Parent Update - 20 November 2015

Dear Parents, 

Please see below our calendar of upcoming events, and do remember to keep checking your child’s year group pages on Firefly and our Important Dates Calendar.

SPORTS DAY – Kowloon Bay Sports Ground
The excitement is building as we get ready for our all-school Sports Day next Friday. You will have received two letters: one about transport arrangements and the other about what to wear/things not to forget. I’m sure that you’ve all read them, but I am attaching them again … just in case! The most important thing is to please let your teacher and our bus team know how your child will be getting to/leaving the Sports Ground, if they are not taking their bus as usual.

ACADEMIC YEAR – 2016/2017
Our calendar of the next academic year has now been approved. Please see attached and we’ll be uploading it to the School Calendar section of our website (click on School Life).

SCHOOL PHOTOS
It was a mammoth project to photograph every child, every sibling group and every class group today for our school photographs. A huge thanks to our Marketing & Communications Manager, Carol Wong, who organised and oversaw the whole day, ably supported by Debbie Stephen and Mandy Leung armed with combs and spare uniform items! We will share all the details of how to order your photos next week.

If your child was absent today, you may contact Helen Yu (2880 5000 or yu@schoolmaster.hk) for an appointment on Sunday 13 December from 10am to 3pm.

PUPIL PROGRESS REVIEW
Next week all primary class teachers will be meeting with our Head of Curriculum, Miss Byrne, for our ‘Pupil Progress Reviews.’  Teachers will discuss the progress made by each child this year and track this to ensure it is continuing from last year. We use this information to plan how better to support and extend each child. This process happens three times a year and is one of the ways we set aspirational targets and ensure progress for all children.  

PRIMARY ASSEMBLY – Click here for photos
Class 3E (Miss Batiste's class) led assembly yesterday and gave a fascinating insight into the Greeks. Thank you goes to Miss Batiste and her class.

Congratulations goes to our Stars of the Week chosen by teachers for being the most ambitious in their learning. As a school we encourage our pupils to "Be Ambitious" about what they want to achieve for themselves.

Year 1: Parth Tipnis, Lewis Wong, Qiselle Lam, Max Foo, Greg Ng
Year 2: Sofia Verga, Rita Zhan, Ashley Lam, Kees Espeskog, Howard Tan
Year 3:  Eva Simmonds, Audrey Wong, Daniel Ng, Danny Brunner, Ashwin Baidwan
Year 4: Luca Lalos Cavanagh, Elizabeth Clough, Adrian Li, Ayla Heasman
Year 5: Chloe Skovgaard, Sherise Cheung, Beatrice Leenders, Jillian Ng
Year 6: Jotaro Kunitomo, Steven Wu, Annabel Sanderson

SECONDARY ASSEMBLY
Our Highly Commended Certificates recognised achievement and effort in History today. Congratulations to the following students who continued to take an ambitious approach to their studies:
Year 7: Elena Gonzalez, Savannah Berry
Year 8: Vivian Wu, Leo Zhang

Our PE Department then joined our Secondary Assembly today to talk about the upcoming Sports Day and the roles that our Years 7 and 8 would take in being sports leaders and ambassadors. Mr Pate and Miss Kenny reinforced the sporting values that our school encourages, and how our older students could act as role models to the Primary students. We finished with a moving talk from Mr Boyd, who spoke about the tragic events of the week before in Paris, and how we need to look for the good and compassion that has come out of these terrorist acts.

GLOBAL CAMPUS – Click here for the presentation

In this week’s Parent Workshop, Mr Robinson spoke to parents with children in years 4 to 8 about the wide range of activities taking place on the Global Campus (GC), including the GC Library Online and our GC Cinema. These projects encourage your child to read and learn, whether at school or at home. Please take the time to talk to your students about how they can get more involved in our Global Campus. It’s such an exciting way to expand our horizons across the 42 schools and 32,000 students in our Nord Anglia family of schools. If you have any questions, about our Global Campus, please contact David.Robinson@nais.hk

APPROVAL AS A GCSE SCHOOL – Click here for academic results from across our Nord Anglia schools

This week we received our approval as a Cambridge GCSE school. This, along with our new extension at the back of the school, is what we need to support and motivate our students to success in their GCSEs. Our current year 8s can look forward to choosing their core and option subjects for their GCSEs around this time next year. Exciting! In the meantime, you may wish to see how well students in our other schools are doing. We have just released the highlights of exam results across our Nord Anglia schools. We are particularly delighted to see that so many of our students are moving on to the world’s top universities.

INTER-HOUSE CHRISTMAS CARD COMPETITION

It’s that time of the year again! Starting today, all classes will spend at least one art lesson designing and creating a Christmas card for the Art inter-House competition. Children from years 4 upwards will be able to take their designs home to work on them, if they wish. All entries must be returned to the Art department by Monday 30th November at 3.30pm. Our Heads of House will then select two winners from each House in two categories: Y1-Y4 & Y5-Y8.

YEAR 8 SPANISH COOKERY / CULTURE WORKSHOP – Click here for photos

Our Year 8s had an interesting day with our Head of Modern Foreign Languages, Mr Lopes at the Spanish Chamber of Commerce and the Hong Kong Institute of Languages. They particularly enjoyed cooking some traditional Spanish dishes (while speaking Spanish!) including some Sangria (non-alcoholic, of course!).

NAIS FOOTBALL KNIGHTS – Click here for photos
Well done to our Year 5/6 Football Knights who fought hard against several international schools earlier this week at DBIS. They won and lost some games - but it's all about improving their game and learning from the experience. Go Knights!

43^RD OPEN DANCE CONTEST – Click here
Sophia Xu, Jessie Dong (Year 3) and Cloris Zhao (Year 2) proudly represented their school, taking home a silver award, in the Open Dance Contest. Great job girls!

Finally, good luck to our Under 12s Girls Basketball Team who will be playing at HKIS tomorrow. As well as playing the hosts, they’ll also be making us proud playing against Canadian International and Hong Kong Academy. We know that you’ll all make us proud: Sissi Yu, Simone Skovgaard, Annabel Sanderson, Sunny Donat, Megu Tanaka, Nina Finch, Nicole Chan, Gigi Liu, Elena Gonzalez and Deborah Gerelchimeg.

Have a wonderful weekend.