The Informer - the International School of Stavanger

Jakob and Dina have dropped everything to enjoy a moment of reading togetherPrimary School NewsLeonie and Sophie take five during PEWe were so pleased with the children’s involvement in ourreading incentive of finding a friend in a book. The incentiveconcluded with a day of Drop Everything and Read. It was funto see so many students so involved in books. There is sucha positive feeling that surfaces when everyone is reading. Itshows we value reading and this rubs off on reading skills asmotivation to read increases. Thank you to everyone involvedin making this such a success.Thank you as well for everyone helping with the many events inand out of school. Primary School track and field has started,and the Primary School musical is just around the corner. I havehad an opportunity to see the community teamwork of teachers,parents and students offering over 100 students an opportunityto learn track and field skills and pulling all the many facetsof the musical production together. Join the students at one ormore of the performances on 7-9 May. The students appreciateseeing you in the audience, and for this musical you will get ahistory lesson.Toward the end of the school year, some tasks become moreand more difficult, and this is a good time to work on resilience.In the book, Mindsets, researcher Carol Dweck at StanfordUniversity has suggested a focus on praise for effort over praisefor intelligence. If looking smart is most important, thenstudents tend to think that the essential thing about schoolwork is to show how good one is at it. If learning is moreimportant, then it is more important to learn concepts andskills in classes than to get the best grades. Put another way, ifa student says the assignment was too easy, perhaps we shouldsay we are sorry we wasted that time, and suggest somethingwe could do that could help them learn more. Dweck suggestswe help develop attitudes that the harder we work at something,the better we get at it. The difficulty is that if we focus on beingsmart, we have a tendency to lose resilience when we encountera deficiency or difficult task. We need to learn how to maintainconfidence when facing challenges and setbacks. When a childdoes something well, we could praise by saying how smart thechild is, but Dweck suggests we praise by saying, “Wow, that’sa really good score. You must have tried really hard.” When achild doesn’t succeed, the focus should be on embracing thechallenge and learning from mistakes.Spring is here with the end of our reading incentive and somany activities in and out of school time. Each of the activitiesis important, and yet we need to focus on the core curriculumareas to ensure children gain essential skills to continue tosucceed. One of the most important ways parents help in theselast months of school is keeping a regular routine for gettingenough sleep. This can be a daunting task with evenings thatare light so late. Routine is often the key to getting to bed, nomatter how light it is outside. Have a wonderful springtime!Len Duevel, PhDPrimary School PrincipalLPDuevel@isstavanger.no14 · The In f o r m e r 29 Ap r i l 2009 www.isstavanger.no