Students and teachers at St Andrews International School Bangkok will be wearing traditional Thai clothing for this Thursday’s Loy Krathong celebration...We’re down to the final round of Word Mania...Thanks to vaccinations last week we can expect a much lighter flu season in the upcoming year...Find out the steps being taken to deal with the recent uptick in air pollution...STEPS is offering a unique way to get the Christmas season rolling.
First a reminder that this year children and teachers will be once again dressing up in Thai Traditional Costumes to celebrate Loy Krathong together. The celebration will be held on Thursday 22 November. (Suitable costumes are available cheaply at the local markets.)
Our celebrations will begin with two assemblies in Primary School:
Our youngest students will be learning about Loy Krathong in their lessons this week and making Krathongs with their parents - more details will be sent to you by the individual class teachers.
The following message is from Khun Toon who is helping to coordinate the assemblies:
On behalf of the Thai Dance Club, I would like to invite you to watch the Thai performance for St Andrews International School Bangkok’s Loy Krathong Assembly. This year, we proudly present “The Khon Performance”: Episode of Jong Thanon (Building the Road).
The Khon Performance is a high class performance that is performed only on special occasions. Moreover, this is the first time ever for St Andrews’ students to be Khon performers so please to come along and support your child.
This performance will take place on Thursday 22 November in the assemblies at 8.30 - 9.00 and again from 9.15 - 9.45 a.m. in the Sports Hall.
Congratulations to EVERY year group in Primary, as they have all made it to the final round of Word Mania. This is a super achievement, and the children should be proud of themselves. When I have spoken to students and teachers about this competition, they have said how much fun it has been, which is great to hear. It should really be helping to improve the children's literacy skills too. The final round continues until Friday 23 November, so please encourage your child to play Word Mania as much as possible.
On Friday afternoon we welcomed Samitivej Hospital into school as we held the second of our Annual Influenza Vaccination Drives. Children of all ages, along with parents, teachers and helpers came along, and in the end there were around 250 people vaccinated. Hopefully this will help to combat the severity of the flu season.
Thank you to all the teachers who supported the reading meeting last week and to all the parents who came along to find out more about how the teaching of reading is approached in FS3, Year 1 and Year 2. There was a good turn out and hopefully new parents, in particular, took away some advice on how to support their children at home.
Many of you will be aware that the air pollution in Bangkok rose last week and, like us, have concerns about how this will impact the health and education of the children. Since the problems we had in the city last year we have added additional Filtrete 3M filter systems to all of the aircon units in school and have also installed 6 of our own air quality monitors across the campus in order to check hour-by-hour the exact pollution levels on our Primary site - which are often very different to the general averages from across the city.
When these levels are high we adapt our schedule for the day, maybe restricting younger students to inside areas, reducing play times, or having indoor play times on particularly bad days, changing PE venues or activities, cancelling swimming etc.
The Vocational Training Centre STEPS, who run our wonderful Primary Cafe, is offering a different way for you and your family to start getting into the Christmas spirit. Join them on the next 4 Saturday mornings to Christmas Sing and Sign. No experience necessary and it is completely free of charge.
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22 November |
8.30am Loy Krathong Assembly for Year 1-3 9.15am Loy Krathong Assembly for Year 4-6 |
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4 December 8.30 a.m. |
FS3 Christmas Show |
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6 December 8.30 a.m. |
FS1/FS2 Christmas Show |
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6 December 1.00 p.m. |
Y2 Show - 1st Performance (Tickets only) |
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7 December 8.30 a.m. |
Y2 Show - 2nd Performance (Tickets only) |
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7 December 1.00 p.m. |
Y2 Show - 3rd Performance (Tickets only) |
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11 December 8.30 a.m. |
Y1 Christmas Celebration in the Quad |
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12 December |
Christmas Fair and Concerts Y3 & Y4 Concert 1.00 p.m. Christmas Fair 2.30 p.m. - 4.00 p.m. Y5 & Y6 Concert 4.00 p.m. |
With the goal of providing meaningful help to the flood victims in the northern regions of Thailand, our entire community at St Andrews Bangkok came together to raise funds and donations for the affected families. In the span of a few short weeks, added to donations of food and clothing, we managed to raise an astounding total of 386,676.50 THB in donation funds. To all students, teachers, parents, and staff who participated in our efforts and contributed to this cause—thank you!
Last Friday, the STA Primary campus was transformed into a celebration of all things maths! The day was packed with engaging, hands-on activities across all year groups, making maths truly come alive for our students.
Senior student at St Andrews Bangkok, Pun (Year 13), devises an innovative solution for effective waste management. Recently, he completed an ambitious project: an AI-powered waste sorting system. After much research and testing, he got the system to work and put the model to use in one of our rooms at school!
Physics students from St Andrews Bangkok made quite an impression at the Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition and won the Best Outreach Award for their brilliant work. BL4S is a prestigious global physics contest organised by CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland) and DESY (the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany), inviting High School students worldwide to propose detailed experiments to be conducted at a particle accelerator beamline. While our students did not win the main prize of conducting their experiment in Geneva, they still stood out and were recognised from an entry of over 400 teams.
