9 Jan 2015 (Friday)

Dear children, 

After our second reading of "Fearless Phil" today, we learned about similes and discussed about mountain tracks and mountain climbing. 

If you want to refer to some of the similes we learnt today, click on these DropBox link for the PowerPoint slides we went through:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6frbkiw5tftu2v8/Similes%20PPT.pptx?dl=0

Here's a quick question on similes: Do you remember the difference between "as strong as a family" and "as strong as an ox"? Both similes are talking about strength -- but how do we use them differently? :)

When we moved on to work on an exercise on adjectives with opposites, some of you found two questions especially difficult because there were new words in them. Do you remember the meanings of the words "stiff" and "menacing" now? If you've forgotten, you can use the online Cambridge dictionary to find out. Click on this link and enter a word into the "Search" box at the top of the page: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/

Continuing along the theme of mountains, we started on our first maths topic for this year - "Numbers to 10 000". We used a website called "Find The Data" to find out the heights of the top 5 tallest mountains in Asia and wrote down their heights in thousands, hundreds, tens and ones. All of them were at least 8000 metres tall! That's nearly 5000 of you stacked vertically!

Many of you were interested to know the other high mountains in Asia, so I am putting here the link to the website that we used:

http://highest-mountains.findthedata.com/d/c/Asia

Besides giving us the names and heights of different mountains, this website also tells us how difficult it is to climb them, in which year people first ascended them, and the percentage of people who died when they tried to climb to the summit. 

Mountain climbing is a dangerous activity. If you are free during the weekend and are interested to watch a National Geographic documentary on how thirty mountain climbers tried to climb to the summit of K2 - the second highest mountain in Asia and the world - click here for a 14-minute YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34FjZOQdhGo

Here's today's reminder:

1) The CCA Open House will be held next Monday after school from 2 p.m. to 3.45 p.m..If you have no CCA presently, please be there to explore the various CCA booths so that you can choose a CCA to join using the AskNLearn portal. CCAs have to be chosen by next Thursday, 15th January 2015.

Have a good weekend with your family! See you on Monday! :)