Over the course of this week, the primary school community has come together for ‘BYO’ coffee mornings and evenings via six online sessions. For me, it was the first opportunity to speak with groups of parents again after the start of the 2022 year and it certainly made me realise how much I miss parents coming into our school. Having said that, the online platform did enable us to connect again and it probably saved some parents a great deal of travelling time. In the future, we plan to offer both, live sessions in school (with coffee actually provided) and online sessions in the evening.

These sessions provided us with the opportunity to share some updates with the community.
We were able to confirm that we have permission from the Ministry of education to have all children in school. We do not need to rotate the attendance of the children as there is ample space available to adhere to the SOPs and Maintain social distancing. We could also share that almost all children are making their way to the school building now. We are currently registering around 96% of our children present every day.

We also appealed for parent volunteers to become Class Parents for their class. We still have some vacancies that we would love to fill.

In our last newsletter, we highlighted being awarded the ‘Recognition’ status for our IEYC and IPC implementation of the curriculum. We also announced that we are now pushing for the final part of this process leading to ‘Accredited’ status. Every three weeks we are focusing on one of the 7 criteria areas for accreditation, also called the 7 foundations of the IPC.

 1) Learner-focused personal, international and subject learning goals
     The school ensures that implementation of the IPC is always learning focused
  2)A progressive pedagogy
     The IPC is learnt and taught utilising recommended progressive pedagogies
  3)A Process to Facilitate Learning for all
     The Process to Facilitate Learning is articulated and made visible (wall display) in all learning and teaching activities in a relevant and appropriate way
   4) Globally Competent learners
        Learning and teaching provides opportunities for the development of international-mindedness and global competence
   5) Knowledge, Skills and Understanding are taught, learned and assessed differently.
        Learning and teaching activities differentiate between Knowledge, Skills and Understanding
   6) Connected Learning
        Learning and teaching enable learners to connect personal interests with meaningful contexts and real-world experiences
   7) Assessment for improving learning
       Learning and teaching engage learners in a range of strategies to assess learning

We are currently focussing on number 1: Learner-focused personal, international and subject learning goals. The school ensures that implementation of the IPC is always learning focused.

In our vision for the primary school, what we wish to achieve for all our learners, we write the following: In our school, we shape the atmosphere, culture and environment to ensure that, through well designed and well-delivered lessons, all brains are learning all the time. We strive for personal, international and academic excellence so that everyone can take their place as resilient individuals, global citizens and responsible leaders in a global community.

We use the Quantum learning system to facilitate learning in all three areas. Our curriculum covers goals for academic, personal and international learning. For the personal learning aspect, we have our Taylor’s RECIPE (Respect, Excellence, Communication, Integrity, Passion and Enjoyable Environment).

For a school community to be learning focussed, we need to have a shared understanding of how we define learning. The learning definition for our primary school is as follows:
Learning is an ongoing process that happens in the brain in which we acquire knowledge, develop skills and deepen our understanding of processes and concepts academically, personally and internationally.

Feel free to approach any member of staff if you would like any of the above clarified further! For all parents who are new to the IEYC and the IPC, we will be planning information sessions very soon, invites will go out via REMIND.

As we are now going into the Chinese New Year, we wish all of our families who celebrate CNY a wonderful time and we wish everyone happy holidays. We are looking forward to seeing all the children back on Monday the 7th of February.
Gong Xi Fa Cai!!!