Dear parents,
It's been a fun and eventful month with lasagna cooking classes, fieldtrips to the Cowboy Park, making Zong Zi (sticky rice cake) for Dragon Boat Festival and celebrating Children's Day. The weather has been mainly nice and children enjoy taking off their shoes and socks when playing in the water by the canal, sand play area and B-level pond. It is getting really hot and the sun is burning. Please don't forget to prepare sun lotion and caps for outside play and remember to communicate with teachers.
Throughout the years, I have felt a growing support for our teachers and overall program. We are truly lucky to have great and modern families who choose Newton because we share similar values in education, which include teaching proper social emotional skills, friendship, teamwork and kindness. In respect to your support, I want to bring up one recent issue in one of our K2 classes, where we found a handful of boys that always like to play pretend war, fighting and shooting. Children, especially boys, probably will at some point be drawn to action, violence and super-powered heroes. Some heroes are fantastical and magical with a wizard's wand or a magical staff and some are soldiers with realistic looking weapons. Weapons that are made to kill in real life. While we encourage fantasy and role-play, including great characters as Monkey King and his companions, we do not allow any lesson or play activities that glorifies or idolize actual violence or harmful actions to people, animals or the environment. To make it simple, Newton students cannot pretend fight, to "shoot dead" anyone with either toys, bricks or even their fingers. If any child, violent or non-violent, exhibit excessive admiration for weapons and/or pretend fighting, teachers are required to meet with parents and discuss ways to change this behavior. I believe most of our families agree and support this and I hope those who have children who admire gun play and violence realize their own part in this and make a change.
Happily moving on to something completely else. We want to inform families that we are cutting back on bottled juices at school and continue to emphasize fruit-infused water instead. We will also be serving more alternatives to milk, including soya milk or "milk" from oats. This week, we received menu suggestions from a K1 parent and will be introducing millet breakfast porridge with sunflower seeds, mild chili con carne with beans and oven baked tofu in the next menu. As always, due to the fact that we have our own bakery, we use imported whole wheat flour for most breads, non-sweetened cocoa powder, low sugar/low carbohydrate Belgium chocolates, olive oil for cooking and real whipping cream from milk. Even though we have biscuits, bread and cakes for afternoon snacks, they are served in small portions with reduced sugars and balanced by fruit, vegetables and salad throughout the day. Keep in mind that since we began doing joint birthdays every month, we have greatly reduced the big servings of sweet empty carbohydrates and sugar from store bought birthday cakes with questionable ingredients. Finally, I wish to remind families not to serve candy or foods inside school at drop-off or pick-up time. We see that bringing food, candy or snacks at pick-up time is a daily occurrence for some and while it might make it easier to pick up your child, it is completely unnecessary as we just finished snack time only 1 hour before regular pick-up time.
Children's Day Gift :
This year, in connection with Dragon Boat Festival and Children's Day, we are giving traditional Chinese drums to children. The drums are made of natural materials, no plastics. The drums can be used in class, for future music lessons and hopefully children will practice their sense of rhythm and percussion, while keeping a sweet reminder from their childhood at Newton.
Finally, I kindly remind parents that we will be closed for Dragon Boat Festival from/to and including Friday, June 7th to Sunday June 9th. We look forward to welcome you back on Monday, June 10th.
IMPORTANT REMINDERS FOR THE COMING MONTH(S):
- June 7th-9th (from/to/including): Dragon Boat Festival Holiday
- June 20th: Foreign Section Summer Concert (keep your calendar open, it might be rescheduled to weekend of 22nd or 23rd)
- June 21st: Domestic Section Summer Concert (keep your calendar open, it might be rescheduled to weekend of 22nd or 23rd)
- July 12th: Last day of school
Wishing you a great month of June!
Anders S Christensen, principal
and the Hui Xin team!
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