Important Notices

See you all back to school January 9th, 2012.

Our new website is LIVE! Be sure to check it out. More modules will

be added next term: www.learndifferent.com.sg

We wish the very best to our students who are moving on from LDA.

Thank you families for letting us be part of your child’s learning jour-

ney and please come back and visit soon!

Congratulations to Ms. Ashley & Ms. Dani for their bronze medals in

a recent nationwide dragon boat racing competition.

Safe and happy holidays to all!

“We, as educators,

talk about the

importance of

imaginative play, yet

we encourage the

brain drain with

some of these new

technologies.”

BIWEEKLY

NEWSLETTER November 28th — December 9th , 2011

1 0 W i n s t e d t R o a d , B l o c k C # 0 1 - 1 6 , S in g a p o r e 2 2 7 9 7 7 T e l : + 6 5 6 8 3 6 1 1 2 8 F a x : + 6 5 6 2 3 5 6 7 9 7 w w w . l e a r n d i f f e r e n t . c o m .s g

Our Director, Sharon, came across an article this week published by wired.com and authored by Jonathon Liu about the '5 Best Toys of All Time'. It is the holiday season so I took some time to think about it; after all I have two preteen children and good amount of experience buying toys. With all the literature lately about getting back to the basics, I had a hunch the list would be surprisingly simple: balls, chalk, crayons, blocks and maybe play dough. All wrong, but not far off! You can read the article for yourselves to discover his actual list at http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/01/the-5-best-toys-of-all-time/all/1. It got me thinking however about gifts and what we buy our children these days. Furthermore, I wonder about the general expectation associated with owning new technologies. Do eight-year-olds really need a telephone? Does a ten-year-old need the latest iTouch version when he has only owned the old one for eight months? Do I need a new phone because my old phone doesn’t have a flash? Oh, the perils of marketing! Are we complicating things for our-selves? For younger children we should ask ourselves, can an eight-year-old have as much fun with a ball of string as with an iTouch? Given a choice be-tween a dirt pile and a stack of video games, what would a six-year-old choose these days? And, if he chose the dirt pile, does that affect his prepar-edness for their future? I raise these questions not to answer them, but ra-ther to arouse thought as we all venture out and brave the holiday shopping madness! We, as educators, talk about the importance of imaginative play, yet we encourage the brain drain with some of these new technologies. I guess I’m asking you, as parents, where, when and how do we draw the line? Happy Holidays!

KEEPING IT SIMPLE!

holidays of SongKran and

Holi first hand. The kids

had a blast throwing col-

orful flour in the air ( and

at their teachers) just like

the Holi celebration in In-

dia and then having a Thai

water fight with the class

to experience Songkran.

It is with a sad heart that

we say goodbye to two of

our classmates. We wish

the best to Ondre & Wei

Jin as they start at new

The last two weeks of the

term we have been finish-

ing up our ‘Celebrations’

theme. We completed and

presented our research

project about interesting

world celebrations and

holidays. We also finished

our celebration masks

which the boys designed

themselves. We had a

very exciting water play

event this week where the

children experienced the

Page 2

Hep, hep, hooray! Con-gratulations to the Year One students for success-fully finishing Term 2. We have been working on ICT, Society, Technology and History for the past two weeks. The students enjoyed researching Sin-gapore’s History and lives of other people in differ-ent continents. They loved drawing the differ-ent transports that are used around the world to deliver product - from baskets on people’s heads, to airplanes, to electric vehicles. The stu-dents were all fascinated with the similarities and differences of each vehi-cle. They were also inter-ested with the good things and challenges that ICT brings. The students

schools in January. We

will miss you both and

know you will do great!

We are so proud of our

students. They have

worked hard and we have

come a long way since

August.

RECEPTION TWO , MS. ASHLEY ’S CLASS

noticed the benefits of ICT in terms of researching and communicating with peo-ple through emails, and Facebook! They all agreed on the downside of ICT, that is it is expensive and it is difficult to repair.

To top off all this learning, the students brilliantly showcased their talents during the Year End Holi-day Concert. We heard some awesome singing and it was a great display of confidence and courage. Luca and the rest of the class helped Mrs. Jones in

YEAR ONE , MS. KATRINA’S CLASS

Congratulations class

on all your efforts! We

hope you all have a

great holiday break and

we look forward to see-

ing everyone in Janu-

ary!

and independent work skills and more will be covered next year.

We wish everybody a won-derful Christmas and a fan-tastic New Year! See you all in 2012!

decorating the classroom with colourful rings and twirly paper. We had fun during practicing and it was “bigger fun” performing for our lovely parents, all of whom are so supportive. We will miss Genna’s cheer-fulness and Sean’s gentle-ness in the classroom as they are moving to different schools. However, we are all looking forward to having the amazing Guy in our classroom. Much has been learnt for the past few months in terms of academics, social

Page 3

RECEPTION TWO , MS. KARINA’S CLASS

RECEPTION ONE , MS. GETTY ’S CLASS

Our class made special men-tion for those who graduated from Learn Different Acade-my and will go to Primary schools in January. We played a clip on how primary stu-dents in Singapore “celebrate” their first day in school. Again, congratulations and good luck to Aidan, Chris-topher, Jade, Lavelle, Marcus for all their achievements. We also want to congratulate Guy for his great success in Reception 2. Guy will move up to Year 1 with Ms. Katrina next year.

Last, but not least, we would like to thank the par-ents for their tremendous support. Your child would not soar this high without you. We hope your Decem-ber holiday is full of fun activities and we look for-ward to another successful year in 2012. Merry Christ-mas and Happy New Year!

occasion. After that, we also

did Holi, the famous Indian

celebration and Songkran,

the most-anticipated water

festival in Thailand. The kids

enjoyed throwing coloured

powder at each other and

afterwards we took pleasure

in spraying each other with

water.

during the week, the children had fun getting wet outdoors. We hooked up the hose and added bubbles for more ex-citement. Afterwards we cele-brated Jade’s birthday with some yummy cake. Happy Birthday, Jade!

Since the theme was about Celebrations, the children made Christmas cards for their family and talked about how they would spend the December holiday.

It has been a wonderful

2011 for Learn Different.

Each student has progressed

in their his or her own way.

The last two weeks has been

bitter-sweet for us as we bid

farewell to one of our stu-

dents, Samuel. We will miss

you Sam and we wish you

luck in your new school! The

students has fun preparing a

farewell party for him in re-

lation to our IPC

’Celebrations’ theme. They

made all the decorations,

party hats, a goodbye card

and brought food for the

Time flies! It’s time to put all the good stuff together and wrap it up with wonderful memories of this year. Lots of learning took place and our young explorers have done extraordinary work.

This week we were very busy preparing for the Christmas celebration and year-end con-cert. They were so eager to work on making decorations with our art teacher and prac-tising for the musical perfor-mance. Their spirit and enthu-siasm to work in a team while having fun mark the end of this year with great success. Also

In Literacy, the older kids

are already done with

their vowel digraphs (-ay,

-ee, -oo, -igh, -ow, -ar, -or,

-ir, -air) while the younger

kids are done with their -

th, -sh, -ch, -ng and –nk

sounds. In Maths, they

were rigorously enhancing

their subtraction skills to-

gether with their addition

techniques.

The year ended with our

Holiday Concert wherein

kids demonstrated their

talents in singing and

showcase in front of eve-

ryone the printed T-shirts

that they made with

teacher Oz in Art class.

Your kids definitely know

how to put on a show!

Every child deserves the right to be taught in the way he or she learns best!