmas concert.

Next week will be our Parent Meeting week, where parents can discuss their child's progress via zoom. We will also hold our Parent Association meeting where we can share all of our exciting school initiatives. There will also include an opportunity to ask any questions. As always, please feel free to contact teachers via Edupage at any time. 

I wish you all a restful weekend.

 

Christopher Kingshott

Head of Secondary

 

Message from Mr Courtin (Science Teacher)

Science classes at CIS Gorki have been electric lately (literally) as the Year 9’s have started their static electricity unit and have discovered all sorts of fun tricks that exploit electrostatic charge separation, such as levitating plastic bags, bending water, and rolling paper cups without so much as touching them. Prior to that, they were studying plants and got to have an intimate look at lilies and the complex reproductive organs that are not only essential to flowering plants, but also beautiful.

The Year 11 class has also moved onto electric circuits and has made use of the laboratory to build their own circuits and design safe ways of connecting wires. They are, of course, taking their studies seriously and preparing for the upcoming IGCSE exams in the springs. 

In Year 7, we have been talking about animals, ecosystems and adaptations the last few weeks and students had the opportunity to create their Ultimate Animal for their chosen ecosystem, full of special adaptations and powers to help it survive. I’m always astounded at the creative that students can bring to class! 

The year 10s have had the most class time of all year levels and as a result, have been moving incredibly effectively through the curriculum. They have learned about specialised cells, done experiments to investigate osmosis in potatoes, tested the effectiveness of enzymes in their saliva to break down starches, and have graphed their motion in a set of races. They always bring a great attitude and lots of energy to class. 

Lastly, the Year 8s have missed quite a bit of class due to COVID related issues but we are starting off Term 2 right but looking at matter and peering into the tiny, tiny world of atoms and molecules and understanding the properties of all things that make up the physical world. 

Students continue to show enthusiasm and curiosity and I’m excited for what the rest of the year has in store.

Mr. Courtin

Science Teacher