Key Dates | Pastoral Update | Student Magazine | Learning Showcase
Dear Parents,
It has been a busy week in the Secondary school with Year 10s and 12s completing internal subject tests and Year 11 and Year 13s completing their final assessments and exam preparations.
Despite overcoming extraordinary circumstances in 2021-22, our Year 11s and 13s will be sitting in exams this year. The exam boards have not provided an alternative, however there are arrangements in place should we need to switch to a non-exam route of assessment. We as a school remain confident that our students are well prepared and believe strongly that sitting final exams represents the best opportunity for them to showcase their learning and achieve outstanding results. It’s important to recognise the dedication and hard work from all teachers who are leading classroom learning at this time.
To parents, we thank you for your ongoing support. As we quickly move towards the final exams in April and May, their progress and welfare are our number 1 priority.
Yours sincerely,
Chris Newman
Head of Secondary
As I’m sure you are aware your son/daughter have just finished their second PCT assessments and yet again had to demonstrate resilience and adaptability to overcome the challenges of online learning. I would like to take this opportunity to share with you my thoughts on how PCTs exams fit into the bigger picture.
Assessment is part of learning and allows students to understand what they can do their strengths and areas that need improving. Assessment doesn’t just happen during PCTs, it occurs in every lesson, every day, and every week which provides teachers with a broader idea of student attainment.
Over the past two weeks some Year 10 students have become anxious about exams and this clearly has a detrimental effect on their well-being. It is our responsibility as teachers and parents to support students to understand the ‘bigger picture’. Of course, students will be taking more exams as they continue their journey through school/college/university but how they prepare both physically and mentally is so important. Our message to all Year 10 students is that continued effort and engagement in lessons will be their best preparation for exams and understanding the importance of taking time away from their studies is just as productive; getting the balance is key.
Please remember the PCTs are a useful assessment tool for students, teachers, and parents but they are just ‘one piece of the puzzle’.
This week I asked several Year 10 students to share their thoughts and concerns about their PCTs, and whether they felt they were getting enough sleep. Here are just some of their responses:
“Even when my teachers reassure us that it is fine if we get low scores, I still get worried.” - DH
“The pressure that others put on us makes it worse as well because sometimes we feel like if we fail the test we are letting everyone down and it feels like the end of the world when we don’t do well in a test.” - Anon
“I’m getting used to PCTs so I feel less pressure than last time.” - YH
“I feel less pressure than before, I am less stressed and I’m getting enough sleep and definitely less anxiety. It is also important to get good grades however, it is also important to maintain our mental and physical health.” - Ji Min
The Year 10 team really value the feedback from students and we will continue to prepare them for the necessary skills they need for their learning journey at BIS.
Mr. Taylor
Head of Year 10
The latest edition of the BIS student magazine, NOVUS, is now available to read and enjoy on the school website. Each edition features articles and viewpoints on a unifying theme. The first edition of 2022 is on the theme of Perspective. Content is written and edited entirely by an in-house student team; and there are a team of graphic designers who ensure everything looks fantastic too. I am very proud to work with such a talented and dedicated group of students and hope very much you enjoy reading their work.
Mr John Bliss
Staff supervisor and mentor
IB Visual Art | Science | MFL | Geography | English | Art
It has been a productive and exciting time in our virtual IB art studio over the last few weeks. Year 13 IB Visual Art students are a matter of weeks away from their exhibition which brings together all of the work from across the last 12 months. We have been so impressed with the standard of work that the Year 13 students are producing all from their own home and we can’t wait to showcase this with you. In the meantime, here is a sneak preview on some of the work you will get to see at our virtual exhibition on Thursday 31st March 2022.
In Year 12 we have begun work on the new section of our Process Portfolio. This component focuses on allowing the students to find out more about themselves and their interests as artists. It allows the space to follow a genuine line of inquiry within material areas that interest students. In our lesson this week students were engaging with a number of different investigations from trying to answer ‘How to satirically depict the lack of humanitarianism in charity through contrast of colours/shapes/forms’, to ‘how to create tension through the formal element of texture’. A group of students in this class have received printing packs at home and are working through a number of techniques with Ms Miller in our virtual art space. This week the group started work on exploring the technique of mono-printing, in particular exploring how we can use pressure and various mark-making tools to create a creative outcome in this area. It was a great way to spend a double lesson, using the screen to facilitate practical learning and created a sense of togetherness in a practical and inquisitive environment.
Keep up the good work everyone!
Ms Miller
In keeping with their topic of Global Issues and Rights, Year 9 Spanish explored Women’s Rights and Gender Equality during their MFL lessons this week. This lesson fell on El Día Internacional de la Mujer (8M), so Year 9 had a great discussion about the origins of this celebration and why it is that we celebrate women on this day.
They then thought about which women in their lives inspire them and why. They spoke about their mothers, grandmothers, sisters, teachers and friends. It was wonderful to see the students using a range of adjectives in Spanish to describe their role models and for them to reflect on the impact that these women have had in their lives.
Ms Dorr
Head of MFL
Mars Week 2022
This Monday (14/3/22) is international Mars day. The purpose of the day is to promote the upcoming launch of the European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission, which hopes to find traces of past life on the red planet.
The day will involve talks and lectures about the science and history of Mars. You can watch these talks for free by heading to this website and booking onto a talk.
In the run-up to Mars week, our students have been hard at work helping NASA train future Mars rovers.
One of the problems facing Mars rovers is that it takes between 5 and 20 minutes for signals to travel from Earth to Mars, depending on the location of the planets at the time the signal is sent. This means driving rovers manually is tricky. Imagine trying to drive a motorbike, but there’s a 20 minute delay between you deciding to do something and it actually happening.
Future Mars rovers will be designed to be autonomous. They will move by themselves, spot potential hazards and respond to changes around them, much like the driverless cars being developed by firms like Google and Tesla.
These future rovers need to be taught how to drive, and that involves feeding them mountains of data about potential hazards. Our students have been diligently analysing hundreds of images taken by existing Mars rovers and highlighting hazards such as sand dunes, cliffs, and boulders. This work will eventually be used to help train future rovers to spot hazards themselves. The project is open to the general public, so if you wish to become involved, head over to this website.
Mr. Somerville
Focus on Independent Inquiry
Recently in STEAM, Year 8 completed the Extreme Weather Challenge in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The challenge was supported by their Geographical knowledge learned in lessons about the distribution, causes and impacts of different extreme weather events around the world and how it links to global warming and climate change.
Over the last term, our Year 8 Geographers were given the opportunity to put their creativity and research skills to the test! They were given an overall inquiry question from their teacher with guided questions to help structure their work, but the choice of the extreme weather event was completely left to the students decide themselves. They had lessons which supported their knowledge and understanding of extreme weather as well as dedicated lesson time to focus on their own research with help from their teacher. It has been fantastic to see the range and wide variety of investigations that we have received. Some of the work has been truly outstanding, with some students following their own inquiry questions to guide their research which are skills we want our students to develop all the way through to I.B level. Well done Year 8!
Check out some of the well-researched video creations and screenshots below!
[[\media\Video Yoon Ji H 3_9_2022 10_31_36 AM.mp4]]This week, Key Stage 3 have been focusing on their writing skills and language expression,
Year 7 have continued their descriptive writing linked to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while also reflecting on their language accuracy by exercising the proper use of capitalisation and subject-verb agreement.
Year 8s have been working on discursive writing regarding the characters in the play The Tempest. We had a great discussion about whether the character Caliban is a victim or a villain in the play and the students shared some amazing observations!
Year 9s have been examining the conventions of diary writing by studying some factual and fictional diary examples and then writing their own creative diary entry using what they have learnt.
Another great week of learning. Well done Key Stage 3!
Key Stage 3 Art: The Global Campus Competition
Over the last few weeks, our Year 8 and 9 students have been working diligently to create an Artwork for the Global Campus Art Competition. Students were asked to choose one of the following themes:
Students researched their chosen topic and relevant artists and ideas, to support the development of their own concepts. Following their planning stage, students chose whichever media they wanted to create their final pieces. The resulting outcomes show just how thoughtful, empathetic and aware our students are of the issues prevalent in today’s society. Many of them throught of their own personal and cultural context to create these thought-provoking artworks.
Here is a selection of the artworks produced by our talented students.
/microsoftteams-image-(7)/hanoi-w.png?h=48&iar=0&w=235&rev=1d3bc711cdeb4b6282c27183e9a86f6a&hash=0DF2F1F1B8575D3D4EC23A938468783C){kind=logo}
