Weekly Newsletter February 10, 2011

Book Recording Books with CD packages are very popular, especially with younger children, and are a great learning tool for language. While these materials are easy to find in the USA, they are not as easily found in Germany, and can be very expensive when available. To this end, GAIS parent Laura Gottsmann initiated a project to create our own books on CD. Thanks to a number of enthusiastic native German speaking parents, like Frauke Janssen shown in the picture above, many new titles are being added to the collection of book and CD sets in the library. Recording takes place on Fridays from 8:30 to 10:00 am in the Library. If you would like to help out with this project, please email our librarian Jana at jseidel@gais.org to be put on the schedule. Also, the Library needs donations of Preschool and Vorschule age books for this program. Board books with a few sentences per page, and series books like the "Licht An" and "Wieso, Weshalb, Warum" series are especially popular with the children. Books your kids have outgrown will be put to excellent use.

News from the Head of School

I would like to offer a round of applause and a great big thank you to all the parents who contributed to GAIS during the first semester with volunteer work. Many parents will have already accumulated their 20 volunteer hours for the year. Other parents have volunteer jobs that will occur during the second semester. All parents were sent a GAIS Volunteer Time Sheet at the start of the year. It is important that these sheets are filled out and handed in to the office at the end of the school year. The deadline for this will be sometime in June. It is important that you complete your hours to avoid being billed by the office. Parents that have questions about their volunteer hours and duties should contact their committee chair. If you are uncertain about who your chair is or in which committee you have been assigned, please contact the school office. For those parents who need to accumulate more volunteer hours, we have decided to hold two works days on Saturday, March 12 and May 7 which will run from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. These will be organized by our Hausmeister, Tim Farris, and will involve a variety of maintenance tasks such as painting, cleaning, power washing, gardening and repairing. You are welcome to come for some or all of these hours.

MYP Corner by Dominic Liechti

MS Skitrip Last week we went with 30 Middle School students on the annual Ski Weekend at Sugarbowl. The Ski Weekend is part of the MYP curriculum and serves a variety of purposes. On the one hand the students keep a balance between academics and fun, get to know the teachers from different perspectives and vice versa. On the other hand the Ski Weekend gives us a great opportunity for teambuilding and maintaining approaches to learning in the context of kitchen duty, responsibility for their equipment, safety, and health. Moreover, they learn to be respectful towards others on the slopes and during the stay. In addition, the students practice their time management and organizational skills in being on time at the different checkpoints. The checkpoints were used to assemble the different Ski groups before leaving the lodge and the ski resort. Every student had a laminated checklist what they had to wear and organize for the checkpoints.

Every day we were on the slopes and enjoyed the beautiful weather and every evening was a different program organized for the students. One highlight was the snowshoe hike on Thursday night. All the students geared up with their snowshoes and we did a 30 min hike through the forest and the snow. Afterwards the eighth graders prepared cider and banana chocolate on a camp fire close to the lodge and we had a fun gathering. I would like to thank my team for their dedication and valuable time during the Ski Weekend 2011.

PYP Corner by Maike Silver

PYP Model The PYP is an international curriculum framework for students 3-12 years old. Below are some bullet points that can help you explain its uniqueness to others:

Connection of subjects through six global themes
Focus on concept based learning rather than facts
Focus on attitudes promotes lifelong learning
Promotes translation of learning into community action
21st century skill development
Promotes internationally minded responsible young people
Allows for students to transfer easily to IB Schools around the world
Student centered through inquiry approach

Preschool Corner by Heike Schmalstieg

A few weeks ago, I wrote about conflict resolution in the preschool. Solving problems and conflicts are important skills to learn. Another important skill for preschoolers is to become assertive and confident and knowing how to handle different situations they might face, whether that might be at school or elsewhere. We invited 'Kidpower' to give a hands-on presentation to each preschool class, to re-inforce this skill. 'Kidpower' is an organisation teaching children "People Safety' skills all over the world. Through calm conversations, fun hands-on practice, and enthusiastic encouragement, the children were taught how to handle situations like name calling, teasing, establishing boundaries and not talking to strangers, with the goal to teach children to be calm and confident. If you are interested in more information or taking a class in the area with your child, please check out their website at www.kidpower.org.

Winter Break - Hort

The school will be closed during Winter Break from February 21 to 25. We do offer Hort from February 22 to 25. We have sent out the sign-up forms for Hort. The deadline to reserve a spot is February 11. We do not offer Hort on President's Day, February 21.

GAIS goes Facebook

We are in the game! Please visit our new page "German-American International School (GAIS) on Facebook. We would like to get as many "likes" as possible. So, please hit the "like" button and spread the word! Thank you.

Vorschule visits Menalto Cleaners

During their artist unit the Vorschule learned about the mobiles of Alexander Calder. They then made mobiles themselves, using wire hangers and lots of different materials from the craft corner. To thank Menalto Cleaners for their donation of the hangers, the children walked over to give the owner a nice mobile creation to decorate the store.
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Yearbook Pictures

It's yearbook time again. Order forms for the 2010-11 edition will be sent out in March. We are looking for advertisers so please let us know if you have any ideas or leads.In addition, we would like some more pictures of following events:

Beach Party
Fundraiser Parties
GAIS Campout

If you would like to share your pictures please send them to the office at offmgr@gais.org or drop by and we can download them from your USB stick.

Middle School Sports League

Soccer Game This school year our Grade 5-8 students will compete in the Small Schools Intermediate League, or SSIL. There are a lot of activities on the calendar that our students can participate in. At present we have students that will participate in the following activities over the next few months:

Tournament Bowling will take place in April or May. We still have room for up to 11 interested students.
Tournament Golf will take place on Wednesday, May 4. We still have room for 3 interested students.
Swimming: Friday, May 20. We still have room for 7 interested students.
Tennis Season will take place in March/April. We still have room for 4 interested students.
Soccer season begins in March. Training begins Thursday, February 17. We still have room for a few more students.

If you are interested in joining one of the teams please contact Jörg Matzeit at jmatzeit@gais.org.

For newsletter information, questions or article submissions, please contact Dagmar Stullich at offmgr@germanamericanschool.org. or call the office at 650-324-8617.

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