Oct 112 min read

Message from the Principals 10/11/2024

Good morning, Hope Community!

1: Important Reminders

2: Curriculum Focus - Knowledge

3: Student Highlight

4: House Points

5: Photos of the week

Due to the ongoing Parent Teacher Conferences today, this blog post will be rather short.

1: Important Reminders

Oct 14-18: Autumn Break (NO SCHOOL)
Nov 1: Open School
Nov 11-13: NO SCHOOL
Nov 22: Sports day!!
Nov 28-29: NO SCHOOL
Dec 6: Parent Workshop

2: Curriculum Focus - Knowledge

Today during the Parent Teacher Conference, teachers will discuss the students' ongoing progress in the classroom. You can read more about that in last week's blog. This is all in preparation for the upcoming Semester 1 report cards.

To help orient families on our report card format and we will discuss the various areas of learning and how we assess them over the next few weeks. The IPC and the IMYC break up the Learning Goals of the curriculum into 3 categories:

Knowledge
Skills
Understanding

Each type of Learning Goal has been defined at Hope through conversations with teachers, students and the community. Hope’s definition of Knowledge is:

“Facts and information we learn”

Every IPC and IMYC unit has a “Knowledge Harvest” which allows students to demonstrate what they may already know about a topic, as well as an opportunity for the teacher to identify any potential gaps that need to be addressed. The teacher will then plan the unit to support children in learning the facts and information needed for the given unit.

Students can demonstrate knowledge in a variety of ways, whether this be through class quizzes, online platforms like Kahoot and Quizizz, worksheets, presentations about key information, classroom questioning and many other methods. As knowledge is based around facts, it can be more easily checked as being correct or incorrect.

Knowledge will also continue to expand throughout a student’s time at Hope. For example, in IPC, students will begin to learn about basic Push/Pull forces in Grade 1, and add to this base through Elementary adding concepts like friction, gravity, velocity, etc. Teachers will support all students at Hope with techniques to grow memory retention, and through this, the knowledge base of the student will continually grow.

3: Student Highlight

One of our Grade 2 students took first place a recent Jiu-Jitsu competition!

For the first time in Japan, the Jiu-Jitsu World Championship was held in Nagoya. It lasted 4 days with 4,500 athletes from 56 countries, including 1,300 children, participated on September 29th and Ryon was champion in the gray category up to 36 kg. You can view his final match in the video!

Congratulations Ryon!