La Sierra Newsletter

School Director:AndrewFrezludeen Office Secretary: Alexa RuizCuan School Phone number: 584 5112 School email: lasierraschool@gmail.com

Volume Number: 7

January 18, 2013

January/February 2013
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday

7
Teachers Return

8
Teachers only

9
Classes Begin

10 17 24 31

11 18

" Hello, Hola, Bonjour, So wa de kap, Konichiewa, BomDia!"

(Which languages are these??? Ask your children)

14 21 28

15 22 29

16 23 30

25
Informal Progress

Happy New Year to all! Students, Teachers and Parents should all be very proud of their efforts since our opening day. I wish you all a very safe and prosperous New Year! "PENSION" Thanks to parents who came forward to update their accounts. This helps us to run the school more efficiently and maintain our standard of education for your children. If you have not addressed your December and January payment, please do so as soon as possible. Your continued support is appreciated!

Important and Upcoming Dates

Jan. 1 New Year 2013 begins Jan. 7, 8 Teachers in school for PD Day Jan. 9 Students begin classes Jan. 25 Informal Progress Reports go home Feb. 11 Holiday School Closed Mar. 1st Formal Report Card Mar. 18 MONGOLIA WEEK Mar. 25-29 Holy Week School Closed Apr. 24 - May 1 Festival Vallenato School Closed May 13 Ascension Day School Closed

Informal Progress Reports January 25th Next week, reports will be sent home to highlight areas of concern. Please make an appointment to see teachers if they indicate that your child is having difficulty.

"DISCOVER MOROCCO WEEK!"

For 3 days in December, we celebrated Morocco and the week culminated with the parents visiting the school. Parents had to say hello in Arabic! Fun was had by all and some more international awareness was surely created in our school community. Thanks to the parents who cooked some food and who came to support the school!

Pillars of GOOD Character!

Students have been working on being CARING and being RESPONSIBLE which also means, at times, being RESPECTFUL. They have also been working on being TRUSTWORTHY. This week and next week, we are aiming to learn what CITIZENSHIP means!

Are you talking to your children about being a good citizen? Are they doing some tasks at home to make them more anything to help their community?

Keep fit in Physical Education Class with Mr. Edilberto!

Anyone want to go for a dip in the pool?

We have some very strong competitive swimmers too!

Swimmers who have shown very good progress in their swimming times:
Grade 2 Sofia Calvo 25 metres Improved from 32 sec to 26 sec Grade 4 Veronica Caldern 25 metres Improved from 24.02 sec to 21.43 sec 50 metres Improved from 52.49 sec to 41.55 sec Grade 5 Mariana Daza 25 metres Improved from 20.19 sec to 18.06 sec

Morning Assembly We learn to say hello in 9 different languages! Ask your children to teach you too

After school activities with Mr. Edilberto

International Connection? Eyes on the world

Can you guess where in the world this is?

Answer: Only ONE parent has ever answered correctly so far.will you be the next parent with the right answer?

Who is Santa Claus anyway? Is this him?

Looking back at the Christmas Play!

What a great show! Thanks to all who came and to all who participtiated!

At La Sierra, they actually celebrate other cultures more than once per year, like..MOROCCO!

Hmmmm..are these kids really from Morocco!

That food really looks yummy!

More from this African country!

Morocco? This looks like a good place for a napI will plan my next trip to Africa

How is Morocco similar to Colombia?

Parents are discovering Morocco

Reasons for Optimism in Today's World

Fareed Zakaria delivered a commencement speech at Harvard. While the audience was graduates, the message could apply to a great many of us. This is an article that I thought parents might be interested in as we look out internationally and think abour our world and the future of your children. Where will your sons and daughters be in 20 years? What is the world going to look like for them and for the rest of us? By Fareed Zakaria (Editor of TIME magazine) The best commencement speech I ever read was by the humorist Art Buchwald. He was brief, saying simply, Remember, we are leaving you a perfect world. Dont screw it up. You are not going to hear that message much these days. In stead, youre likely to hear that we are living through grim economic times, that the graduates are entering the slowest recovery since the Great Depression. The worries are not just economic. Ever since 9/11, we have lived in an age of terror, and our lives remain altered by the fears of future attacks and a future of new threats and dangers. Then there are larger concerns that you hear about: The Earth is warming; were running out of water and other vital resources; we have a billion people on the globe trapped in terrible poverty. So, I want to sketch out for you, perhaps with a little bit of historical context, the world as I see it. The world we live in is, first of all, at peace profoundly at peace. The richest countries of the world are not in geopolitical competition with one another, fighting wars, proxy wars, or even engaging in arms races or cold wars. This is a historical rarity. You would have to go back hundreds of years to find a similar period of great power peace. I know that you watch a bomb going off in Afghanistan or hear of a terror plot in this country and think we live in dangerous times. But here is the data. The number of people who have died as a result of war, civil war, and, yes, terrorism, is down 50 percent this decade from the 1990s. It is down 75 percent from the preceding five decades, the decades of the Cold War, and it is, of course, down 99 percent from the decade before that, which is World War II. Harvard professor Steven Pinker says that we are living in the most peaceful times in human history. The political stability we have experienced has allowed the creation of a single global economic system, in which countries around the world are participating and flourishing. In 1980, the number of countries that were growing at 4 percent a year

robust growth was around 60. By 2007, it had doubled. Even now, after the financial crisis, that number is more than 80. Even in the current period of slow growth, keep in mind that the global economy as a whole will grow 10 to 20 percent faster this decade than it did a decade ago, 60 percent faster than it did two decades ago, and five times as fast as it did three decades ago. The result: The United Nations estimates that poverty has been reduced more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500 years. And much of that reduction has taken place in the last 20 years. The average Chinese person is 10 times richer than he or she was 50 years ago and lives for 25 years longer. Life expectancy across the world has risen dramatically. We gain five hours of life expectancy every day without even exercising! A third of all the babies born in the developed world this year will live to be 100.