STUDENTS´ NEWSSpring 2014

Tree Planting in Modřanská rokle

The Botanicus Questcontinues….

The event took place on a Saturday morning in April in the Modřanská rokle forest behind school from 9am to 12pm and was organised by a local group of volunteers. The forest park is still suffering the effects of last year’s floods and there is much work needed to conserve the surrounding forest area. I took this new challenge of planting trees in an area that had been devastated by the floods.

Though it was really hard, I loved the outdoor work. We had to work collaboratively with other members of the team, measuring the distance between the trees we were going to plant to ensure that they had enough space to grow without overcrowding the other trees. To ensure we were doing this correctly, we were given some expert advice by an agriculturist. At first I thought I would not be that good at planting the trees because the other team members worked faster, however I did catch up eventually. In the end we planted a total of 120 trees!

Once the work was done, I gave home-made lemonade to others. This event was very new to me and helping the environment both locally and globally by

planting trees is very important especially with reports of pollution increasing day by day.

Dheeraj, 16 years (For part of his CAS volunteer work for his IB Diploma, Dheeraj got involved with a local environmental group

to help replant trees in the local forest park behind school.)

The wise knights of EISP were now in the beautiful garden of Botanicus. The knight named Daniel, dismounted his trusty steed.“Let us head to the candle making!” he announced dramatically.The adventure will continue in the next newsletter… J

Krystof, 10 years and Dadmehr, 12 years

I have returned from a week full of challenges, new friends, and mixed emotions; a week I wouldn’t have missed for the world. Since my return to Prague many people have asked me, “So, how was it?” The question leaves me standing there hopeless as I can never find the words to explain the rather life-changing week. Every moment I spent either on camp, in the school, in Zanzibar or in the bus was accompanied by a mix of emotion and constant curiosity to find out more about my fellow students, the culture or the ways of thinking. The trip has allowed me to challenge myself and therefore expand my comfort zone. Whether it was teaching 39 children, singing in Swahili or African dancing, every moment was a chance for me to develop myself. Teaching such a large group of children outside with limited resources was definitely one of the most overwhelming experiences of the trip. I stood there in front of 39 kids with their eyes constantly fixed on me while other groups started painting the school behind me. During my stay in the school, I got very close to a 12-year-old student, Glory. She goes to the boarding school and has no knowledge of her biological parents but she told me that the school is her family. In one of her letters, she wrote, “I love you Emma you are my best friend. You taught us many things and painted for us our school.” This brought tears to my eyes because I realised how different her values were to mine - she valued education and the love from her older ‘sisters’ whereas a lot of the time I take my education and many other things for granted. The trip to Zanzibar definitely gave me insight on the role tourism plays in Tanzania and the complexity of the situation. After an hour and a half trip through the impoverished Zanzibar, we arrived at our hotel. The contrast was quite shocking: even 5 meters before the hotel, I could observe poverty: unfinished and crumbling constructions inhabited by both man and beast; the hotel, on the other hand, offered a variety of luxuries, such as buffet dinner and breakfast, sport facilities and a pool.

However, having witnessed some of the local life, I came to the conclusion that things aren’t as black and

white as I believed them to be. The hotel contributes to the local economy by providing employment and opportunity to various communities in Zanzibar.

90% of income in Zanzibar comes from tourism. We experienced this through a dolphin safari, a popular tourist attraction on the island. Chasing and cornering a group of dolphins, we were surprised and slightly shocked by both the inconsiderate behaviour of the tourists and the locals. As tourists, we felt that it was our responsibility to respect the wildlife and the natural routine of the animals. Instead, they made no apparent objections to behave with disrespect. At first, we felt that the locals were equally to blame as they seemed indifferent towards the welfare of the dolphins. After reflecting, we realized that there was a reason for their actions: tourists came with expectations of seeing dolphins and as guides it was their responsibility to meet their demands- the better their performance, the higher income they have.

Back in camp, I learned that community service is great and does make a change. Has teaching, painting, reconstructing and bonding been beneficial to both us and the students and Maua? Definitely. However, the key to really making a change to less economically developed countries is by investment and education. Education is the foundation for success and means more potential investment leading to sustainability, development and overall growth in GDP.

Emma, 16 years

The English International School, Prague Brunelova 960/12, 142 00 Prague 4, school@eisp.cz, www.eisp.cz

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Reflection on Tanzania

Dear Parent

As we race towards the end of the year it might be useful to think back on all the progress that has been made over the first two terms with the support of parents, staff and of course, our students.

Improving the school’s use of data for teaching and learning, expansion

of the enrichment programme, updating Moodle, new website, relaunching school councils, further developing High Performance Learning, expanding the IB offer, staff restructuring, new languages on offer and a full curriculum review are just a part of what has been happening over the last eight months at our school.

Sport, drama and music continue to develop in the school and on top of the productions, concerts and excellent results against other schools (we’ve won so much this year) I am committed to ensuring we do even more for next and not only develop our teams but also to work with smaller groups of students on sports such as tennis, golf and dancing. This will widen our offer yet further and allow other students to excel.

We are justifiably proud of the pastoral care that we give

to our students and as I walk around the school I am always so pleased at how happy they are which as a parent is inevitably near the top of our list of priorities. We are working on developing our tutoring in the Senior school to further support this pastoral care and I am confident that under the supervision of tutors and new Key Stage leaders this will be superb next academic year.

There is of course more to do as we are committed to ensuring that the English International School, Prague not only cements its position as a leader in academic performance and pastoral care in the city but also constantly looks to challenge itself to do better. This is a feature of the very best international schools and it is, and will continue to be, a feature of our school.

Mr Ogden and I will be asking parents, students and staff to join us after half term in looking at vision and mission statements for the school where we really set out clearly what sort of school we want to be. This is a very important piece of work which I know parents will certainly want to be a part of.

The relationships that I have been able to build with you all have been hugely important to me and I am earnestly looking forward to continuing to working with you all as your Principal to make the English International School, Prague better than ever.

My thanks as ever for all your support

Stephen

Turtle Day was organised by the school to raise money for the school turtles. They live in a tank outside the Year 5 classroom.

We all had to wear green or dress up as a turtle and bring in 50 CZK for the turtles. Turtle Day was fun because we got to do some activities. I picked up a turtle to see what it felt like. Its shell was bumpy and when I picked it up it was very funny because it opened its mouth wide and looked like it was smiling at the camera when a photograph was taken of me holding it. I didn’t touch its belly but held it by the side of its shell.

My sister was lucky because she won a prize from the Tombola. She was very happy. I didn’t win anything but enjoyed taking part in the other activities. There was face painting, a craft activity, a Turtle and Spoon race and Hide the Turtle in the sand game.

My sister had a turtle painted on her arm and face and we both made a turtle out of rocks and card. I made three turtles! When I got home I made a little habitat for them.

Asia, 7 years

As part of our new computer science curriculum in primary school students in Year 4 have been learning to build and program robots that mimic real life situations. The students were challenged to follow complex instructions to construct and then program their robot to complete a series of tasks that can be controlled by a human. The next step in our development within robotics looked at students evolving their creations to preform actions automatically by using sensors as inputs. The students used a range of skills such as refining sequences of instructions, problem solving and using models to explore input and outputs to answer questions.

To give you an insight into Year 4 lessons in robotics we spoke to Jakub and Iris about their experience of learning robotics with the Lego Wedo education kits:

After building lots of different animals using the Lego Wedo the students were challenged to design and construct their very own Lego Robot based on their experiences over the term. Jakub and Iris worked together to create a snake that had several moving body parts that mimicked a snake slithering across the ground. As Jakub explained, “We used our experience of creating the drumming monkey robot to build the two separate parts of the snake that used the clams to move the Lego at random speeds. We then added a motion sensor so that the snake would start to slither once it sensed an object in front of it – just like a real snake would!”

When asked about their experience of learning robotics this term Iris felt that “the best thing about using the Lego to learn was that it was fun and easy as well as we got to work in teams to help each other”. Jakub was interested in “using the Lego to help me learn in other subjects such as maths

and science for building experiments. I think that building the robots lets me use my maths skills for creating the right power and timing of our snake movement.” When asked about the most challenging part about learning robotics Iris felt that “it was hard to learn so many different skills at the same time but this also made it more interesting. I especially felt good when we managed to make our snake move like a real snake would after lots of testing with different combinations of cams.”

Jakub reflected on the overall engineering process: “It helped us to follow the instructions on the computer but when we tried to just build a robot ourselves it was very difficult, but it helped when we learnt how to plan our designs before trying to build”, Iris added: “When we planned our design on paper we were able to look back at robots we had already built and link parts of these to our snake robot. It also meant that we didn’t waste lots of time experimenting with the Lego because we knew exactly what we wanted to do”. Jakub felt that “the planning helped us to think about the design, what we wanted to achieve and what program code we would need to make our snake work.”

From our Principal

Turtle Day

Year 6 Programming

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In Year 6 students have been learning how to program their own games using the online application Scratch. This was an exciting addition to our computing curriculum aimed at developing logical reasoning and problem solving skills in order to develop ideas from initial conception to completed games. Year 6 students have been creating multiplayer and multi-level games that involve characters collecting objects by avoiding capture by another character. To give an insight to the lessons we asked Alex and Honza from Year 6 to tell us more about using Scratch to create their games:

Alex created a game called Dungeon Chaser and felt that “creating complex rules in my gaming script was the most challenging as I had to link my knowledge of physics to make my character move how I wanted him to move”. He also felt that “sequencing the code was difficult as there is so much and some people think that it is simple but you need good problem solving skills to debug the code”. The most motivating aspect of learning programming through game building is that students have control over the creative design of their characters, environment and

movements. As Alex said, ”I invested allot of heart and time into creating a game that I would like to play”.

When we spoke with Honza about his experiences of Scratch to create his (as yet unnamed) game, he was excited to be doing something which he loved and hoped “to study in the future at University to use my programming skills to create artificially intelligent machines that could make a difference in real life”. Honza highlighted that “learning computational skills such as logical sequencing of instructions allowed me to break more complex instructions into multistep that made it easier to program”.

Alex was excited that he could now use his new transferable programming skills to “learn more programing languages now like Java Script and then move onto Unity which means I can build even more complex games”. Our aim is to equip students with the fundamentals of computer science that enables them to transfer these skills to any given programming environment to create a wide variety of creations from animation and computer games to applications and robotics.

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What did we do? i) Call 112 – rock, paper, scissorsii) pressure bandage for cutsAnd what did the Year 6 students think?

‘…it was really important. We had a lot of fun bandaging our friends’ areas…we also learnt how to call to save someone’s’ life!’ (Daniel)

‘…There was a pressure situation…we had a lot of pressure to bandage our injured classmates to save their lives before they bled out….at the same time our friend had to call the 112 emergency line…’ (Luis)

‘ …at first I wasn’t sure …then it was great fun, especially with the bandages…I like practicing and working in groups…’ (Honza)

‘…it was fun, very fun…I liked bandaging my friends….’ (Sally)

Year 6 First Aid TrainingYear 4 Robotics