Welcome (back)I hope everyone had a wonderful mid-term break and is ready for the exciting events coming up over the next few weeks. This week the BSQ community takes another exciting and important step towards our school life reaching pre-pandemic operations as we welcome back the final phase of students to the campus. I cannot wait to see everyone together again. Of course, this has only been possible because of a phenomenal act of teamwork throughout this school year with parents, students and all staff members working together to ensure that we are able to reach this point. We will continue to observe our protocols and keep everyone safe so that learning and living together remains uninterrupted. In the meantime, we will also be working on updating our PICE so that we can change some other elements of those protocols to further open up opportunities for living and learning together. Year 13. I want to take this opportunity to congratulate the Year 13 class of 2022 for the excellent TOK (Theory of Knowledge) exhibition I opened on October 27th. What a wonderful display, or curiosity, intellect and hard work. There will be a full report elsewhere in the newsletter but for now – outstanding! Intervalles. Please take into consideration the current works in Intervalles (Mondays to Saturdays from 9AM-4PM and from 9PM – 2AM) and plan ahead. We will open the drive through 5 minutes earlier each morning to help with the traffic. Please drive forward as far as you can once you are in the school to support the families behind you. Finally, please consider using the school transport service as a stress/free alternative! Bonfire Spirit Night We are all getting excited about the return of this event at the weekend. Amazing work has been done by our Year 12 and Year 13 CAS teams, Ms Montenegro and the PA to make sure it goes with a bang! Whilst not everyone can attend this year, we will make sure there are lots of photographs to celebrate the spooky happenings. My thanks to the class representatives for agreeing to help. BSL This week 2 of our Y9 students will be demonstrating a new sign: social distancing, using BSL. Please watch this brilliant video: Ms. Hayley Dean, KS2 Lead Dates for your Diary As always please check this section carefully and ensure that you have all the details in your calendars.
Emma Newman Principal Being BSQ – Primary Update Welcome back to Term 2 here at The British School Quito – I hope you and your family all had a relaxing break. We are delighted to welcome back all of our students to the BSQ campus. This term is quite short, with six weeks before the Christmas break, so lots of great learning opportunities to share with the students. There are three dates that I would like you to note for your diaries:
As the term progresses, there will be more events and activities that we will share with you – please do look regularly at the Parent Portal and Key Stage Canvas announcements. One thing I do want to ask you all to support us with is making sure your child has a suitable hat in school every day. Many students are still coming to school without a hat and are not able to play freely outside, having to stay in the shaded areas. The best thing to do is to send the hat into school every Monday and for your child to leave it at school, to be returned home on Friday to be washed ready for the next week. We look forward to sharing many more learning opportunities with your child over the coming weeks, in the countdown to Christmas (47 days as I write this!). Marcus Madden Head of Primary Y2B The first term of school is over and children in 2B have completed some challenging but also fun units on which we will continue building on during the next term. In Maths, after working for some weeks on Place Value, we have now moved on to Addition and Subtraction focusing on the column model. The children have been able to identify when they should exchange a ten for 10 ones in order to complete their calculations. It is important to pay attention to the operation and identify key words in word problems that could help us with our calculations. In Science, this term, we have been exploring animals and their babies, humans and the life stages of a human focusing on the changes that take place from the first stage (being a baby) to the last stage (being an elderly). In Literacy, during the last week, we focused on observing ourselves, our unique features and write sentences about the things we like but also the ones we don’t. The focus of the unit was to ensure that children are confident simple structures when writing focusing on capital letters, full stops and simple connectives. Have you identified some of your unique characteristics? We invite you to take a couple of minutes in front of the mirror and draw yourself on a piece of paper. Remember to draw yourself exactly the way you are! Have a look at our posters... Ms. Anna Vasilokonstantaki, Y2B Teacher Being BSQ – Secondary Update And breathe… What a wonderful week we had before the break with the excitement of the holidays upon us and the inevitable fun and activity connected with the Halloween season and the end of term. On Friday we enjoyed some excellent cricket in the house event for key stage 3 and the three-way football for the older students. It was a very well organised competition by Mr Edwards and well supported by the staff as ever pitching in. The cricket was repeated on Monday for years 7-10 so that everyone had the opportunity to be involved. It seems that the sport is catching on with the bat and stumps appearing in some PE lessons as well. As a British school we should of course be supporting this so much more of the game to come. The staff also had some fun after hours on Monday with them all travelling back to their own Primary years by throwing bean bags to targets. More importantly it was an opportunity for us to all get together and have some fun. Wellbeing for us all is extremely important and it was lovely for everyone to get together from all areas of the school. Please remember that we have the second round of vaccinations for those students who are involved on the first Monday back. We plan to run our normal lessons for all year groups as the Ministry are bringing their own staff. If your son or daughter is having their vaccination they can either stay at school afterwards or go home if you would prefer they had some recovery time. Year 13 will return after the break and look to starting a period of intense activity. I suspect that the stress levels will be rising so we all need to be supportive and gently encourage them in their journey. They will be finalising coursework deadlines, completing applications for university and sitting important mock examinations. Do please encourage preparation and revision over the half-term break as this will really help moving forward. I suppose the greatest thing to welcome next term is that we are finally all back together in lessons in school. We say goodbye to blended learning and we focus on getting back to the basics in the classroom with all members of our community. This is a huge step forward and a great relief to us all. What we have all endured over the last 18 months has been significant and what I am proud of most is the resilience of our children and staff as they have navigated through. It has been a challenge but also a great success. We are all better and stronger as a result of the experience. A huge well done to Mrs Madden and the year 13 students for the wonderful Theory of Knowledge Exhibition that was presented this week. Senior members of staff visited the event on Wednesday lunch time so that students could explain their deeper thinking skills. This is a key element of the IBDP in 6th form. I look forward to younger students visiting in the first week back to deepen their own interest in this important part of learning. Mrs Madden is also coordinating how we can embed some of the skills in younger years as we develop our curriculum even further. Finally, I would like to share an update on Rafaella and her achievement. She obtained the Silver Medal in the National Figure Skating Championship. Well done Rafaella! Y12B The students in Y12 have recently been deciding on their topic choice for the IB Extended Essay. The Extended Essay is a 4,000 word researched academic piece completed over the course of a year on any topic they wish to pursue. There have been some fantastic ideas already! This week the students were set up with their supervisors, who will help them to hone their ideas into a format that best fits the academic style of the assignment. The students are currently working on formulating a proper guiding title and starting their reading and research. TOK Exhibition On Wednesday 27th October The British School Quito hosted the first-ever TOK Exhibition. Year 13 students displayed three objects and a 950-word commentary to link their objects to one "IA prompt"(a question about knowledge). Objects included a Moy and Bstie 35mm hand-cranked cine camera in response to the question: How important are material tools in the production or acquisition of knowledge? and a Japanese folklore book published in the 1830's in response to the question: What role does imagination play in producing knowledge about the world? The Exhibition will be displayed for the next three weeks and all students from the Secondary school will have an opportunity to see it. TOK Coordinator, Mrs Madden, praised the Year 13's for their hard work and their engagement in explaining how their three objects linked to their chosen prompt to the visiting teachers and students from Year 12. LAHC Theatre Camp Aitana, Year 12, was part of the LAHC Theatre Camp celebrated on October 22nd, 23rd and 24th. During her participation, Aitana, along with group 6, created and performed a 10-minute thriller, showing her creativity and dramatic potential. Also, she had the opportunity to share experiences with students and teachers from Brazil, Mexico, Peru, etc. Here are some of Alan Downie's words regarding the event: "It was truly inspiring to see the way that these young people responded to the challenges that we gave them and I think that we had some really valuable feedback from them for future events." I can only congratulate Aitana for her participation and encourage her to continue making theatre, as is one of the most rewarding and enriching experiences in life. Ms Espinosa, KS3 Drama Teacher Have a wonderful week everyone and enjoy whatever you are planning.
Lee Moors Head of Secondary
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