Dreaming B ig and Sh in ing Br igh t a t A IS

Albanian International School

May 2 n d , 2014 Vo lume 2 , Issue 8

“The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men . . .” I guess Mr. Burns had it right. Ever make plans and watch them change without you being able to do anything about it? Welcome to April/May at AIS! We were supposed to welcome some university students from the AIESEC program (l’Association Internationale des Étudiants en Sciences Économiques et Commerciales), who were to work with our AIS students on environmental projects for a Science Fair in May. Oops, Albania happened. Turns out Albanian bureaucracy delayed their visas, and they have only just arrived. Beginning May 5th, the foreign students will be working with AIS students for four hours every Monday for six weeks. Our students will be learning about the effects of pollution on water, how garbage not disposed of properly not only looks and smells bad but is bad for the environment, how saving energy is good for the environment and economy of Albania, and why we should recycle and reuse materials rather than put them in landfills. Each Saturday beginning May 10th, our students’ projects and the projects of the other Albanian schools involved in this endeavor will be available for viewing at one of the schools. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, I do not have more details for you. Please look for more info at our website, www.ais-tirana.org. On another important note, Summer Camp is being planned at AIS each week beginning Monday, June 23rd until Friday, August 15th. That is eight weeks of Summer Camp full of fun and surprises! Each week a teacher or a team of teachers will present a special theme campers will follow that week. Those themes include “Cakes, Cookies, Cupcakes, and Ice Cream” with Ms. Barbara and “Puzzle Kings” in the afternoon for the week of June 30th to July 4th. Other themes include studying the art, culture and history of Rome; Music of the World, World Sports, etc.. Intensive English language classes will also be available during those eight weeks. Again, more detailed information will be forthcoming through fliers and on our AIS website. Summer camp fees of 75 Euro per week include snack, lunch and all books and materials. Register for six weeks, and only pay for five. Saving the best for last, I am pleased to announce the 2014/2015 School Year Fee Schedule. Register and pay for your student(s) BEFORE July 15th and you will receive a significant savings. Register and pay for the first term by July 15th and you will lock in a big savings for each of the two additional terms. See the table below and our website for more details. Please call me with any questions/comments/concerns. I would be happy to speak with anyone interested in the school or anyone who wishes to visit the school.

Warren Anderson, Executive Director Tel: +355 42 273 488 / Mob: +355 67 416 0637

Grades & Ages Annual Tuition Dates Due

Pre-Kindergarten 1650€ ½ Day/ 2150€ Full Day July 15, 2014

3-4 years old OR

Half-Day: 585€/Term Full-Day: 750€/Term

July 15, 2014 Jan. 5, 2015 April 6, 2015

Kindergarten Full Tuition of 2750 € July 15, 2014

5 years old 1st Term: 935€ 2nd Term: 935€ 3rd Term: 935€

July 15, 2014 Jan. 5, 2015 April 6, 2015

GRADE 1 through 9 Full Tuition of 3900€ July 15, 2014

6 years old and up 1st Term: 1385€ 2nd Term: 1385€ 3rd Term: 1385€

July 15, 2014 Jan. 5, 2015 April 6, 2015

All prices are in Euros. Prices revert back to 2013/2014 prices after July 15th. Tuition fees include snack, lunch and textbooks. They do NOT include transportation (to be arranged by parents) or out-of-school activities (prices vary per activity). Parents may choose to pay tuition per term, or annually. No partial payments of installments are allowed. A late payment fee of 100 Euros will be assessed for fees not settled in advance or on the first day of term. Please keep in mind that enrollment in the school is for the entire academic year, and no adjustments or reductions will be made for any reason. If a student has to be withdrawn due to exceptional circumstances, such as sudden relocation, a refund will be given ONLY for the term(s) not begun. No refund will be given for the current month/term.

A I SA I S M a y M a y N e w sN e w s

From The Executive Director

Pre-K News Ms. Barbara Meinel

The Preschool class in May is continuing their Earth Day activities as the world around us changes, blooms, grows and awakens out of the winter hibernation. We are greeting our friends the ants, snails and wild flowers daily. The 3-year-old children are starting to write their names free hand and will be learning to write 1 to 10. We are making a “Number Train” composed of numbers 1-20. Each day we will be adding another number car to the train until all the cars are complete and we post it on our classroom wall. The 4-5 year old kids are learning simple addition and subtraction to prepare them for Kindergarten next year. We will continue to learn color combinations, solid shapes, lines and angles and make topical posters to decorate our classroom. Have a happy May!

This month grade 1 moved into a bright new classroom, where the top floor is entirely their own. In math, dramatic progress was made in the fundamentals; Rei is now adding and subtracting figures up to three and four digits and Ana mastering up to six. They will continue to hone their skills in basic math facts and in the upcoming month we shall turn our attention towards numbers less than one: fractions and monetary units under a dollar. In science, we are continuing our exploration of the earth’s natural resources, in particular focusing on rocks and minerals. This month Rei and Ana shall grow their own crystals. In language arts, the students will continue to develop their writing skills. The goal is to learn how to express oneself in writing as well as in speech. Sama, Rei, and Ana will begin brainstorming ideas for an original classroom book, drawing from their collected experience of reading and discussing fiction prose.

April rain hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm my class has for learning as much as they can every day! Since our Science Fair was postponed, we got through our 7th unit on weather in good time and are now nearly done with the short 8th unit, which introduced students to the solar system. We’ll begin working on science fair projects again once our AIESEC volunteers join us at the beginning of May, and complete the 9th unit in our science book (all about changes in matter) as well! Math continues to challenge Grade 4 students, so we stat each lesson with a review of difficult concepts, looking forward to the day when they become routine. Our lone second grade math student is nearly finished with his textbook, and ready to tackle Grade 3 already! Meanwhile the 3rd grade students are making excellent progress completing their own textbook and will almost certainly be finished with it before the school year is up. In Social Studies, the new books have been a huge hit with the class! We quickly completed Units 1 and 2, learning about physical maps and reviewing basic map skills already taught back in September, then diving deep into mountains and how they’re formed, and how they impact history. Now we’re studying the spread of Islam, which has been a unique opportunity for many students to learn things they didn’t know about their own religion. We’ll bring this unit to life with a field trip to a local mosque, and we’re inviting Grades 1, 5 and 6 to join us! The next two units will take us into the kingdoms of Africa and ancient Chinese dynasties, then we’ll end the year with a brief look at U.S. history. The CKLA 2 class has now begun Domain 3 (Ancient Greece) in the Listening and Learning Strand and started Unit 5, which includes a fun book about a knight and recalls our history lessons on the Middle Ages last year. CKLA 3 have torn through Unit 6 on Norse mythology at light speed, and are nearly done with Domain 4 (Ancient Rome) too! Domain 5 and Unit 7 are right around the corner, and they are eager to begin. We’re also continuing our class reading project, which is the classic series of true stories about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her life on the American frontier. The students love learning of her life and adventures!

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Grade 1 News Miss Andrea Messenger

Grades 2-4 News Miss Keelah Rose Calloway

Kindergarten News

Miss Tamara Rahoumi

It feels as though the month of April has literally flown by! As we move into May, the kindergarten class continues to move right along. In language arts, I am beyond impressed by the progress that the students have made in regards to their ability to read and decode new words in class, and I’m proud to say that a great deal of the read-alouds that we use in class are now read to me by the students, as opposed to vice versa. This is especially impressive considering that we have begun learning tricky words that don’t follow the common rules of phonics we’ve learned thus far. In May, we’ll continue practicing these tricky words, and introduce new ones, as well as looking at new letter combinations. In our Listening and Learning Strand, we’ll move on from the topic of kings, queens, and the royal family to begin delving into the world of weather and seasons. We’ve already examined these topics a great deal in several of our past science and math units, so it will be interesting to begin looking at this familiar topic from a new angle. In our math unit, we’ll continue working on concepts like 3D shapes and expanding our understanding of them, but start focusing more on concepts that will aid us in addition and subtraction. We have not begun, nor will we begin, solving addition and subtraction equations directly just yet, however we will begin spending a great deal of our time on lessons and activities that help students get a hang of the primary critical thinking skills required to tackle such equations. These activities will include, for example, expanding on our knowledge of money by now having students “pay” for items in pairs or groups as opposed to only doing so one at a time. This will force students to combine prices of items and calculate the price in this way as opposed to simply reading a tag and finding the corresponding coin value. Finally, in science we were not able to get to our unit on magnets in the month of April and so we will explore the new and interesting topic of magnetic attraction in May!

In math, later on in the month, we’ll start exploring decimals a little more closely. This will give us an opportunity to review fractions while also examining the relationship between the two. In the meantime, we will continue working on geometric figures and considering the difference between knowing something for certain and providing an educated, but not necessarily justifiable, explanation. There are parallels in math to our work in science where we’ve been examining the death of the dinosaurs and the question of exactly how we can know what happened to them over 65 million years ago. While the students had many ideas either based on their own theories or information they have heard in the past, the history of how science unraveled this mystery provides a lot of lessons to be learned in how we know things and how we talk about them. I also think it’s worthwhile to see how theories in science first emerge as ideas, but then must be discarded or refined as new evidence becomes available. In history, we will be finishing up with our look at Japan with its similar feudal structure yet very different cultural norms. By popular demand, we will next move onto the ancient civilizations that populated North and South America prior to the arrival of the Europeans. As with Japan, the goal will be to avoid dismissing the unknown as weird or quaint. One of the keys to better understanding history is the ability to think outside of your own experiences and find value in different perspectives and ideas.

Art News Miss Ida Metaj

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Important announcement: Since we’re approaching the end of school, our talent show is very close. So along with learning music notation, music history and everything else we’ll practice the students’ favorite songs.

PRE-KINDERGARTEN/KINDERGARTEN We’ll learn to recognize short and long sounds, and how to discriminate between fast and slow, high and low pitches, and loud and soft sounds. We’ll recognize that some phrases are the same, some different, sing unaccompanied, accompanied, and in unison. There will be dancing and singing many new songs.

GRADE 1/2 We’ll understand and write music notation, recognize short and long sounds, understand that melody can move up and down and hum the melody while listening to music. We’ll Echo short rhythms and melodic patterns, then have an introduction to the opera.

GRADE 3/4 We’ll echo short rhythms and melodic patterns, play simple rhythms and melodies, recognize harmony, sing rounds, recognize verse and refrain, review names of musical notes, learn scale as a series of notes, sing the C major scale using “do re mi” etc., become familiar with brass instruments and review the orchestra, including families of instruments and specific instruments.

GRADE 5/6 We’ll discriminate between loud and soft, gradually increasing and decreasing volume, crescendo and decrescendo, legato (smoothly flowing progression of notes) and staccato (crisp, distinct notes), recognize harmony, sing rounds and canons plus two and three-part singing. We’ll recognize introduction, interlude, and coda in musical selections along with verse and refrain, and continue work with timbre and phrasing. We’ll recognize theme and variations, then sing or play simple melodies while reading scores.

French News Mr. Michel Ramond

Music News Miss Veisla Mucaj

Grade 5/6 News Mr. Alex Semerjian

Grades 2-6 We finished all the lessons as planned! We watched more slides to help illustrate some French culture and parts of fun videos, using it as word games, which they enjoy very much. In May, we will have a general review of all the main subjects and key lessons we had so far this year. It will be a bit of work but important to make sure they retain all that they need to know in order to be ready for the next school year when there will be new challenges and so much more to learn and enjoy! We will also work on a new spelling words list (#5) with 25 new words. If they do well with lessons and work pages and time permitting, we will continue to watch other videos in French combined with word games, which they enjoy and help to keep the course more interesting. Generally there’s good participation during class and they do well with work pages and tests. It is encouraging to see the progress made by all of them and a pleasure to know that they enjoy learning French.

Pre-K/K This month we had some adjustments in our lessons plan as we started using a series called “Caillou.” Since they liked it so much and seemed to learn a lot from it, we have been using these video clips more. We also continue doing activity pages introducing new vocabulary words as well as using flash cards, reviewing all those that they already know. Good progress with the reading method, introducing new phonetic sounds and vocabulary words. We’ll continue practicing a few basic Question & Answer phrases. At this stage I believe that if they were in a French-speaking environment for awhile (such as the immersion method), they would start speaking French quite quickly and all that they have learned would come out much more. The 3 of them are bright, and sweet children and it is a pleasure to teach them!

PRE-KINDERGARTEN This month, we’ll focus more on colors: How many do we know? How do we divide them? How many have we used? From vibrant colors and transparent overlays to the world of color printing from the pencils, markers and paint used to create art, to the dots of primary colors that printers use to print the art.

KINDERGARTEN We’re looking at and talking about works of art. We’ll still go on with their first impressions: what they notice first and how they feel. We’ll be observing and talking about: “The Bath” by Mary Cassatt and “Snap the Whip” by Winslow Homer. At the end they will start to create their own paintings of a playground.

GRADE 1/2 This month we’ll focus on Mona Lisa — her beauty and mystery — and reproduce here in different media.

GRADE 3/4 This month we’re still on ancient art. We’re going to explore the architecture of Ancient Rome: The Pantheon, the Colosseum, arches, keystones, lintels, and masonry. At the end they will choose their favorite genre and make their own ancient masterpiece. And a big surprise: A 3D Colosseum!

GRADE 5/6 We’ll continue with the art of Japan, calligraphy, the Great Buddha, the Landscape Garden, origami, and Ukiyo-e. They will paint with ink and little tiny brushes like the Japanese did and we will create some hand fan paints. At the end, they will research Japanese gardens and the tea ceremony as a culminating activity for the unit.

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Thursday May 1st 2014 May Day — no school.

Friday May 9th 2014 Primary field trip to Et’hem Bey Mosque, the Bektashi Tekke and the Resurrection of Christ Orthodox Cathedral in Tirana from 12:45-3:30PM.

Midterm Report Cards: Fri. May 9 2014 Term 3 midterm grades issued.

Saturday, May 10th, 2014 Albanian International School science projects will be displayed along with projects from other schools every weekend starting today! For locations and times, check out our website at www.ais-tirana.org

This Month’s Highlights:

Students of the Month

Ali & Sama .ALI was nominated by Mr. Semerjian and Miss Ida for his cheerful attitude, and his confidence in coming into classrooms full of older students and upper level teachers just to say hi, draw a picture, talk about new words, search for balloons or just play with a giant spider. Mr. Anderson has also noticed how much his English is improving in just a short time with us! Way to go, Ali! We love you! SAMA was nominated by Miss Nina and Mr. Anderson for her improvement in reading this month. Miss Calloway also noticed how well she did on this month’s poem. Great work, Sama!

Student Spotlight Dariel Domi, Grade 5

It’s May!!! I sadly haven’t yet told you what we did in a previous month. But now that I’m free I can tell you. Let’s start with science. Nobody knows much about dinosaurs, so that’s why we asked questions and discussed ideas about them. We also started to see a documentary about dinosaurs. It is called “The Day the Mesozoic Died.” We’re still unsure about some things. In math we learned about angles, parallel lines, perpendicular lines and more, but these are the most interesting things. Also we had a shape and we needed to find the angles without measuring and we only knew one or two angles. These were a lot of fun and I hope we can still do those in May. In French we learned about directions and food. Thanks to Mr. Michel, I won’t be lost or starve in France. “Tournez a gauche.” I think learning new languages is good for me. I think after I know French I may start learning a new language like Spanish and German or also practice my British Accent. I hope this month will be as fun as April was.

It’s almost here . . .

Check out next month’s newsletter for the full schedule, and our website for the most up-to-date enrollment information!

When a couple of our Albanian students who happen to be Muslim said they did not know the name of the old mosque by the Skanderbeg statue in the center of Tirana (the Et’hem Bey Mosque), and knowing that they were studying Islam in class, Mr. Anderson decided a field trip was in order! On Friday, May 9th our 1st through 6th graders will be going on a field trip to several of Tirana’s religious sites. Students will be visiting the Et’hem Bey Mosque as well as the Bektashi Tekke by the city center and the Resurrection of Christ Orthodox Cathedral, also near the city center. We’ll leave at 12:45PM and return by 3:30PM. Parents are welcome to join us! This will be a valuable learning experience for us all.

Albanian International School : Dream bigger. Learn better. Shine brighter.

24 Rruga Elbasanit Tirana, Albania 1001 042 273 488

The first three students to complete this puzzle and return it to Miss Calloway get a prize!