Welcome back everyone!

I hope you had a great and relaxing winter break and managed to do everything that you had hoped or planned to do.

In the Middle School classroom, we began the new year by considering our goals for the year ahead and how we believe we can achieve these goals.

We also worked on a collaborative story-telling project. The challenge was to create a story that must involve a map. We began by “mapping” our story, i.e. characters, setting and plot. We were reminded of the idea of the “Hero’s Journey” that we looked at when working for Performance Day ’23. This is a useful template for considering story development.

In the latter part of the week, we plan to get outside and attend to the Gojo Garden project as well as assessing the school greenhouse. We will be preparing the greenhouse for the new school year beginning in April so that seedlings can be better propagated on site for our garden.

The first day back also saw us outside where we got to make make and savor mochi. This is always a highlight of the school year for the whole school as we welcome and catch up with one another after the holidays and partake in a traditional food preparation activity. It was a lot of fun and the mochi tasted wonderful.

We also took some time for one on one meetings, with a view to catching up on plans for the next school year and any assistance that this may require.

Next week, we will be beginning a new class reader, “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson. This is an award winning novel with a difficult and challenging subject-matter, that I am sure will generate quite a number of thought-provoking conversations. I am looking forward to reading it with them.

We will also be continuing with our focus on IGCSE and Eiken material.

Great to be back and let’s get going again.

Ciao!