March 2012 Volume 3

Issue 3 SFS SFS SFS TodayTodayToday Details of daily distinction found at Seoul Foreign SchoolDetails of daily distinction found at Seoul Foreign SchoolDetails of daily distinction found at Seoul Foreign School

Seoul Foreign School, centered in Christ, inspires educational excellence & promotes Christian values, Seoul Foreign School, centered in Christ, inspires educational excellence & promotes Christian values, Seoul Foreign School, centered in Christ, inspires educational excellence & promotes Christian values, personal integrity & responsible global citizenship through a dynamic international experience.personal integrity & responsible global citizenship through a dynamic international experience.personal integrity & responsible global citizenship through a dynamic international experience.

www.seoulforeign.org

SFS ES Student Awarded IFLAC Poem of the Month!

Last November, SFS students sub-mi ed poetry to the International Forum for the Literature and Culture of Peace (IFLAC), a voluntary Associ-ation that strives for peace by build-ing bridges of understanding and peace through culture, literature and communication. Students were invit-ed to submit peace poems answering the question ‘What is peace to me?’

In the 9-10 year old age group, our ES 5B student Chloe Kim’s poem “Winter’s Harmony” placed first and was also chosen as the Poem of the Month in December 2011. We also had Mercy Milliken, 5B receive 3rd place and two special mentions for Christina Cho, 5B and Grace Kwak, 5B. In the 10-11 year old age group, Ra-chel Lee, 7R in the MS, won third

prize. First, second, and third place winners in each language (English and Spanish) received an IFLAC Honorary Diploma signed by the IFLAC Commi ee and a special gi . Huge congratulations to Chloe and the others who took part in the poetry contest. We are so proud of you! To read more about the contest and the poems please visit h p://iflac.wordpress.com/

Proud Winners of the IFLAC Poetry Contest From Le : Rachel Lee, Grace Kwak, Mercy Milliken, Christina Cho and Chloe Choi

For the last 5 years, SFS has compet-ed in the APAC Forensics Competi-tion where students compete in a range of Debate and Speech events. This year, the competition was host-ed by Hong Kong International School.

Our team of 10, relatively new com-petitors were nervously excited about competing this year. During our stay in Hong Kong, students spent time

with their host families enjoying both the beautiful sights and the excellent food that is to be found in the city. A er 3 days of intense competition, 4 of our team members made it into the final rounds in 5 events.

A er calming their nerves, each SFS finalist gave the performance of their lives and each and every one of them received a medal. The greatest excite-ment for the team came when it was

announced that SFS had come second overall, a result that was beyond our expectations. The result was a credit to the team who had worked hard, supported each other, showed a will-ingness to be coached and had a keen desire to improve their public speak-ing skills. We are already looking for-ward to next year’s APAC competi-tion to be held in Manila.

FORENSICS RESULTS Solo Acting Andrew Kim, 1st Place Christina Hahn, 2nd Place

Impromptu Leon Jun, 2nd Place

Extemp Speaking Leon Jun, 3rd Place

Original Interpretation Seng‐Min Youn, 2nd Place

The Year 6/Grade 5 1:1 Laptop pro-gram is part of a larger initiative across Seoul Foreign School. Stu-dents are specifically taught a myri-ad of tech skills one of which is online collaboration, to prepare them for their futures. Here are some student thoughts six months into the program.

“This year, I learned how to use the snipping tool, screen shot and how to post stuff on the wiki. So, I think I learned a lot of amazing technolo-gy skills. The edu20 site helped me a lot because when I got stuck on homework or when I had a question, the people on edu20 answered my questions and gave me advice.“

Jonathan Kim, Y6S “Listen to the teachers if they are talking about tech, because it is a very serious and important subject and if you forget a certain skill, you will be in great trouble. My tech skill in Year 5 wasnt̀ that good but because I learnt a lot this year my ʺtech skillʺ has boosted up.”

Annabelle Park, Y6S

“I am good at using Windows 7 on my Xnote and Mac OS X Lion on my mac. Iʹm proud that I know how to use both of them. One really good thing about Year 6 is that you can get your own laptops and can use them in class rather than do lots and lots of bookwork. Also the teachers are really nice... :)“

Jennifer Lee, Y6H

2012 SFS Forensics Team

BS Y6/ES Gr. 5 Make Strides with 1:1 Laptop Program

Emmalyn Sinclair and Annabelle Park, Y6S

Maya Lycett and Aayushi Swadia, Y6S

2012 APAC Forensics Team Shines Through with 2nd Place

The grade seven Humanities classes held an Ancient China Exhibition at the “Relyea Art Institute” and the “Skidmore Metropolitan Center” during the morning of Monday, De-cember 12, 2011. All students presented invented arti-facts and original artwork of China which demonstrated their responses

to the questions “How do historians know about what happened in the past?” and “What events and turning points are important in history and why?” A wide variety of topics such as history, inventions, art and culture were exhibited and detailed explana-tions were provided by each of the students. Tea and biscuits were also served to all visitors.

“We got to learn about different topics of China. While working on the project, we found new facts and also learnt a lot from our own research. It was a bit stress-ful trying to find artifacts but it was a worthwhile project.”

Jasmine Chu 7S

“It was fun preparing for this pro-ject. By sharing our learning and findings with each other we got to learn a wide variety of topics and history on China.”

Julia Mun 7A

Visit to the 7th Grade Ancient China Exhibition

Last Fall, Middle School and British School KS3 students participated in the American Math Contest 8(AMC8). AMC8 is a 25 question 40 minute exam given around the world on Tuesday November 15, 2011. The problems are designed to challenge students and offer problem-solving opportunities beyond a typi-cal classroom curriculum. This year we had 40 students partici-pate in the exam. We had 2 sixth graders on the achievement role for Outstanding Performance as a 6th Grader, Linda Wang and David Lee. The remaining winners all made the Honor Roll, scoring in the top 5% of participants world-wide. Linda Wang, 6th Grade, YooJoon Lee, 7th Grade and Michael Yoon, 8th Grade scored 1st place. Andy Jeong, 7th Grade took 2nd place. Brian Lee,

Year 9 and Nicholas Kim, 8th grade took 3rd place at SFS.

We are proud to announce the 7 win-ners from SFS. Picture Top Row: Linda Wang & David Lee Bo om Row: Nicholas Kim, Andy Jeong & Yoo Joon Lee Not pictured: Michael Yoon and Bri-an Lee

MS/ BS KS3 AMC8 Math Test: On Top of the World

Sean Choi and Julia Mun

HS Student Recipient

of Scholastic Art &

Writing Award

The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards represent an international competition with many thousands of entries. Janice Kim, a SFS junior, won both second place and honorable mention with two of her art pieces, now on display out-side the high school art room. Janice is an IB 1 student who is using the subject of Childhood in her studio work, and will be mounting a one man show of her work as part of her final exam in IB Visual Arts next year. Come by the art room and see the prize winning pieces.

Janice Kim, Grade 11

SFBS Student Nominated As Ambassador for World Maths Day

The UNICEF/ World Education Games is an event for all schools and students around the world. It runs from 6-8 March (in three areas: Spelling, Maths and Sci-ence), involving 5.5 million stu-dents from over 200 countries and territories. This is a global challenge to get all students (4-18 years of age) excited about learn-ing, and to give the top students in each school an opportunity to see how they measure up against the best. Bo‐Min Ryu from Year 6 has been chosen to be the Ambassador for

World Maths Day (March 7) of South Korea. Bo-Min will have a number of official duties to complete and will be working on a blog to share with the other 5.5 million children who take part in the day.

Please go to h p://www.worldmathsday.com/ for more details on the World Edu-cation Games and click on Am-bassadors to see Bo-Min’s pro-file.

“I am truly grateful to have been chosen as the representa-tive for my entire school. I feel I am not the strongest in Math

but I think I am a great speaker and leader. I am very excited to be representing the school and I hope I can have fun.”

Bo‐Min Ryu, Y6H

“Stella the Starfish” is a magical un-derwater tale with an important mes-sage about being helpful. Stella has lost her family and two children, So-phie and Stephen, help to reunite Stel-la with her family. One of the children expressed how she felt during the play:

“Stella the Starfish has lost her fami-ly so I was kind of sad even though it was not real!”

Ines Lee, Y2P

This yearʹs KS1 production has been an incredible team effort as members of the staff and parents across the Brit-ish School shared their talents and

supported the younger students in the school as they prepared to perform on stage.

The children have enjoyed preparing for Stella the Starfish and have worked collaboratively together on the songs, words, actions, dances, and

stage directions.

This is what some of the children had to say…

“I was excited about the show be-cause I couldn’t wait to be on the stage!”

Roman Smith, RW

“I felt fantastic being a rainbow fish and doing my dance and singing all the songs.”

Alla Almutoteh Y1B “Being a jellyfish was great fun. My costume was violet and I had dark purple leggings. I liked all the songs and the actions. I thought they were very creative. I saw my mum and dad in the audience. They were si ing near the front.”

Charlo e Wood, Y2C

BS KS1 Production “Stella the Starfish”

Over the Christmas Holi-days Mr. Eric Baland ES Grade 5 teacher pur-chased four Lego Mind-storms kits for his stu-dents. The unit of study was on artificial limbs and their goal was to build a prototype of a human limb. For their final build, they built a robot called the Snatcher. It can grab objects and stack and move them based on size or color. The students have really responded well to them.

They like building with Legos, but more importantly, they are learning

how to program the robot to do certain things. They are seeing the relation-ship between building and programming a robot and that they both must work together – and that programming is o en the most difficult part. They can then relate this infor-mation to their study of human artificial limbs and how we are using cu ing edge technology

to help human lead more productive lives.

Lego Robotics: Stimulating Creative Technology for ES/MS Students

In the MS, Mr. Peter Shaffer has introduced the Lego Robotics to the MS students. Lego Robots are very popular among many schools today where students learn to be creative, collaborate and share their ideas. This is a field where possibilities are un-limited. The program not only well represents the 21st Centu‐ry learning skills but also offers introduction to computer sci‐ence and graphics which can be con‐tinuously developed in the High School. This is only the beginning and with further training and pro-gramming lessons Mr. Shaffer would like to further develop the Lego Ro-botics program at SFS. These are some of the things that stu-dents in the MS Lego class would do to make a “Bumper Car” work. • Adding a functional “bumper” to

the robot

• creating a program with a loop following the example and using the touch sensor

• try and create some movements, using some other sensor

• create a new program , where the robot will react if either sensor is activated

• modify, be creative, and have it do some other reaction.

“It’s really fun working on the Lego Robotics but it’s also chal-lenging and hard. By working on

this, I’m learning to be more creative and collaborate with my partner.”

Bailey Pra , Gr. 7SK

“Programing Robots in class is fun! Building the robots,

programing and making it do what it should do is exciting but it’s challenging when it

doesn’t do the job that it should be doing.”

Ariel Zhou, Gr. 8K

Ashley Won, 5B with NXT

Bailey Pratt and Sean Kim, Gr. 7

Ariel Zhou, Gr. 8K

Strong Finish for our APAC Swimmers

Hosted by Brent International School Manila, Philippines February 2‐4, 2012 The Seoul Foreign School 2012 APAC Swim Team put it all in the water at this year’s APAC Championships. Held at Brent International School in Manila, each swimmer displayed posi-tive sportsmanship and compet-ed with spirited enthusiasm to the best of their ability. Even as a 24-hour flu bug hit swimmers hard, the Crusaders cut through the water as fast as they could. In preparation this year, the APAC team experienced greater em-phasis on dry-land conditioning with continued competitive swim training. The Crusader team finished fourth overall in both the boy and girl’s final standings.

This year’s APAC team consisted of: Daniel Lou y, Erich Kim, Alex Min, Alex Song, Eric Joo, Chris

Luke, Chris Kim, Joonil Lee, Mi-chael Yi, Sae-Won Kim, Benedict Printz, Glenn Kim, Aramie Sohn, Rachel Woo, Leah Chong, Yage Song, Lily Ha, Ellen Surdeau, Maxime Percheron, Angela Yoon, Eunnie Lee, Erin Kim, and coach-es Jason Van Galder and Jeff Oakes. The following SFS results pro-vide a snapshot of individual and team accomplishments: 5 Silver medals, 14 Bronze medals, 14 Ribbons, 6 SFS School Records, and 60 Personal Bests. Considering the power of swim-ming programs such as Interna-tional School of Beijing, Shanghai American School Puxi, and-Shanghai American School Pu-dong, the Seoul Foreign School Crusaders did extremely well and are to be commended for competing at such a high level.

Seoul Foreign School will again have Summer Seoul-stice from June 11– August 3, 2012. This summer pro-gram will include Camp SFS, Sport Camp, Academic Enrichment Camp, and Specialty Camp for a variety of ages. This day-camp will be offered for all of the summer school sessions for students entering Senior Kindergar-ten/Year 1 through students finishing Grade 5/Year 6.  

Camp SFS will feature:  Instructional Swimming lessons  

Recreational Swimming  Nature Exploration and Adventure  

Arts & Cra s  Music  

Organized Sports  Story Time

 

Students will be grouped by age and assigned quali-fied SFS Counselors.

Summer Seoulstice personnel will include qualified SFS Teachers, Specialists, Camp Counselors, Camp Nurse, American Red Cross Certified Lifeguards and WSI Certified Swim Instructors, Summer Programs Director and Assistant Director. Watch Edline, Back-pack mail, and parent e-mails for registration infor-mation. Please contact summerprograms@seoulforeign.org for more information.

APAC Swim Team

June 11—August 3 2012