Mr Anthony Rowlands Weekly Update 9th October

Education beyond the classroom is a major feature of the curriculum at BIS Hanoi. We want our students to be challenged beyond what we sometimes see as day to day academic work. We want to challenge them through such areas as sport, music, residential trips, and community projects along with the wonderfully diverse Duke of Edinburgh International Award Programme. On  Wednesday, I spent around 90 minutes in the school sports hall watching our KS4/5 boys’ and girls’ teams  play volleyball against UNIS. Both games were played simultaneously next to each other. It was a wonderful way for me to see our students experience such a great variety of emotions in such a short period of time! They experienced disappointment, happiness, success, and failure whilst, all the time, learning to operate as teams, always encouraging each other. It was an electric atmosphere as there was so much cheering, laughter, and excitement.   Both our teams lost by the smallest of margins but, in my eyes, they were all winners because of what they learnt from the experience and how they had demonstrated great respect for themselves and the opposition.

In the next few weeks, many of our students will be experiencing similar challenging, but enjoyable, situations to the one outlined above:

Next week all our students from Years 7 – 10 will be going on their annual expedition to various locations

Many students will be performing musical acts at our Secondary talent show on 29

October.

Thirty of our students will travel to HCMC this weekend to participate in the Annual BIS HCMC Swim Meet.

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DoE IA

: This year we have the following, truly amazing,  number of students participating in the :

-  Bronze Award – 38
-  Silver Award –  34
-  Gold Award - 4

Our annual Book Week, which took place this week, is another event that takes learning well beyond the classroom and enhances the children’s love of books. The “Two Steves” were with us at the beginning of the week and proved very popular with the staff and students. We had many book related activities along with a popular book store during the middle part of the week. On the final day of the week, Primary students and staff dressed up as their favourite book characters and took part in a colourful and exciting assembly.

At BIS Hanoi, there is no doubt that we certainly do educate beyond the classroom. Next week, I will be away from school as I will be attending a Nord Anglia Education Principals’ Conference in Switzerland.

I do hope that you all have a wonderful weekend.

Mr Anthony Rowlands, Principal