Monday was a Cyber Day for ICS-P students and a Professional Development Day for ICS-P teachers and administrators. Students had assignments online from their teachers and worked via technology from home or wherever they desired. Teachers came to school and immensely enjoyed an excellent workshop from Kagan Korea on Cooperative Learning. The workshop leader was Mr. Chris Lowe who used fantastic techniques with all of us to realize the big differences between "Group Work" and "Cooperative Learning." Teachers were active and engaged and were filled with a lot of joy and excitement as they received a lot of great stuff about brain research and how children AND adults learn! It was a time of happy and joyful learning for our staff. During the days following the day-long workshop I witnessed many of our teachers already implementing some of the great techniques into their teaching! I was very impressed that even our high school teachers had begun to implement the ideas into their teaching! Mr. Mooney, who not only is our Academic Principal but also teaches one class to high school students on Worldview, had rearranged his lesson plans to implement a RallyCoach type of cooperative learning. Mr. Mooney successfully tried out a variation of RallyCoach (Round Coach?) with his worldview class. Two teams were given identical stacks of hexagons with people, concepts, or ideas written on them. They had to place them in a web and explain the connection with every adjacent piece to the rest of the team. They enjoyed it and had great conversations about the content!
Mr. Mooney's Worldview class involved in a cooperative learning
lesson. It was great to see them thinking and hear them interacting
with one another.
A picture of another group in the Worldview class this past week!
I wish we could have remembered videotape tape the interactions
with this learning activity!
Another group of hexagons; wish you could hear the interaction!
And one more group's hexagon activity!
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We have been praying for our sister school in South Korea, ICS-Uijeongbu, concerning the decision as to whether or not it would stay open after this current year or if it would need to close. During this past week after many discussions and much prayer, all of us in the Network of International Christian Schools received the news of the closing from our Founder and President, Dr. Joe Hale. Instead of me writing a lot about the closing, I am going to give you a link which you can click on and it will take you to the NICS news article on their website. It will give you details and items to pray for during this time of mourning as well as celebration for what the Lord has done through the teachers and students at ICS-Uijeongbu. The link is below. (If it does not allow you to go to the page t is linked to for some reason, please type in the url address in your web browser (or copy and paste it into the browser) to view Dr. Hale's article about the closing.)
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I have some exciting news that the Art Class wanted to share with you! In August, Elementary students participated in an Art Contest hosted by Korean Air Lines. Over 600 elementary students from international schools throughout Korea participated in the contest! Korean Air chose only 50 students to receive awards and recognition!
On Friday, our Art Teacher, Ms. Kathy Lee informed me that Cyrus, one of our students in 3rd grade was selected to win an award!!! He is not in the top three places but we are still so happy and proud that one of our ICS-Pyeongtaek students was selected for this special recognition and award for his artwork!!
The picture below is not for the contest, but this young man, Cyrus, was also selected as one of our Golden Ticket students recently for demonstrating excellent character! We are all very proud of this young man!
Here I am with Cyrus during a Friday afternoon Golden Ticket celebration!
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Sunset after a cool rainy day near ICS-Pyeongtaek! If I would get out of my car and walk to the school from the bridge, it would probably take 5-7 minutes.
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I want to leave you with another beautiful piece from our Art teacher at ICS-P. I am not sure if Ms. Lee wrote this or not, but it is her artwork. I want to be able to make this my declaration every day.
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Thank you, as always, for your faithful love, care, encouragement, emails, regular mail, prayers, and gifts. This next week is our final week of Quarter One. Please pray for our teachers as they prepare grade reports and get ready for Parent-teacher Conferences on October 27. It will be a busy couple of weeks. Thanks for praying. I would especially ask your prayers as I need to make a couple important decisions this week. Thank you. Please enjoy a great week! Our weather here in Pyeongtaek is getting cooler. I love this cool, yet not cold, weather! :-)
Love, Gregg
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