News from Primary School

Dear Parents and Readers of our regular Friday letters,

I was lucky enough to pull the longest straw and, therefore, I get to share my impressions with you. The first month of this school year has floated away like fast moving water, and has brought all of the responsibilities associated with school work. However, the joy that comes with it all is also in full swing. This slightly non-standard school year started smoothly and everyone, children and adults alike, got used to the school regime by the holidays.

It’s no coincidence that the the honor of writing this letter was bestowed upon my finger tips. As the technical liason officer, I would like you to make sure that your children’s abilities to login to MS teams are brushed up and dusted off. In the coming week, we will be working with the students in this environment as part of our lessons.

Registration for the Logic Olympics ended on Wednesday. From the Primary School, we are putting 68 hot irons in the fire, and we’ll keep our fingers crossed for all participants. The competition tasks for Category A (students from grades 3-5) can be solved by participants from yesterday until Wednesday, October 7th. Good luck!!!

And now I will give you a look into the secrets of the individual classes:

This week the first-graders were introduced to the legend of St. Wenceslas, learning something about his life and making a “stained-glass window“ to hang in our windows. When the sun shines, it colors our classroom beautifully. Additional letters of the alphabet were added to what they already know, and we have already read a short story. In mathematics, they discovered a mysterious number, and they were successful in creating some magic with it. For the first time, they went to the gym for PE class, where they tried various equipment and stretched their bodies.

Class 1 made some beautiful rainbows in their art class this week. We learned about mixing colours and we had a lot of fun painting together. They have also been practising counting to 20 and talking about their school things.

Our second-year students also commemorated the day of Czech statehood in Tuesday morning’s Oasis. They read a comic strip about the life of St. Wenceslas. They talked about the insidious Drahomíra, grandmother Ludmila and the treacherous Boleslav, who ended the life of the wise ruler. Saša was quite surprised at how much the students already knew!

On Wednesday, Bára and the whole class were discussing our feelings. What are we happy about and what upsets us? Can we forgive each other? And can we forgive ourselves?

Thursday’s sunny weather lured the second year students out of the classroom. They put on sports clothes and enjoyed exercising in the fresh air. These globetrotters enjoyed a foot race around the OG complex. They all ran to the finish line and everyone was a winner!

And what are they learning at the moment? They are training the alphabet and counting with Grandpa Forest (děda Lesoň) and his animals. They are slowly venturing from the Czech Republic and the elders will look beyond its borders to the neighboring countries. I think they will need their passports. But what about Eda the Cat? We’ll see!

This week we started unit 2  in Incredible English and learned about different furniture. We took a spelling test on Thursday and did phonics.  We read a book called Chicken Licken and learned what a barn is. In art  class we made a barn out of construction paper with opening doors and decorated it with different animals, tractors, trees, ponds, and even dinosaurs.

In the third grade, we talked about International Senior Day in both English and Czech. We created beautiful cards for our grandmothers and grandfathers. We all agree that our grandparents are important to us and play one of the main roles in our lives. We let our imaginations run wild and, thus, really interesting cards were created! Grandmothers, grandfathers, we love you very much. ;-)

Class 3 did a great job with their writing homework this week; they made up fictional clubs and made leaflets for them. There were lots of great ideas: Trippers‘ club, Gamers‘ club, Dancing club, Electronics club and many others. They also included a lot of beautiful artwork. The leaflets turned out great and will be on display in the corridor next week. This week we continued learning about the five senses which we enjoyed very much! We also had a very close game of Pictionary on Wednesday to practise our phonics words for the week!

The patron of our country, St. Wenceslas, was a topic in Czech and English even in Class 4. Because he is the Patron Saint of Winemakers and Brewers, they made bunches of grapes, which were not only printed, but also tasted. After the sometimes torturous learning of mathematical equations, finding geometrical areas, multiplications, and in the Czech language studying prefixes, roots and dictations, Class 4 spent a lot of time outside. The reading workshop, pottery workshop and almost all of the breaks were spent outside to regain our energy.

In Class 4, we have been learning about the water cycle and we had some very interesting discussions about water on Earth. The children had great questions that were sometimes difficult to answer (such as: If the amount of water on Earth is always the same, what happens when astronauts take water to space?), but we definitely enjoyed talking about them. They finished learning about different weather and made their own map of the UK and Ireland with different weather icons and then presented them in class. We started unit 2 in Incredible English with a focus on different kinds of jobs. On Thursday we continued making our map of the Czech republic and drawing all the things we associate with Czech republic.  We are looking forward to presenting our maps next week in class to our classmates. We also took our spelling test with Felizardo.

On Thursday, Class 5 started a two-day adaptation course and went on a cycling trip to Voděradské Bučiny. After overcoming the forest, gravel, sand and asphalt tracks, they ended up in the Na Statku Restaurant in Jevany where they refreshed themselves and continued back to OG. They covered a total of 34.95km and burned 4,500 calories. Respect to sports, especially cycling!

In class 5 this week we did some of our usual learning but of course the big excitement came from the adaptation trip! As I wrote this, we are taking a break for lunch in Jevany after a beautiful morning of cycling around in the pleasant autumn sun. We are all looking forward to the rest of the activities later today and tomorrow which I am sure you will hear all about when everyone gets home tomorrow!

To the parents, legal guardians and children, I wish you all beauitful days full of joy, knowledge, togetherness and, most importantly, health!

From Marie Zicháčková and the whole Open Gate Primary School team

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