Parent Update - 23 January 2015

Dear Parents,

Another busy period ahead, so please take note of the important dates below. We’re creating a “stick on the fridge” list of ‘Important Dates & Information’ for the rest of the year, so you’ll be able to plan ahead more easily. This will come to you in next week’s Parent Update.

DATES TO REMEMBER:

26 Jan – School Lunches - If you’re paying for lunches on a monthly basis, please remember to fill in the form and return with the cheque. Click here for the February menu.

28 & 29 Jan – Kids Fest School Trip for Year 2s: “The Princess and the Pea”. Please email your class teacher for any updates.

29 Jan – 8.30am to 9am – Parent Workshop: “Learning Through Play in Key Stage 1 (Years 1 & 2)”. Led by Mrs Patsy Morgan. Please email ricky.auyeung@nais.hk to reserve a place.

29 Jan – PTA Quiz Night: 7pm for a 7.30pm start. Don’t worry if you don’t have a team. Come along and we’ll make up the teams on the night. More than 80 parents and teachers have already signed up!

4 Feb – Kids Fest School Trip for Year 1s: “The Tiger who Came to Tea”. Please email your class teacher for any updates.

5 Feb – 8.15am to 9am – We’ve added a new Parent Workshop to our regular calendar. This extended session will be led by our Curriculum Coordinator, Katie Byrne, and will give a practical overview of “How we assess your child’s progress”. Please email ricky.auyeung@nais.hk to reserve a place.

5 Feb – PTA Valentine’s Disco – A lovely excuse for the children, or all ages, to relax and let their hair down! If you’ve not yet replied, please try and bring in your form and $20 on Monday morning. It’s going to be a fun afternoon.

9 March – Mid-Year Academic Reports sent home.

18/19 March – Parent-Teacher Conferences (3.30pm to 6.00pm). Details to follow.

And now … the rest of the news, in no particular order!

STAR OF THE WEEK - GEOGRAPHY

This week in our regular Friday Whole School Assembly we celebrated our Stars of the Week in Geography. A huge congratulations to all the pupils who showed perseverance and commitment in their geography projects:

Year 1s: David Du, Jerry Tang, Leo Charlier, Louis Sabourin, Hugo Cardonnel

Year 2s: Stephanie Chan, Yash Madnani, Ilaria Heasman, Tavleen Sahi, Audrey Wong

Year 3s: Tamanisa McCarthy, Vivek Wilson, Thomas Incledon, Tony Zhang

Year 4: Ryan Chung, Lune Delettre-Gros, Connor Mair, Ihsan Mithani

Year 5: Sofia Gonzalez, Boris Ho, Charis Wong

Year 6: Deborah Gerelchimeg, Daniel Gao

Year 7: Vivian Wu, Marcus Wong

KIDS FEST – Our Year 3s meeting the Dinosaurs!

Our Year 3s had an amazing time getting up close to some incredibly life-like dinosaur puppets at their Kids Fest school trip. You can see some lovely photos on our Facebook page, as well as a “first-hand” report on the day from Sukshaa Kshirsagar, who had the pleasure of Kids Fest on her first day at NAIS!

NAIS HIKING GROUPS

This time of the year is absolutely perfect for hiking and we’ve been delighted by the response that we’ve had from our families wanting to get involved in some NAIS hikes. Our first hike is tomorrow morning, and we have more than 20 parents and children setting off for a very gentle 5.5km hike. We also have another group of regular Monday morning hikers, who are a little more serious I think! Either way, please check our NAIS Parent Blog for details: http://naisparents.blogspot.hk/

INTER-SCHOOL SPORTS COMPETITIONS

We will be sending teams to two up-coming inter-school events in Gymnastics and Fencing being held by the Hong Kong Schools Sports Federation. If your child would like to get involved in either of these events, please email our Head of PE, Mr Pate at: martin.pate@nais.hk Mr Pate will be updating you on more inter-school sporting events very soon.

COBIS GAMES UPDATE

Our PE Team has been running some extra trails for our swimming, football and athletics team for the COBIS Games, to allow the new children that joined the school this term to get involved. Mr Pate will be sharing more details on the teams in early February.

HOUSE T-SHIRTS

All our pupils are proud members of one of our Houses: Balmoral, Caernarfon, Sandringham or Windsor. Now, adding to our House Badges, you can have a House T-shirt. These are now available at the Aston Wilson uniform shop and children can show their support for their House by wearing them for House events and competitions. We’ll be letting you know when they can wear their House t-shirts (if they’ve not already let you know first!).

CLIVE LEACH – PARENT WORKSHOPS & TEACHER TRAINING

It was a real pleasure to have Clive Leach with us for two days this week. It was wonderful to see 150 parents joining us for a two-hour workshop on Wednesday, focusing on how we can develop Resilient & Resourceful Children. We all came out, the mums in the Admissions & Marketing Team too (!), feeling fired up to set goals for ourselves and our families.

Our secondary school students enjoyed their own session with Mr Leach, who reported back that they had had a really interesting and mature discussion about “understanding when we are at our best” and developing goals and strategies to achieve this.

For our teachers, we also had workshops over the two days with the focus on effective coaching, both within the teams in our schools but also between teachers and pupils.

MEET OUR TEACHERS – Mr Robinson, Global Classroom Leader

Finally, we have such a lot of amazing talent in the school, but they are often so busy that we don’t get much time to ask them to share their expertise and interests with us all. We’d like to change that! So, from today we’ll be adding (hopefully) weekly interviews/Q&As. Our first interview is with David Robinson, our Global Classroom Leader. Mr Robinson is incredibly passionate about the benefits that our Global Classroom – comprising 31 Nord Anglia schools – bring to all our pupils. Please click here to enjoy our first “Meet our Teachers” interview. We welcome your feedback on who you’d like to hear from next. I may ask some of our budding journalists and bloggers in Secondary School students to conduct some of the interviews!

Please keep letting us know how you and your children are enjoying NAIS (or if there are aspects where you want changes). We do welcome your feedback and hope that you feel that you can always send an email, pick up the phone or knock on our door.