Here to Help SAS School Nurses

Then 1995 Now 2022

The ethic of active community service was promoted by the SAS Social Services Club in the 1980s, and it continued to expand in the following decade. By 1994, the club was actively conducting 10 different projects in Singapore, supported by 150 students and 15 teachers. Early SAS service clubs initially planned activities that revolved around raising money for the needy, but the school later began to look at ways to actively involve students in community service. The first ecology club was organized by Kate Thorne and Richard Frazier at Ulu Pandan. The club participated in the Pulau Ubin Sensory Trail project, helped to clean up Sungei Buloh nature park, and promoted recycling. In high school, six elected students oversee all service clubs via our Executive Service Council. Students who join service clubs develop skills such as taking initiative, collaborating, organizing, and implementing plans. Encouraged to initiate their own service-learning projects, they work on valuable life skills and become more responsible, enlightened, and reflective global citizens. Blue Planet Initiative (BPI) is a service club in the high school that aims to practice and promote marine conservation and environmental sustainability through various service projects. This year, over 145 volunteers (students and educators) participated in four beach cleanups around the island, and more than 12,500 pieces of trash were removed from East Coast Park and Changi Beach.

Beyond The Headlines:

Teaching Current Events

By

CARA D'AVANZO

Communications Writer

As Europe’s most serious military conflict in decades dominates news headlines, parents in many countries are wondering how their children are learning about it at school. Addressing current events in age-appropriate ways is part of Singapore American School’s mission of cultivating exceptional thinkers prepared for the future. The skills required to assess and understand news items in today’s environment are taught through our learning aspirations of critical thinking, content knowledge, cultural competence, and character. We asked teachers schoolwide to tell us how they guide their students to go beyond the headlines to better understand their world.

First grade teacher Gillian Lait says that in the early grades, teaching about current events is done on a teacher-by-teacher basis. “My students and I often talk about these events at the end of the day during the closing circle, when there’s time to bring up any thoughts they want to raise,” she explains. “Additionally, once a week I have a ‘campfire chat’ with my students, where we all share something that’s bugging us.” Such open-ended discussions allow students to raise issues they’ve heard about that are worrying or confusing them. Lait then helps the class understand the wider context or relate the event to their own lives. For serious and complex current events, “We usually read an age-appropriate book that sparks conversation and then go from there with concerns and connections. These conversations are student-led, so if questions come up, I ask other students to respond or help paraphrase a response that I give. This keeps the conversation at a developmentally appropriate level, since they are the ones setting the pace.”

In middle school, social studies classes take the lead in teaching about current events. Sixth grade teacher Megan Kelly explains, “I use Flocabulary, which has a weekly current events video. We discuss the events and how they relate to our current units. Other teachers, often in advisory, use CNN10’s 10-minute news segments, designed for middle school and high school audiences. We will also design lessons for major events; for example, last year we did a specific lesson on the events of January 6, 2021 in the US.” When Russia invaded Ukraine, Kelly created a lesson that sixth grade social studies teachers used to help students understand the news they were hearing about. “We devoted a full class period to understanding the conflict and giving students background knowledge,” recalls Kelly. “I found that they didn't know much, but were desperate to find out more.” In seventh grade social studies, students are expected to watch, read, or listen to current events each day and then write a tweet-length summary of one event. Teacher Leigh Curnett explains that students learn how to choose credible news sources and may follow one story over time or choose different news events each class for a global perspective. “At the beginning of second semester,” she says, “students were tasked with connecting current events to our topic of investigation: interdependence and equity through the lens of geography and economics in Singapore.” When the Ukraine–Russia crisis escalated, the class changed course to examine it. Curnett developed a mini-lesson based on the book Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall and then asked students to develop their own questions about the crisis. “They researched these using commonly accessed news sources as well as news sources within Russia and Ukraine, and they looked at their own home country's response to the crisis,” she explains. Since spring break, seventh graders have revisited their work to develop claims they can support with evidence and reasoning. They have also learned about the broader context of the conflict, including the role of sanctions, NATO, CSTO, the fall of the Soviet Union, communism, and democracy. “While some students then chose to develop a research-based argument about Ukraine and Russia,” Curnett says, “others decided to focus on Singapore, with topics ranging from naturalresource scarcity to influence of colonial rule to diversity.”

The eighth grade social studies course focuses on US history and society and moves through five units purposely designed to go from past to present. Current events may therefore be incorporated into lessons that cover relevant material. Teacher and middle school social studies department chair Dr. Scott Oskins shared a lesson to demonstrate how teachers may sensitively raise issues in the news that, while difficult for students to discuss, are vitally important to address. Developed and co-taught with the middle school instructional coaches, the lesson draws on earlier work the students did when reading Julius Lester's To Be a Slave and is based on articles that ran in major newspapers during last