Secondary School Updates (17 June 2022)

Key Dates | Learning Showcase

Weekly update from Head of Secondary

Dear Parents,

As we enter the final week of school, I am delighted to update the community on the outstanding university offers our Year 13s have received so far this year.  Many of them are unconditional and some come with scholarships. We are enormously proud of the achievements of our students this year in extraordinary conditions. There are more offers and acceptances to come over the coming months, about which we will keep you updated. 

You will notice that we have included the QS University Rankings besides each college or university. While we use this as a very rough guide of quality, the ranking is not the be-all-and-end-of-all for students when choosing a destination. Our focus is on best-fit for the students’ personal strengths and character. 

Overall we have: 

• 139 offers 

• 30% in the Top 50  

• 42% in the Top 100 universities in the world 

• 50% of offers are from North America 

• 30% from the UK 

• 10% from Australia 

Chris Newman 

Head of Secondary

Key Dates

• Friday 24 June: Final Day of the School Year 

Students are dismissed from 12:30 PM.

Learning Showcase

Art | MFL | English

Art

Congratulations to our Year 8 and 9 Art students who have worked tirelessly this term to develop these high-quality final outcomes. 

Year 8 focused on the theme of ‘Portraiture’ and were inspired by the work of Pablo Picasso and Alvaro Hidalgo, while Year 9 explored the theme of ‘A crowded place’ to develop these compositions. 

We in the Art department are so proud of their diligence over the last term and have exhibited their work in the school to celebrate their successes.  

MFL

Over the last few weeks, our MFL students in Years 7, 8 and 9 have been delving into the culture of the French and Spanish speaking worlds! It is so important for our students to learn about the different cultural aspects, and for them to be able to research information accurately and reliably. This has really helped them to further develop their Learner Attribute of ‘Inquiring’.  

To learn which websites to use and how to cite references properly, we enlisted the help of Mrs Hall, our teacher-librarian at BIS Hanoi. She came to the theatre and spoke to each year group, building on their prior knowledge of researching and referencing. Mrs Hall spoke about using Get Epic, Britannica Kids and Kiddle to find accurate and reliable sources. The students enjoyed seeing how sites they use for other subjects can also help them with their understanding in MFL.

Each student selected a topic that interested them and has been researching and writing an article which will be published in our first edition of the BIS MFL Magazine at the start of next year. The edition is set to be incredibly interesting with a huge range of different topics! Our students have chosen a wide range of topics that link to many of their other subjects, such as history, art, geography, sport and even mathematics!  

Examples of French articles include: 

• Senegalese food 
• Louis Vuitton 
• The French football team  
• French numbers and how they work 
• Le Tour de France  

Examples of Spanish articles include: 

• Colombian cultural references in the film Encanto 
• The heyday of Barcelona FC  
• The Spanish Empire 
• How to make Paella 
• Flamenco fashion  
• Hispanic migration to the USA 

We are so looking forward to the final edition where the students will learn lots about the culture of the different languages. The MFL department would like to thank our KS3 students for the hard work they have put into their articles and Mrs Hall for her collaboration with this project.  

MFL Department 

English

As we near the end of the school year, the students have spent this week reflecting on past writing tasks and language accuracy. 

Year 7 have been working on frequent grammar errors and practicing peer correction using our reflection code. It was a lot of fun playing “teacher” for an hour and the students enjoyed helping each other with their work.

Year 8s have spent the last few lessons practicing PEE paragraphs in preparation for their final writing task. They have enjoyed digging deep into the meaning of the poem they are studying and this week we had some group analysis where all the students had the opportunity to shine. 

Year 9s completed their last piece of writing and had time to reflect on the analysis skills using Shakespeare’s classic Romeo and Juliet. We took a look at lots of great writing and set some targets for the future to us of what needs to be improved. 

Michael Tchakov 

English Teacher