18th June

Good afternoon parents and friends of the school

1. We are starting the last week of school for the term. On Friday we close for a four week break. School re-opens on Tuesday 24^th July. The office will be open for the first week of the holidays and the last week. During the last week of the holidays we will be running a HOLIDAY COURSE for our students. Details will come home this week. In the first week we are running a holiday conference for teachers. All of the Koroboro teachers will be attending and there are also a good number from other IEA Schools. We also have two teachers attending from the International School in the Solomon Islands.
2. Last week we issued a newsletter, hopefully this got home.
3. This week there will be a notice going home about our new school of music. We are offering private lessons for children either at the end of the school day or during the school day (parents can choose). The instruments will be lead guitar, bass guitar, classical guitar, clarinet, saxophone, flute, soprano recorder, tenor recorder and keyboard. The cost will be K200 per term. Children will receive two 20 minute lessons each week. Children can use the instruments at school (these can not be taken home) or they can provide their own.
4. There will be soccer on the first Saturday of the holidays. This will be the last game so hopefully everyone can be there.
5. This Thursday evening the Middle School have a display of work and some performances. This starts at 6.00pm.
6. Grade 7 and 8 Assembly this Friday.
7. Dr Rob Gilfillan worked with us again this week. On Friday he met with the athletes and distributed some Nike running shoes which were donated to us by the Company. Next term we will be launching our first school of excellence in sport. This will be in athletics. Children who would like to join will work with Rob during his visits to PNG. When he is not here they will follow a training schedule which will be supervised by one of our staff. Each week the children involved will email Rob with the results of their training and he will modify the schedule as is needed. Some of the children will visit Brisbane and work with coaches there and take part in competitions. There will be a cost involved as Rob is a professional coach. Later we hope to extend this school of excellence idea to netball and soccer. The goal will be to provide opportunities for our promising athletes and sports people that do not currently exist in PNG. There will be more information early next term.

Hopefully you will get some time to relax with your children over the holidays.

Doug

This week’s question in the planner is ‘Why is it 9.00am on Monday in Papua New Guinea but 2.00pm on Sunday in Los Angeles America? Time zones are fascinating. This is a good opportunity to get you children to think about how the world is split up into time zones and the reasons for this. Imagine if it were the same time evertywhere in the world, how would that change things? Who invented time?

A time zone is a region of the Earth that has adopted the same standard time, usually referred to as the local time. Most adjacent time zones are exactly one hour apart, and by convention compute their local time as an offset from Greenwich Mean Time (see also UTC).Standard Time Zones of the World as of 2005. (Some time zones have changed since then)

Standard time zones can be defined by geometrically subdividing the Earth's spheroid into 24 lunes (wedge-shaped sections), bordered by meridians each 15° of longitude apart. The local time in neighbouring zones would differ by one hour. However, political and geographical practicalities can result in irregularly-shaped zones that follow political boundaries or that change their time seasonally (as with daylight saving time), as well as being subject to occasional redefinition as political conditions change.

History

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was established in 1675, when the Royal Observatory was built, as an aid to determine longitude at sea by mariners. The first time zone in the world was established by British railways on December 1, 1847 — with GMT hand-carried on chronometers. About August 23, 1852, time signals were first transmitted by telegraph from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Even though 98% of Great Britain's public clocks were using GMT by 1855, it was not made Britain's legal time until August 2, 1880. Some old clocks from this period have two minute hands — one for the local time, one for GMT.^[1] This only applied to the island of Great Britain, and not to the island of Ireland.

On November 2, 1868, New Zealand (then a British colony) officially adopted a standard time to be observed throughout the colony, and was perhaps the first country to do so. It was based on the longitude 172° 30' East of Greenwich, that is 11 hours 30 minutes ahead of GMT. This standard was known as New Zealand Mean Time.

Try these websites:

http://www.die.net/earth/hemisphere.html

www.timeanddate.com/