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November 23, 2017 Volume 11, Issue 6

BAIS Buzz Mission Statement

The Banjul American International School is an accredited international school

providing a meaningful, rigorous American curriculum in a global context. In

partnership with the local and international community, we empower students to

become enthusiastic, creative, lifelong learners who value integrity, cultural

diversity, and global responsibility.

Message from the Director

Dear BAIS Families,

Can you believe we have completed the first trimester

already?! I’m extremely proud of our students’ and teachers’

wonderful work, which you will observe in detail in the

Teacher-Led Portfolio Conferences next Thursday (see page

2). You can also read a bit about what has been happening

throughout our classrooms in the Teacher Updates on pages

6-15.

I am thrilled to announce that I have received a School

Exchange grant from the Association of International Schools

of Africa (AISA). This grant will cover all costs for me to visit the

American International School of Freetown (AISF) December

1st - 5th. I will stay with Irene Epp, the Director of AISF, and we

will spend this time sharing our experiences and practices. This

is an exciting opportunity for me as I spent four years as a

teacher and administrator at AISF, and Irene is now my mentor

in the AISA School Heads Mentorship Program. Irene is a highly

experienced and very accomplished school director, and she

has successfully led AISF’s recovery since the school had to

close down to the Ebola outbreak. I am fortunate to have the

opportunity to learn from her and am excited to see how we

strengthen the partnership between our schools.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Caleb Steindam, Director

Inside this Issue

Teacher-Led Portfolio

Conferences (p. 2)

BAIS Musical: Aristocats!

(p. 3)

An Opportunity for Student

Musicians! (p. 4)

Student Council Update

(p. 4)

BAIS Christmas Party (p. 5)

Teacher Updates (p. 6-15)

Upcoming Events

Fri, Nov 24

No school (Thanksgiving holiday)

Thursday, Nov 30

Teacher-Led Portfolio

Conferences (No regular classes)

Fri, Dec 1

No School (Prophet’s Birthday)

Dec 1 - 5

Caleb at AISFreetown for AISA

School Exchange

Wed, Dec 6

T1 Report Cards sent home

Sat, Dec 9, 3:30-6:30pm

BAIS Christmas Party

Fri, Dec 15

Last School Day of 2017

(Winter Break begins Sat, Dec 16)

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Portfolio Conferences

Portfolio conferences for the first trimester will be next Thursday, November 30th. Portfolio

conferences are an opportunity for BAIS students, parents, and teachers to celebrate all the

students have learned and accomplished over the course of the trimester. The portfolio

conferences for the first trimester are “teacher-led,” meaning the teacher will guide the

presentation and discussion of the portfolio with contributions from the student. The second

trimester’s conferences are “co-led,” meaning the student will play an increasingly active role in

presenting the portfolio to the parents. For the third trimester’s “student-led” conferences, the

teacher will be present but the student will take the lead in guiding their family through the

portfolio. Reports will go home six days after the portfolio conference, on December 6th, to

provide further detailed information about the students’ progress.

Please note that there is no regular class the day of portfolio conferences. On November 30th,

parents should bring their children to school with them only during the scheduled conference

times. Please be on time for your conference, because there is much to discuss and you will need

to finish on time. If for any reason you are unable to attend at the scheduled time, you may

contact the teacher to see if it is possible to schedule a conference outside of this window of time.

Here is the schedule for next Thursday’s portfolio conferences:

Grades 2 through 5 will have portfolio

conferences with both Mr. James and

Ms. Stacy, so some of these conferences

were scheduled on other days in order

to fit them all in.

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Disney’s Aristocats Kids musical play

The BAIS musical performance this year will be Disney’s Aristocats

Kids, based on the classic animated movie The Aristocats, in which

a Parisian cat family befriends a group of jazz musician alley cats

and must escape a kidnapping plot by their bumbling butler Edgar.

It’s a fun story with unforgettable songs. Our final Aristocats

performance of will be at Ebunjan Theatre on Friday, March 2, 2017.

Students in grades 1 through 9 may audition for roles in the

Aristocats. Pre-K and Kindergarten students will perform in opening

acts before the Aristocats. There will be performance roles for all

students who want them. If any students do not wish to perform,

they will contribute to the performance by working on set construction, costumes, and props.

Auditions will be held in December during the final two weeks before Christmas break, and we will

begin practicing as soon as we return in January. Students can begin practicing for auditions now.

Just go to https://www.mtishows.com/disneys-the-aristocats-kids and click on “Audition Central”

on the right side of the page. From there you can pick any character to view the audition

materials of excerpts from the script and songs with sheet music.

As you may recall, I announced earlier that we would be performing Seussical Kids as our musical

this year. We were all excited about this show, but unfortunately our distribution company made

an error by selling us the rights to Seussical even though they did not have showkits in stock. But

there is doubly good news, because we still have a fantastic show to put on with the Aristocats,

and we are already guaranteed to have the rights and showkit to perform Seussical next year!

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An Opportunity for Young Musicians

Our final performance of Disney’s Aristocats Kids

will be on Friday, March 2nd, 2017. Before the

opening acts begin, as audiences are taking their

seats, we would love some music performed by

BAIS students who are studying a musical

instrument. These performances will not be part

of the official program and are not be too high-

pressure, but could be a wonderful opportunity for

aspiring musicians to perform in a beautiful theater

in front of a live audience. Let Mrs. Sanyang or Mr. Steindam

know if you are interested in this performance opportunity.

Student Council Update

It’s been an incredible year already for Student Council! The

Halloween Party was a momentous achievement for Student Council

and great fun for the whole BAIS community. They accomplished the

success of the Halloween Party thanks to the extraordinary leadership

efforts of Ms. Stacy and many others who helped enormously. The

Student Council wants the parents who helped out for this event to

know that they deeply appreciate their help.

Ms. Stephanie is coordinator of Student Council now, and they are

continuing to have fun while contributing to a positive school

experience for all BAIS students. Today, the Student Council led the

whole school in a fun Thanksgiving activity at the end of the school

day. Students teamed up to hunt for “turkey eggs” throughout the

school, while being chased by “turkeys” from the Student Council

who tried to tag them to take eggs from them! This was followed

with a chalk activity of drawing turkeys and thinking about what we

are all thankful for. It was a fun way to end the week with everyone

together before beginning the Thanksgiving holiday.

Student Council is also excited to collaborate with the PTO by

helping to decorate for the BAIS Christmas Party! The next page

contains information about the Christmas Party, which will be on

Saturday, December 9th.

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Art (PreK-HS)

The artists at BAIS have been hard at work over the last month! By now you’ve

seen the beautiful books they illustrated for Author’s Tea on November 3rd, which

challenged them to utilize the art elements and design principles they’ve been

honing throughout the trimester.

Our youngest students have also continued exploring what art is and how artists

create while learning a bit of art history. They even made cut-paper “color

gardens” inspired by Henri Matisse and tried to capture the feeling of music in

the style of Wassily Kandinksy!

Meanwhile, our upper primary and middle school students have been looking at the unique

features of graffiti and street art by examining artists such as Banksy and Keith Haring. Check out

these pictures from their recent stencilling project!

Be sure to visit www.baisart.weebly.com for more updates and images from the art room!

-Ms. Leah

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Pre-K

Students are growing in all ways imaginable in Pre-K! In language arts, we have been busy

studying the letters F, G, H, I and now J. Students learned how to write each letter, its associated

sounds and objects around us that begin with the same letter

sound. We have been working on how to write our name, and

most of the students in class can

now do this! Pre-K students have

also been learning about fairy

tales. We’ve discussed certain

elements that are commonly

found in fairy tales and are

having fun listening to some

classics in the meantime!

In math we have been focusing on shapes. We are learning how shapes are all around us and

that many different shapes can be found hidden in buildings and houses. Pre-K students can draw

basic shapes and are incorporating them when they build towers in our ‘construction zone.’

We have taken a break from our class kitchen and supermarket, and students can now visit the

Pre-K Hair Salon and Pre-K Eye Doctor for role play. The class has been learning about the

importance of looking after your eyes and how when you go to an eye doctor, you may be asked

to read from an eye chart. If you feel like your eyesight is fading, please come and visit us in Pre-K

and one of our specialized optometrists’ will give you a thorough exam!

Many fun, hands-on experiments have taken place with our five senses unit. Students have used

their sense of hearing to decipher what certain sounds are in our hearing games. We had two

guest speakers come and talk to us about being deaf who also taught us

some basic sign language. We used our sense of taste in our blindfolded

taste tests, created beautiful pictures with glitter for a sense of sight, and

did more blindfold experiments with our sense of touch. Our favorite

experiment was when we got to get messy and use our sense of touch to

play with corn flour. Two men who are blind from “Start Now’ also came to

talk to our class about what it is like to be blind.

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Kindergarten

Greeting from Kindergarten,

In Science, Kindergarten talked about how the sun heats up the ground and what we can do to

reduce it. The children built shades from different material to create shade from the sun.

We continued to practice sight words in various ways. One way was by writing the word “you” in

shaving gel. It was lots of fun!

In Math we started to work with addition and subtraction. The children wrote their own addition

and subtraction stories.

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Grade One

In Grade One, students have concluded their study of Kenya with a role-playing session in which they portrayed

Maasai villagers who were offended by the remarks of visiting nature photographers. A meeting was held by the

photographers to problem-solve the situation and a plan was made to apologize and make amends with the Maasai. It

worked!

Students then explored painting with straws around an elevation

map of Africa and are currently working on developing map skills

and understanding cardinal directions, using maps of Africa and the

world.

In language arts, our new board games make learning fun and help

us to recognize compound words, blends, and contractions!

We were fortunate to have Jimmy’s dad drop by with

a robot named Jainaba! Jimmy demonstrated how

the robot could clean pencil shavings on our

classroom floor by using sensors and how it could

find its way “home” to get recharged. We were impressed and happy with our clean floor!

In science, we have studied phases of the Moon and recently learned how to locate

the North Star using the constellation, The Big Dipper. We loved how the book, The Big Dipper and You, describes

how the North Star is like the tip of an umbrella when you spin it. Like the tip, the North Star stays stationary while

everything spins around, including us!

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Grade Two to Five

Grades 2-5 have classroom blog where activities and work can be published to a wider audience.

You will find interesting posts around exploring the different spheres on Earth, Halloween

watermelon carving, experiments on water, erosion and weathering experiments and building the

fossil records, just to name a few. Check out themenagerie.edublogs.org to see what we have

been doing.

- Ms. Stacy & Mr. James

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Middle & High School Science

Science class has been keeping the momentum high as we moved into learning about Newton’s

Laws of Motion! The students have been making meaning of and connecting the Laws through

running various experiments and collecting then analyzing data. They explored concepts of

friction and the relationship between mass and acceleration. Students learned how to represent

these concepts and motion of an object using force diagrams, first as drawings with arrows

representing force and then as free-body force diagrams.

In their mid-unit assessment of building a balloon-powered car, students worked hard to apply

Newton’s Laws to and manipulate materials into a vehicle that moves! It proved to be a

challenging engineering task as the force provided by only one balloon is very small, thus their cars

needed to be very light weight.

In our final time trials, hosted on Tuesday, November 21, Aina’s car was awarded the golden

balloon for the farthest traveled! Aziz’s car was awarded the golden balloon of fastest to 3 meters!

All the students did a fantastic job in getting their cars to move!

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French

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Middle/High School Math

The Middle School students wrapped up their Fractions Action unit. They learned how to add, subtract, multiply and

divide fractions and mixed numbers and change fractions to decimals. Fractions usually pose a challenge for students

and it is important to gain the skills acquired to handle operations involving fractions as they are needed in the units

such as percentages, ratios, rates and proportions. This week, we started our unit on Parts and Wholes whereby

students learn to use proportional reasoning and solve problems involving proportions, rates and percents. Students

will be working on examples involving real-life problems such as doubling a recipe or calculating the price of a sale

item that is half off and more. These help enhance their understanding of the importance of this topic in mathematics

and how it relates to everyday life. Students in grades 7 and 9 also worked on solving two-step equations and learned

to apply them in word problems. All MS students explored solving inequalities in one variable and graphing them.

The grade 7 & 9 students continue their work on functions, equations using function table of values and graphing

coordinates of points from the table. They have also reviewed inequalities and their application in problem solving. In

mathematics a linear inequality is an inequality which involves a linear function but contains one of the symbols

of inequality: < is less than. > is greater than. ≤ is less than or equal to. Students explored the writing and translating

word phrases to inequalities. They learned that to be at least 16 to drive a car can be written as a≥16 (a is a variable

defined to represent age). For example: If you have at most $60 and want to spend $22 on jeans and the rest on t-

shirts that cost $9, students know that this can be translated to an inequality using algebraic reasoning that can give

them more than one possible solution and the inequality is 22 + 9t ≤ 60. Seventh graders explored learning by

simulating solutions to problems such as finding 2 or more consecutive numbers with a certain sum or difference; so if

n=8, then n+1=9, and n+2=10 and so forth (examples of three consecutive numbers). A great emphasis is placed on

enhancing problem solving skills and algebraic reasoning to give students the opportunity to apply the skills they are

learning and their application in real world context. Middle school math is also integrated with science in several of

their projects. Students worked on equations involving Newton’s Laws of motion and applying the formulas to solve

mass, distance and velocity or rates. The MS students learned to apply several formulas related to energy such as

kinetic energy = 1⁄2 × mass × velocity

2. Some of the problems needed students to calculate the area and perimeter to

determine to apply the formulas of Potential and Kinetic energy. Other applications and integrations with math were

the use of graphs and function tables.

Students continuously work on improving their ‘Math Talk’ questioning/discussing when working in teams to solve

problems and share with the class.

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Middle/High School Humanities

The BAIS Middle/High School students presented their final project for the first unit, Early

Civilizations, in late October. An inquiry-based project, the Oriental Museum of the University of

Chicago Museum Display Project required students to investigate eight features of a civilization of

their choice, create “new” and unique artifacts, and present their findings to parents. They chose

from the Indus River Valley, Huang-He, the Old Kingdom of Egypt, and the Kingdom of Kush. After

weeks of research, analyzing, writing, and creating, the students finally shared what they learned.

It was an impressive collection of knowledge and creativity! Thanks to all the parents who

attended this special event!

After this project, students began to analyze Aristotle’s ideas about tragedy and contemplating

why catastrophe is so compellingly entertaining. After wrapping up the Epic of Gilgamesh and

studying epic heroes, students were introduced to Antigone and tragic heroes. Before reading

Antigone, concepts like harmartia (fatal flaw), catastrophe, and catharsis were introduced along

with the six elements of tragedy according to Aristotle: plot, character, thought, diction, melody,

and spectacle. Using reader’s theater and rotating roles, students acted out the drama and

followed Antigone and King Creon during their tragic downfalls. The final assessment for this unit is

a debate where the motion “Antigone is the true tragic hero in Antigone, not Creon,” will be

argued by two three-member teams. Debate skills and strategies have been introduced, and

teams are in deep into their preparation.

After the Thanksgiving holiday, students will begin their 3rd unit, The Maya, which has been

designed to practice more advanced informational reading skills, geography, and interdisciplinary

connections with math and science. Students will publish blogs as a forum to share their learning,

so stay tuned!

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Music

Pre-K students learned the song “Swimming” and demonstrated the various swimming positions as

they sang. Added to their repertoire was the song “Sing a Song of Senses,’’ which taught students

about the various senses and what the eye, ear, nose, tongue, hands and eyes are used for. One

of the favourites this month was “I Wanna Be Like You” from the Jungle Book musicals. Kindy

students learned the song “This Is a Cowbell” and joined in by rocking their cowbells and

percussion instruments together in a steady beat. Students also sang and danced to the songs

“Oh Where Has my little Dog Gone’’, “Sing a Song of Senses,” and “Funga Alafia,” a Nigerian song

that means “welcome.” Grade One students learned the songs “Shiver & Shake,” “I’m a Little

Scarecrow,” and “Crunchy Leaves,” as well as “Fanga Alafia” and various Christmas carols.

Grades Two and Three learned the song “Back to School”. They also learned the songs “Shiver and

Shake” and “Chumbara.” Grades Four and Five focused on recognizing the value of the various

musical notes. They completed a variety of exercises that used musical notes in a simple math

equation and used the staves to identify notes above and below the treble and bass clef. Middle

and High School students continued to complete various the musical scales and key signatures of

E and A Major. Students learned with examples various terminology used in standard music

notation such as forte, messo piano, andante, and

adagio.

Students of all ages have also been rehearsing

various Christmas carols.

Physical Education

It has been an exciting first trimester with a lot of accomplishment in PE class at all grade levels.

The pre-k students are reviewing what they have learned and been assessed on the locomotor

and non-locomotor skills in small sided game situations.

Building on social skills through parachute play has been a challenge for the kindergarten

students, and we have made great progress. Kindergarteners are now enjoying playing together

with a parachute and learning different way it can be used to have fun.

Primary students are reflecting on the various concepts and skills they have been learning

throughout the trimester, and preparing to reflect on their accomplishments with their families in

the portfolio conferences.

Middle and High School have just completed a written test and research activity on the Track and

Field activities they have done. In golf, they are currently working on recording data into their golf

scorecard.