Loy Krathong was a sight to behold for the community. Our Marlins and Flames got stuck into an action-packed weekend of sport. This week, we have a performing arts extravaganza, special Juilliard virtual visitors and a PTG coffee morning in Primary School.
Last Friday’s Loy Krathong Festival at both school campuses were really wonderful events. Thank you to our School Director Khru Noke and the Thai team for all the hard work they put into setting up the assemblies and activities in school. In fact, it was truly a sight to behold how everyone from across the community dressed up in traditional Thai clothing and participated in the festivities at both Primary and High School. It is my hope that the day's events inspired our students, teachers and staff to join with their families in the many Loy Krathong festivals happening across Bangkok and the country on Saturday.
Last weekend was also an incredibly busy weekend for our sports teams. Considering what’s going on in many other countries around the world, we are so wonderfully fortunate that our students and coaches have so many opportunities to participate in the competitions and tournaments across the city. BISAC tournaments called upon our U13 and U15 boys and girls Basketball teams, U15 boys and girls tennis team, JV girls and boys Volleyball teams, U15 rugby team and the JV boys and girls football teams to show what they could do against top notch competition in Bangkok. If you want to see how our teams performed, please check out the Primary and High School Sports sections of the newsletter. Let’s all catch our collective breaths and get ready for next weekend’s TISAC tournaments, kicking off with the U13 girls and boys basketball tournaments.
Performing Arts extravaganza
This Monday there will be an IB Music Recital which I am very much looking forward to. Our Year 13 IB Music students will perform examination pieces to a live audience. Witnessing how well these young musicians perform is nothing short of inspirational. Later in the week, we also have the House Drama Competition which promises to be an entertaining display of theatre talent. Groups of High School students from our four Houses - Akha, Yao, Lahu and Karen - will perform short plays they have written and produced. In past years, these high quality performances have been superb, and not to mention great fun to watch. The whole competition showcases what a talented group of young people we have and is a testament to how the drama curriculum imbues our students with the confidence and skills they need to bring to life such imaginative original work.
St Andrews International School Bangkok is very fortunate to have a long-standing working relationship with the fantastic Juilliard School of Performing Arts in New York City through our affiliation with Nord Anglia Education. Even though the present conditions for international travel are tenuous at best, the online links between Juilliard and our Creative and Performing Arts Faculty remain very strong. Juilliard specialists and instructors have been working closely with our teachers in the High School Drama Faculty as well as with Primary’s Drama and Dance coordinators.
Thanks to this collaboration, over the next few weeks, Juilliard Specialists will be delivering virtual workshops to students in ECA lessons and classes, as well as teacher CPD programmes across Primary and High School. We have also been recording a selection of lessons that will be shared with our Juilliard Specialists and reflected upon with our teaching teams. It goes without saying that our school is very excited to welcome this Team back to St Andrews.
Our School Counsellors Ms Amy and Ms Twinkle organised a very successful workshop on social media at High School last week. Thank you to all the High School parents who attended this event. It was great to have an in-person session for our parents on campus. However, if you were not able to attend or would like to review what was discussed, the presentation entitled STA Time to Talk can be found on Moodle.
There will also be an in-depth workshop on Social Media for Primary School on the 23rd November at 8.15am. During this session, there will also be an opportunity to contribute to a survey to help decide future workshop topics for the Primary School community next term. Please keep an eye out for posts providing further details.
PTG Coffee Morning - “Wellbeing for Primary Students”
On Friday 6th November at 8.15, you are invited to attend an informal Coffee Morning arranged by the PTG and our School Counselling Team. The theme of this coffee morning will be “Wellbeing for Primary School Students”. We are all facing challenges from the impact of COVID, and this session promises to provide information on all the school resources available to support our children.
Our very own School Counsellors will be facilitating the session, and together we will be looking at the preventive curriculum and framework of support our children can rely on to carry them through the ups and downs of growing up. Areas to be examined include the approach and philosophy of tackling bullying, as well as how to help our students to be healthy digital citizens. The counsellors will also explain the emotional support services available for our STA community.
With the recent half term and this last long weekend holiday, it's likely that many families in our community were able to get away for at least a few days outside of Bangkok, making the most what Thailand has to offer. In order to have the most up to date information regarding everyone's health and travel, we request that everyone takes a moment to update the Health and Travel Declaration Form found on your parent Moodle page.
This information will only be used by the Ministry of Public Health should an outbreak of Coronavirus occur within our school community. The details of where individual families may have travelled will help the MoPH screen, track and trace transmission of COVID-19 to ensure it is fully controlled and isolated.
While Thailand's coronavirus cases remain low it is essential that we as a community stay vigilant. Everyone who comes onto the school sites must wear an appropriate face mask or face shield. Temperature screening will continue to take place at the entries to both of our school campuses, and anyone presenting with a high temperature will be taken to School Nurse for further observation before going home. Please do not let your children come to school if they have fever, coughs or colds.
Everyone should be able to swim and take part in all school activities unless they have a doctor’s certificate stating clear and precise reasons why this should not be the case.
Vaccination Programme
For a number of years, we have been hosting a Flu Vaccination Programme for our school community. Last year, we were pleased to report that over 500 people in our school community received the flu vaccination in school- 221 STA staff and 228 students and parents.
This year’s Flu Vaccination Programme will be held on Friday 27th November between 1 pm and 4 pm in the Drama Studio at the Primary School. The programme, in collaboration with Samitivej Hospital, will be open to all members of the family at a price of 590 baht per shot.
How to register
The programme is popular, and this year we anticipate a tremendous turnout. To make sure we have ordered enough vaccines, we ask that you complete the form below to register. Please note that one form must be completed for each person who is to receive the vaccine.
With parental consent, High School students may take the shuttle bus over to Primary at 2.30pm to receive their vaccination independently.
Our school will follow the recently updated school calendar that has been shared with our school community and is available on our school website. We realise the Government has recently brought in some additional holidays in November and altered holiday dates in December. However, St Andrews will not be adding any additional holidays or making any further changes to the calendar.
For your convenience, you can find the updated school calendar for 2020-2021 here.
For parents with enquiries about Primary School, please contact officeps@standrews.ac.th or Tel: +66 2 381-2387-8.
For parents with enquiries about High School, please contact officehs@standrews.ac.th or Tel: +66 2 056-9555.
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.
