Weekly Highlights 26/05/2023

Mr. Simon Higham, Principal

Dear Parents

Welcome to another edition of the Weekly Highlights that showcases the many varied opportunities and successes which take place each week across our BVIS community.

Thank you for engaging and connecting!

Learn Phonics with Fred the Frog

It was extremely rewarding to meet with some of our youngest students this week who came over to my office to let me know how proud they were of their recent work when practicing their reading and writing.

Accompanying our young, enthusiastic learners was their little friend, Fred the frog.

Fred is an adorable friend of our EYFS children, as well as an enthusiastic assistant to the teachers during bilingual phonics lessons. Learn more about how he helps to support our unique bilingual phonics programme and our emergent readers and writers in this post.

Student Success Stories  

Our BVIS students continue to be amazing and to showcase their incredible achievements, I invite you to read about the individual success story of Nam Phương, by clicking on this link.

Nam Phương has a passion for studying Chemistry, which will continue to be her academic focus next year at BVIS, alongside Maths and Biology. 

BVIS Horticulture club and Eco-club collaborate to fundraise for our Global Garden Project

Our Global Garden is a project run by the Horticulture Club and Eco-club students at BVIS. It encourages eco-friendly thinking, problem solving, financial awareness and a commitment to making the world a greener place. 

Students meet at the club twice a week to formulate their ongoing strategy, maintain the area, discuss how they can recycle, reuse and regenerate and of course, care for the plants.

Read more about their work and the recent ‘flash sale’ that they organised in this post from our school website.

BVIS Summer School

Our Summer programme takes place over three weeks from 26^th June to 14^th July 2023. Children from 2 to 13 years old can attend with a focus around four key areas of learning: 

1. Academic development 
2. English development  
3. Development of key skills 
4. Promotion of a healthy lifestyle  

Currently, places are limited so don’t delay in registering your son / daughter to secure their place.

Click here for full details and the registration form. 

2023 – 2024 Academic Calendars  

To help you to prepare for the final few weeks of this academic year and look forward to next year, please find below the links to our academic calendars:

2022 - 2023

2023 - 2024

We hope you find these useful.

Engage and Connect at Home

Following on from our successful positive parenting workshops for Lower Primary parents this week, I encourage you to take time to engage and connect with your child(ren) at home. This weekend, ask them the following 4 questions:

1. What do you do best at school and what are the reasons for this?
2. What is one thing that you most need to improve upon and how are you going to achieve this?
3. How have you shown at least 2 of our 6 core values this week? (integrity, respect, care, enquiry, reflection and perseverance)
4. Which core values will you focus upon next week and what will you do to achieve this?

As always, I look forward to hearing about the responses by either email or catching up with me on the gate at drop off or pick up time.

Contact Us

For all enquiries regarding your child’s BVIS education, use the contact details below:

On behalf of everyone at BVIS, I wish you a very family-orientated and enjoyable weekend ahead.

Mrs Mary McAloon, Head of Primary

Staying Safe Online

It was wonderful to welcome a number of primary parents to our final workshop of the year about online safety.  Being such a prominent element of our daily lives, it is imperative that we share how as adults we can support our children to make the right choices to stay safe online and how we can use the tools available to create restrictions on devices that help create the safest possible online environment.  

Ms Jessica Ashforth, our ICT & Computing teacher, and Ms An Khuu, our ICT specialist Teaching Assistant, shared a number of common top tips as reminders of our duty of care as adults.  As an example, there are virtually no platforms that are suggested as suitable for primary children to use for communication with others online.

Monitoring children’s use of their devices is the number one top tip and in addition, having strict boundaries of when and where they can be used in the home will help to ensure they stay safe online.

If you missed this opportunity to discuss the subject, our team is always available to advise parents. Ms Jessica and Ms An are available most days in their ICT classroom (Room 111) at the end of the school day.  Parents also have the option of messaging Ms Jessica directly through ClassDojo – just look for “Ms Jessica Ashforth”.

Wearing your playful hat

The final positive parenting workshop theme of the year took a more practical approach this week.  With the summer holidays on the horizon, it was a perfect opportunity for parents to practice being creative and planning engaging and meaningful activities for their children during the time away from the daily routines of school. 
 
Parents met Mr Luke Curran, our Head of Safeguarding, Welfare and Guidance and Ms Khuyen Tran our Assistant Headteacher, in the STEAM room where there is access to resources and materials suitable for fun and practical activities.  

The key takeaway for parents was that children love to learn through creative and hands-on activities and with some planning, this can be achieved at home during holiday times.  We look forward to hearing from parents and children about their summer holiday activities; please do share these on Class Dojo.

SISAC City Championships – U11 Girls Basketball

The U11 girls basketball season came to a close this week, finishing with their annual SISAC Basketball City Championships.  Six schools competed in a fantastic competition to end the season. The Bulldogs started very strong and were extremely dominant winning all their group stage games comfortably.

The girls made it to the final!  They gave everything they had in the final match and finished as the runner-up of the tournament.  

This was a great achievement for our girls’ basketball players and a very positive end to the season.
 
Go Bulldogs!

Turn Back Time

On Friday last week, 4 of our primary students joined together with 3 secondary students and performed on stage in the musical concert ‘Turn Back Time’.  This concert was the first collaborative event with the International Choir & Orchestra (ICO) of HCMC and the Vietnam Schools Association for Arts and Performance (VSAAP) and has helped to showcase the intentions of both organisations to promote music-making within the city. It was also an opportunity for students from different international schools to work together and make music. We hope to work closely with this organisation in the future to provide further collaborative opportunities.  

We are incredibly proud of our students for showing exemplary behaviour and a positive attitude towards the whole experience.  Their singing in the choir was excellent and made the audience applaud with excitement and appreciation.  Congratulations to all our BVIS choir singers, the concert was outstanding, and your contributions were invaluable.

Upcoming Events

• 31/05/23 @ 08:40 – Positive Parenting Workshop 6 for Upper Primary: Wearing your playful hat
  
  
• 01/06/23 – Children’s Day celebrations in school (children are invited to wear their own clothes to celebrate)
  
  
• 15/06/23 @ 14:00 – EYFS Parent meeting for the upcoming new academic year

• 15/06/23 – Whole School Sports Awards

• 20/06/23 – Y6 Celebration Evening for Y6 students and families

Mr Toby Bate, Head of Secondary

Reading Seminar

It was a pleasure to welcome parents to the annual Secondary Reading Session on Friday 19^th May. The aim of the session was to show how much we love and value reading at BVIS and to encourage all parents to read as much as possible with their children. 

Reading often and reading good quality books and texts has a really positive impact on academic outcomes and student wellbeing – evidence even strongly suggests it’s connected to higher incomes in future careers! 

Thank you to all the parents who attended the session; it was terrific to see you and we hope to see you again soon!

Junior UKMT Challenge

Every year our students compete in the UKMT Maths Challenge alongside thousands of students across the world. This is designed to assess their problem-solving and Mathematical reasoning skills across a number of challenging questions. 

We are very proud this year to announce our five gold winners who placed in the top 8% of students worldwide!

Gold Award Winners

• My Van (Cloudie) – 8V
• Tuan Long – 8I
• Duy Vu Jayden – 8V
• Nguyen Anh (Tony) – 7S
• Minh Khue (Sumi) – 7I

A special mention for Tony and Jayden who were the top students in Year 7 and Year 8 respectfully.

Congratulations to all our winners and we are already looking forward to next year’s challenge.

Secondary Production 2023-24

This week saw the launch of the main secondary production which next academic year will be...

Featuring several musical hits from the band ABBA, this show has been described as a “Guaranteed get-happy hit” and will allow our students to take on a variety of different roles.

The Creative Arts department is now actively recruiting singers, dancers, actors, musicians and members of the off-stage team. 

This is a fantastic opportunity to be involved in a large-scale production, develop your creative skills and have a lot of fun at the same time. Auditions will take place on Monday 5^th and Tuesday 6^th of June with the cast list announced on the 12^th. Students can sign up by joining the Microsoft Team or by speaking to Ms Amos or Ms Lopez.

Student Champion of the week

This week’s Champion is....

Phuong Anh from 10V! Congratulations to her!

Secondary Champion Tutor Group of the Week

This week’s highest scoring tutor group was...



Who collectively scored a huge 111 Housepoints . Well done to everyone in 7S!

First News

Congratulations to Max in 8I who is the First News champion again! Congratulations also go to Tran Tuyet Anh who was the First News champion in Year 7.

Upcoming Events  

• Ongoing: IGCSE; AS/A level exams
  
  
• 9^th June: Season 3 clubs end
  
  
• 13 – 16^th June: Transition week for year 4,5,6
  
  
• 12 – 16^th June: Science Week
  
  
• 17^th June: Year 13 Graduation Ceremony
  
  
• 19^th June: Debate Day
  
  
• 23^rd June 11:30 am: Term 3 ends

Safeguarding and Child Protection

The health, safety and wellbeing of our students remains the number one priority at BVIS HCMC.

Should you have a concern for the welfare of any child in our school, please refer to our Safeguarding poster below: