Key Dates | Pastoral Update | BIS Debate Achievement | Virtual Learning Showcase
Dear Parents,
World Children’s Day was the focus this week, with engaging activities running through Form Tutor sessions and during assembly. An enormous thank you to Linh Dan and Gia Han, our UNICEF ambassadors, for leading the events for students this week; they have done a tremendous job.
World Children’s Day is special to us as an educational institution, because we know that education is a powerful positive force for young people. We believe, as UNICEF does also, that every child has a universal right to a good education that opens their minds, acknowledges diversity, includes all, and treats children with dignity and respect. A 2017 report from UNESCO revealed a distinct correlation between education and poverty, and asserted that if every adult received two or more years of education or completed secondary school, it could alleviate 60 million people from poverty.
We must all be grateful to live in a country and community that highly values education and the teachers that provide it. We recommit ourselves, through our values and mission, to continue to provide outstanding learning opportunities for the children in our care. Happy Children’s Day, everyone.
Yours sincerely,
Chris Newman
Head of Secondary
As we face so many different challenges nowadays I often think how difficult it must be for a teenager to start important IGCSE exam courses online. I am pleased to say that Year 10s have made a great start to their IGCSE courses and have shown excellent engagement in lessons. They have quickly adapted to the technical demands of online learning and are starting to understand and appreciate the increased workload that the IGCSE courses bring. They have been well supported by their Tutors who have focused on student well-being as a priority.
Morning registration is always engaging and the year 10’s are currently piloting a scheme called ‘Freerice’. This scheme allows students to give something back to the community by entering a quiz and for every question the student answers correctly, ten grains of rice are donated to families in need around the world via the United Nation’s World Food Programme. A really positive action from our Year 10 students who have so far, donated over 5,000 grains of rice.
During their well-being lessons, Year 10s have been looking at their Mental Health and strategies to cope with online learning. During this time students that have required additional support have managed to speak to their tutors on a one-to-one basis for advice on their academics. During these lessons, there is also time for some students to work independently, developing good study skills for the future.
There have also been chances over the last couple of weeks to sign up to be part of the student council and very soon they will find out if they have been selected. I was also very pleased to see a large number of students volunteer for the Duke of Edinburgh Award which is a fantastic course and one which will certainly help them develop important life skills. As a measure of the Year 10s success so far with virtual learning, I am pleased to share that Year 10s have received more praise points than any of the year groups above them.
Despite a slightly different start to the year, I was very pleased to see that all of our new students have settled in well. As a measure of their confidence they attended an after school social event last week and had some fun finding out things that we shared in common. We also discovered that students are so much smarter than the staff when it comes to online games!
A great start to the two-year IGCSE programme. The Year 10s’ have demonstrated fantastic adaptability, resilience and engagement so far and I hope these skills along with many others develop as they complete this journey. A really huge well done Year 10s and please keep up the good work!
Rob Taylor
Head of Year 10
Last weekend (13 - 14 November), BIS Debate sent two teams to the Disney British Parliamentary Open, an international tournament consisting of a total of 34 teams. Our BIS teams ended their incredible run at Disney BP Open. BIS Simba, consisting of Heidy in Year 13 and Ha Tien in Year 12, got into the Semi-finals! BIS Olaf, consisting of Mai and Ngoc Anh in Year 11, is the 2nd Reserve Breaking Team (Top 10), and ranked Top 12 speakers. Gia Khanh in Year 9 and her teammate got into the Finals and ranked Top 9 Speakers!
BIS Debate members and mentors have all worked really hard to best prepare for the tournament, with countless training sessions both pre and during the tournament.
We thank everyone for their support and wishes for BIS Debate at Disney BP Open. We hope to continue enhancing the debating spirit within our school, with many more exciting tournaments and events coming up!
Maths | English | Vietnamese | Humanities | Art | Korean | Business Studies
Resilience and Creativity: How technology is helping us become better mathematicians
Whilst teaching mathematical skills and knowledge at BIS, we also empower our students to become resilient and creative in their approaches. Never have these attributes been needed more than in the current learning climate we find ourselves. Learning online can be tough- especially when you just want to put pen to paper ‘the old fashioned’ way! Below you will see our students overcoming communication boundaries by reaching out to their peers using the chat box (Year 9), embracing the digital pen and creating some fantastic three-dimensional drawings (Year 7), and also becoming adapt with 21st technology to explore graphs of functions (Year 11). Our students are constantly developing their risk-taking and critical thinking skills to adapt their usual Maths knowledge to work within the virtual world. Although we are all dreaming of the day of being back face to face, it has been wonderful to see our students’ perseverance and innovation skills strengthen day by day.
To help students understand the theme of love and love within Shakespearean plays, students watched different video clips from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (another romantic comedy) and 'Romeo and Juliet' (a romantic tragedy). These videos - and their reading of 'Twelfth Night' - gave them the inspiration they needed to write and perform their own tragic or comedic love scene.
Students were encouraged to think creatively and dramatically about how they will perform their scene. They were encouraged to present their work in a non-conventional way. Using Flipgrid, students were able to pause their recordings and take on different personas.
Not only did this help students to understand the complex theme of this play, but it allowed students to take on the role of a director, playwright, and actor in a creative way.
This week Year 7s have had a creative activity. They have drawn comics for their learned fables. 8Vs students drew comics about their daily routine and wrote descriptions in Vietnamese.
Year 10 students have learned about poetry written during the war. In the role of soldiers, they wrote letters to family members or loved ones based on the poems they learned. They have created really emotional works.
Year 13 HL biologists were set the task of making a creative piece of work to consolidate and demonstrate their learning about how muscle fibres contract to enable movement. I was very impressed with their collaborative efforts and creativity. One group made a bedtime story featuring characters such as Fire, Coatie, Boundy and Sparkless as characters in their tale. Another group made a cartoon strip using One Note, pictured. All the students were able to describe verbally the rather complicated process of muscle fibre contraction and used different parts of their brain to do this which should help them to remember. Well done Year 13s!
Our Year 12 SL IB students completed their first unit of work on Changing Population this week by investigating the benefits of South Korea’s demographic dividend. They showed excellent creativity and critical thinking in engaging with a ‘dual coding’ task in which they used a combination of key words, statistics and images to summarise to help develop their memory and revision skills. A you can see from the small selection below, they have done a superb job. Well done Year 12s!
Year 13 Visual Arts
This group of committed and resilient artists are making incredible strides with their exhibition unit. The HL Visual Arts students have recently submitted their second piece in the build up to their Exhibition unit in March. Every member of the class is approaching virtual learning in Visual Arts as just another learning diversion along the creative journey. They are producing impressively high quality work, seeking guidance when needed, challenging their thinking and are being nothing but ambitious with their ideas. I am so impressed with the work they are producing I wanted to take this opportunity to provide you with a sneak preview and also publicly celebrate their effort and energy- well done everyone! Keep up the good work.
Year 7 Art
It has been another fantastic week for our Year 7 artists. Over the last two weeks, they have been learning more about the two different types of shapes (geometric and organic) and explored how constructivist artists such as Kazimir Malevich, use shape in their Artwork. The students created an extension of a famous artwork from Malevich, using the 21st century skills taught in our Art lessons and reusing prior learning from their STEAM lessons, creating some very successful outcomes. Well done Year 7s and we are looking forward to seeing how you keep using these skills within our next task, positive and negative space!
Year 11 Korean: The joy of reading poems
Year 11 students completed their PCT virtually, and they reflected their PCT scores via OneNote. After doing self-feedback, they spent some time celebrating their completion of PCT and had a silent reading time during the lesson. They sat back and found the joy of reading poems. While students were doing a silent reading, they chose 1-2 poems that made them think and recorded them with their voices. It was such a precious time that students could get some positivity with a gratitude mindset.
Students from all year groups have begun planning for World Entrepreneur’s Day by collaborating to create business ideas. Each year group will pitch their products to the Secondary school during Assembly next week after which, all students will vote for the best one. They have been developing creative concepts and emulating true entrepreneurial spirit, through the challenges of working remotely. We are very proud of their efforts and look forward to announcing the winners!
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