Student Highlights & Success Stories (05/01 - 09/01/26)

Dear Families

A very warm welcome back and I hope you had a good holiday with your families.

We have had a great start to the term and I would like to formally welcome all our new families who have joined the school.

It is worth reminding ourselves what an incredible Term 1 we had at the school. Please click below for the highlights:

As we approach the TET season of celebration we are pleased to launch the registration process for our main TET celebration and our annual TET appeal. Please see below for more details:

On Tuesday next week we are delighted to welcome some of our alumni students to the school who will be joining a session talking about their experiences at universities across the world. Please see details of the event below:

For our school bus users we were delighted to launch a trial of a new bus app that we hope will further enhance your user experience. We look forward to receiving your feedback on the new system.

I am looking forward to a very exciting few weeks ahead. 

We would like to warmly welcome all families back to school for the weeks between Christmas and the Tet holiday. We hope you enjoyed a restful and enjoyable break with your families, and we are looking forward to an exciting and purposeful term ahead.

As always, we are pleased to involve parents in sharing their children’s learning journey. We strongly believe that when parents and schoolwork together, children feel more supported, more confident, and more motivated to succeed. There will be a range of opportunities this term for parents to engage with school life, all of which are outlined in the calendar of events below.

This term, teachers will be sharing more evidence of academic progress with parents. This may include progress in reading, maths, writing and other areas of learning, helping families to better understand how children are developing and how learning can be supported at home.

In addition, we will be increasing the number of educational trips during the second half of the school year. These experiences are designed to enrich classroom learning and provide meaningful, real-world opportunities for children. Alongside this, we will continue to explore new ways to identify and develop individual students’ talents and strengths.

Please see the list of upcoming events at the bottom of this post for further details. I look forward to welcoming you into school over the coming weeks and seeing many of you at our upcoming events.

Youth Volleyball Festival

Yesterday, BVIS proudly hosted the Youth Volleyball Festival, welcoming over 100 students from six international schools across Hanoi. The festival focused on creating a fun, inclusive, and supportive learning environment, with no scores kept and an emphasis on participation, development, and enjoyment of the game. Our students worked incredibly hard throughout the day, demonstrating excellent volleyball skills, teamwork, and sportsmanship. They also represented the school brilliantly by consistently showing our core school values both on and off the court.

Developing Independence

The children in Early Years have continued to develop their independence, building confidence in making choices and managing their learning.

Over the course of this term, I will be sharing with you examples of how children all the way from F1 to Year 6 are making academic progress and developing their talents at school.

A sweet start to learning!

This week in Year 3, we were excited to begin our new IPC topic, Chocolate. We launched the unit with an engaging entry point where Year 3 students tasted and identified the textures, flavours, and smells of different types of chocolate. The students also enjoyed making hot chocolate and researching interesting facts about chocolate, including where it comes from and how it is made. It was a fun and memorable start to our new topic, and the students showed great curiosity and enthusiasm.

Tet Shoebox Project

This week, Year 4 students officially launched the “Tết Shoebox” project – a meaningful initiative with strong humanitarian values. Beyond delivering small but heartfelt gifts to children from disadvantaged backgrounds in Hanoi, the project offers our students valuable experiences through which they can better understand and appreciate the importance of kindness, gratitude and a sense of responsibility towards the wider community.

New IPC Topic - ‘The Great, The Bold and the Brave’

This week the Year 5 children began their new IPC unit ‘The Great, The Bold and the Brave’ by learning the legend of the Trojan War, and making their own model Trojan Horses.

Academic Newsletter

Before Christmas break, we shared a copy of our Term 1 Academic Newsletter. Just in case you missed this, a copy can be found HERE.

Year 12 embracing the Vietnamese art of Calligraphy

Our Y12 students have been practicing Calligraphy writing during a lesson on the text “Chữ người tử tù” by writer Nguyễn Tuân. The lesson not only highlights the noble heroism and respect for talented individuals but also reflects the cultural beauty of the Vietnamese art of Calligraphy, cherished from the past to the present.

Global Campus Writing Competition

The deadline for entries to the Global Campus Writing Competition passed last Friday, 12 December, and we would like to say a huge congratulations to all of the students who took part. It is fantastic to see such creativity, imagination, and commitment from across the year groups.

A panel of judges will now be reviewing all submissions to select the overall winners for KS3 and KS4/5. These school winners will be announced after the Christmas break. The winning entries from each category will then be submitted to the Nord Anglia global competition, where they will be judged alongside winning internal entries from Nord Anglia schools around the world. Global winners will be announced by Global Campus in May.

Competitions like this play an important role in students’ wider development. Taking part in extracurricular opportunities helps students build confidence, resilience, creativity, and a love of learning beyond the classroom. We are incredibly proud of all students who challenged themselves by entering and look forward to celebrating their achievements soon.!

MIT Student Trip Competition 2026 – Reminder

Following our communications before the Christmas break, I would like to remind families that the MIT Student Trip Competition 2026 is now underway. This competition offers students the opportunity to apply for a place on a week-long educational visit to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston in November 2026.

Students are expected to design and present an innovative solution to a real-world problem, demonstrating creativity, independent thinking, and strong communication skills through a poster and short presentation video.
We encourage students to use the coming weeks to finalise their ideas and prepare their entries, ahead of the submission deadline on 15th January 2026.

Please note that entries cannot be finalised without the parent consent form being completed. Families should ensure that this form has been submitted in order for a student’s entry to be considered valid.

Further details, including the entry link and submission guidance, have already been shared via email but contact me if you would like this again. We look forward to receiving students’ final submissions and celebrating their innovative ideas.

Student Experience – MIT Student Trip 2025

To give families a clearer insight into what this opportunity involves, we are pleased to share a reflection from Hiep Huyen Trang (Year 12) who took part in the MIT Student Trip in November 2025. Her experience highlights the academic challenge, independence and inspiration gained from spending time on the MIT campus and engaging with students and researchers from around the world.

From the 2nd to the 8th of November, our group took part in an unforgettable trip to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Throughout the week, we were introduced to a wide range of research areas, student experiences, and hands-on activities that showed us what science and university life look like at one of the world’s leading institutions.

A large part of our visit focused on the cancer research labs at the Koch Institute. The researchers there shared the latest progress they are making in developing new ways to treat and potentially cure cancer. We learned how scientists combine engineering, biology, and technology to understand cancer cells and design more effective treatments. Hearing these explanations directly from researchers made everything feel much more real and gave us a deeper appreciation for the amount of work that goes into medical breakthroughs. For our group, this was the area where we spent the most time, and it stood out as one of the most educational parts of the whole trip.

Alongside cancer research, we were also introduced to projects involving rocketry and ancient ocean studies. The sessions on rocketry and ancient oceans were led by MIT graduate students who talked about their research. Although these sessions were more focused on explanations, like lectures, rather than hands-on activities, they gave us important background knowledge that will be useful for our own Zero Gravity project, where we had to create an experiment to carry out in a zero-gravity environment. Hearing directly from students who are working at such a high level helped us understand how scientific careers develop and how big research questions are approached.

About the Zero Gravity Project, unfortunately our team did not make it to space. Our project was on the reaction of plants in outer space, specifically the mechanism of the Venus flytrap, and how its behaviour would act differently on Earth compared to space. We built a model replicating the mechanism of the Venus flytrap, which ultimately fell apart during the Expo, but overall it was really cool to study the mechanism behind it while also recreating it. One of my teammates also worked on the sensory and electrical parts of this model, and you know what, it was VERY cool watching him connect the wires and use some complicated app that I don't know how to use. It made me want to learn about electricity so much. After this project, I really want to make an ECA where we recreate unnecessary mechanical stuff, both to learn mechanisms and just for fun.

While the academic parts of the trip were incredibly insightful, the week was also filled with memorable experiences outside the labs. One of the first things we noticed was the portion sizes of the food. It was much larger than what we were used to and definitely a fun topic of conversation during the trip. We also had the chance to go to Boda Borg, where we worked together to solve physical and mental challenges which was really fun!

The surroundings of MIT were just as exciting. The view from our hotel was beautiful, especially in the evenings when the sky turned golden behind the bridge near the Google buildings. Exploring the MIT campus through a puzzle hunt gave us a fun and interactive way to learn our way around, and we even visited Sea Grant to explore marine science research. One of the most unique moments was going on the famous Duck Boat tour, which took us around Boston both on land and in the water. Around the city, people would try everything to shout quack, quack, and we had to respond with there’s nothing to see, which is part of the Duck Boat tour culture. The tour guide was so good at speaking with humor, mixing it with the history of the city. Every single time we passed something that she thought was the highlight, which everything along the road is, she would shout and we would take a photo.

We also took part in a 2D to 3D workshop, where we learned how flat designs can be transformed into three-dimensional objects. Although I used to be an art student (but not for this type of art) I made a cactus that fell off immediately after I released it, a camel that is bigger than a building, and yeah, all in a really fast pace. Visiting the iconic MIT Dome was another highlight.

Another meaningful part of our experience was listening to MIT students talk about their daily life, how they applied, and the fun things they do around campus. They called it TIM Talks, which is funny because TIM is MIT backwards, and this is like a parody of TED Talks. Hearing their personal stories helped us understand the reality of studying at MIT and made the idea of attending a place like this feel more achievable. Well, it was my dream university anyway, so it was worth hearing. I also have some students' contacts there, just in case I need them next year. We even had time for a self-guided tour of Harvard, giving us the chance to compare two of the world’s most famous universities in one afternoon. We took a lot of photos there, with my friend group and my team, and bought so much stuff in the COOP store. I bought a lot, I mean it, a lot of books that I couldn't find in Vietnam, which made my chaperone concerned about the weight of my suitcase. Don't worry, I made it through security!

Overall, it was really, really, really good, just like the teachers were promoting at school. Both for yourself and for your CV. I gained my modelling skills through the chance to recreate things using basic equipment. I learned a lot of new theories and explored novel concepts that you would never think of. So YES, you should give it a try!

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