Welcome After a lot of hard work, sweat and (maybe) some tears, our annual Bonfire Night Talent Show was released at the end of the week because despite the restrictions on our ability to share the event together in person, there are no restrictions at all on our creativity. Thank you to those students and staff who shared their talents with us – it was such a joy to see and hear you all. Last week the secondary student council entertainments section organised the Murder Mystery event which Mr Moors referred to in his newsletter. What a brilliant feat of teamwork and entertainment. Thanks to all the staff and students involved. Finally, of course there was the Open Choir event organised by Ms Cano and Mr Kidd. Bringing together a groups of students and staff from across the school this event enabled us to join with schools from across Latin America to enjoy singing and sharing. A strong community will always find ways to connect and these are just some of the examples of how our students and staff are continuing to grow, develop and flourish away from home. In the meantime, some of our staff (and maybe even some students) are participating in Movember. If any parents out there would like to join in, then please contact Mr Edwards on bedwards@british school quito.edu.ec but hurry as November is drawing to a close! e-Learning at BSQ From the Staff and the Students Continuing with our teachers and their stories about e-learning this new period. This week we have Mrs. Natalie Moors, Mr. Simon Newman, Ms. Belén Arellano, Ms. Natalie Sawyers and the Student Council Events Team from Secondary and Mrs. Helen Dávila and Ms. Antonella Coronel from Primary. Mrs. Natalie Moors and Mr. Simon Newman – Y7 Tutors In Year 7, we’ve been working on the positivity challenge. Each day, there’s a new challenge which you have to complete — it lasts for thirty days. This is a great way to bring a positive start to the beginning of the day! “It was fun to see others’ thoughts and ideas. It also made me feel more positive about myself and made me relax a bit more. I was thinking of doing some more mindful colouring every week.” — Lyla, a Y7 student. Many of the challenges help boost the students’ self-confidence, as everyone has at least one thing that they’re good at. This helps create a great atmosphere and makes many of the students be more positive in general and aware of others’ feelings. Some loved to reflect on good things they and others had done, whereas it simply motivated some to do their chores. Others felt a sort of commitment, and felt it gave them the tools to remain calm in difficult situations. Each activity is designed to help students think positively about themselves and help improve focus. Many students acknowledge the Positivity Challenge as a great way to encourage them to talk about their feelings and a great way of setting the right tone for the school day. Doodle Art and Identity During partial 1, year 7 students explored their identity and how they could communicate their ideas with doodles and color pencil techniques. Through a process of 8 weeks, students explored ideas and later symbols that could represent their thoughts and feelings of what make them different and similar from others. Here you can see some results of the unit! Ms Arellano Remembrance Day Year 9 did some work recently to celebrate remembrance day which is celebrated in the United Kingdom to commemorate all those who fought and died in the line of duty to keep us free during the First World War and beyond. I think you will agree that year 9 have done some fantastic research into this important day and have even linked this to the important issue of sustainability in relation to the poppies. Well done year 9! Ms. Natalie Sawyers Secondary Student Council Events Team Over the past few weeks, the events team from the secondary student council has been working hard to prepare a new, creative, event for the whole of secondary school to enjoy with the goal of alleviating the stress accumulated through a fun, interactive, mystery that the students enjoyed. Our final product was a brand-new murder mystery that was brought to life with the help of teachers, who enthusiastically became involved by submitting their own videos, scripted by us, which helped set the theme of a 1920s gang mystery. The overall student enjoyment & satisfaction proved the mystery to be a success, further encouraging the student council events team to continue planning & putting great effort to construct events such as the one we had on Friday, November 13th. We are eager to share with the rest of the school the projects we have in mind & we're ready to bring them to life to help increase student morale during this pandemic, our goal is for students to enjoy as much of the pandemic as possible despite the unfortunate circumstances. Because our goal to increase morale doesn't end with students, the events team leaves you the biggest clue to solving the mystery here, for you to try to solve in your own time. We also wish to share with you the teacher's hard work, which is why we're uploading their interrogations to a drive for you to enjoy. By: Samantha B., Student Council Events Team
Mrs. Helen Dávila – Year 1B Teacher. We have had a busy week this week in year 1B. We started our learning off by creating some wonderful 3D models using junk materials. This helped everyone learn the names of the shapes before we moved on to trickier work! As a class we worked together to build 3D nets with great success. With our amazing homemade 3D shapes, the whole class decided how many faces, vertices and edges each shape had. It made for a long lesson but everyone showed great determination to complete the work! In Topic we read a story about a little dog called Kipper who loved to go out in the rain. As our topic this term is Weather, we all talked about things we use to keep ourselves dry in the rain. Everyone had a go at designing waterproof clothing and trying it out on one of their own teddies at home. It looked like most survived the heavy downpours we find here in Ecuador. Well done 1B! Ms. Antonella Coronel – Head of EYFS Dear parents, During the previous week in Literacy, the students in Reception worked on creating short sentences with proper syntax. The children wrote letters to a zoo asking for an animal they would like to receive. The letters were inspired by the story “Dear Zoo”. What animal would you like? In Mathematics, the students learned how to measure things using cubes. They measured their heights and size of their feet. This week we are excited to learn about Thanksgiving, why it is celebrated and where. In Nursery we will end the week with a lunch to give thanks. Remember to wear your handmade headpiece! Have a wonderful week and share your “thank you” to your loved ones. Kind regards Dates for your Diary
Emma Newman Principal Being BSQ – Primary Update Following on from our celebrations in the assemblies last week, including sharing a wonderful array of talent on show, we are now approaching the Christmas season with just over a month to the big day. This year our usual events and celebrations have had to be radically changed, which does mean that we are not able to enjoy our traditional performances from our younger students. However, the teachers have been busy planning alternatives to make sure that the children all get into the festive spirit – please watch out for announcements from your child’s class teachers. Thank you to everyone who attended last week’s Parent Meetings to discuss the content of the upcoming RSE Parent/Student Workshops. These are an important part of our continuing programme of Personal Social Health Education (PSHE) and we appreciate the time and effort it takes to support your child in this important part of their education. Children are naturally inquisitive and our role is to make sure that they have the relevant, appropriate information at each stage of their development, being sensitive to their needs and supporting them as they learn more about themselves and the world around them. These workshops take place throughout the week:
As we continue our teaching and learning online, it is important to think creatively about how we can best support our children, particularly in terms of appropriate equipment and resources. Whilst the teachers use a wide variety of strategies to ensure the students have the opportunity to apply their knowledge and understanding to practical, real-life problems, it is important to use the resources in your home to support this process. This idea is particularly relevant to solving mathematical calculations and problems, through using items you can find in your house and activities that directly relate to the learning that is happening in the online sessions. One of the best ways to achieve this is through encouraging your child to join you while preparing food for the family, measuring quantities of ingredients and helping you lay the table ready for a family meal. Give it a try – try to think of creative ways you can explore your child’s understanding of concepts in your everyday life and please do share those ‘lightbulb’ moments with us! Marcus Madden Head of Primary Being BSQ – Secondary Update The time to rebuild a new, ‘New Now’ is in our sights We are increasingly looking to the future and becoming excited at the possibility that we may be all together again, back in our wonderful community at the school campus. We look forward as well to the opportunities again to test our student’s resilience and flexibility and add to the rich experiences they are gaining from the way they learn and problem solve as they grow towards young adults. There will be anxieties for staff and student alike with the prospect of being back on campus, and away from the comforts of home and the obvious flexibility and trappings of being able to nip to the fridge for a treat. Back at school some of these flexibilities disappear and of course more formality returns. Different pupils within the same class will have had very different experiences of the lockdown period and online learning. They will also have developed differently with how they cope and demonstrate resilience in dealing with those experiences. The same is said for our teachers who to be honest, have been amazing in being resilient and flexible in developing their systems so that they can teach and still maintain relationships. I have said it before, what we do at BSQ is extraordinary and it will be envied in other systems and countries around the world. Even with this, with the possible return, there is of course more opportunities to change and develop again. Our staff are a super set of professionals who take their professional practice extremely seriously and who are also courageous when approaching a new concept or risk. I wonder if this phase will eventually become the new, ‘new norm’? This week I have heard of students thanking staff for their time and for being so creative and going to huge lengths to provide interesting and enriching activities. They have also been thanked for perhaps finding and introducing another online platform which benefits learning. The fact that emails of thanks and even face to face (online) acts of recognition are taking place is significant, and this is reflected in the recent survey opinions which show some a level of correlation – more about this in a while. The teaching profession has been dragged forcibly into modernizing over the last 9 months and there are so many things we will be taking from what we are doing now into the school when we eventually return. It would be extremely foolhardy to just retreat back into the norms and lose the wonderful developments we have experienced. Out team are looking at this closely and seeing what we can continue with back in the classroom. It really is a very exciting time. Of course it will not all be plain sailing as some students may not feel able to jump straight back into learning immediately when they return to school. They may find it a little harder to focus due to the change in environment. The eventual return may lead to some disruption to attitudes to learning and behaviour, as pupils get used to seeing each other again. In the early stages at BSQ we will be focusing on the rebuild and the need for students to reconnect. You could argue that they will need to ‘get it out of their system’ first, before the hard task of knuckling down to the business of work begins. It is also important to acknowledge that our students in year 11 and 13 who are completing exam years, may find the challenge of starting this reconnection of learning more difficult, and experience feelings of burden with the perception of the need to catch up. Our staff have been working incredibly hard to make sure that this is not the case and as much as possible, what has gone is generally on track. These students need to trust their teachers and accept support and advice when it is offered and they will be absolutely fine. One thing that is guaranteed with our eventual return will be the excitement of reconnecting attachments that are so important with children. Friends will be together again, student-teacher relationships will be reconnected in a more personal way, adults will be able to interact professionally and socially, and you as parents will again have the opportunity to see people in the flesh and blood - socially distanced of course. We all look forward to the wellbeing gains that this will have for everyone. Do please be reassured that we are very aware of the challenges ahead with bringing staff and students back together at BSQ, and whenever this does happen, we will be prepared and we will enjoy every minute. I thought this week that I would share an example which exemplifies the quality of work completed by some of our wonderful students that has come across my desk. We really do have some super bright and talented children here who work so hard irrespective of the challenges they face. This week I would like to share Antonella’s wonderful piece of work on the Sahara Desert. It really does show her enquiry skills, her attention to detail and her presentation – Well done Antonella! As promised last week there is more information in the newsletter on the great murder mystery event – do please see the wider report prepared by our very gifted Samantha Baugh. She takes time to talk about the event and the thinking behind it, and there are links to videos and other goodies you can look at to enjoy at your leisure. There is even an additional task that takes readers on their own murder mystery. Well done to Emilio Sisa, Katherine Hoshima and Samantha Baugh, and particularly Samantha who takes credit alone for her excellent newsletter article. Maybe she needs to consider events management or journalism as a possible career? Soon we will be turning our attention to exams in the New Year and all of the hard work that students will face in the run in. I encourage you to revisit my comments previously on this. I will be writing with more details over the coming weeks about arrangements and expectations. Staff will be preparing resources and outlining revision needs for those involved. They are looking carefully at the exam scripts, balancing the need for rigor and achievability. We really do want students, especially in year 11 and 13, to really focus hard on these important exams. The outcomes will form part of the evidence process for assessment and of course, also give staff important data when considering predicted grades for exam boards and intervention needs. Staff are also turning their minds to written reports that will be due at the end of January. It is always a good time for students who may have previously had a poor report to have a fresh start. There is still time of course for everyone to make a really good impression and perhaps influence the content positively. All students have recently been surveyed on their attitudes to their selves and school. This is an important exercise for us as it gauges the feeling amongst the student body about their feelings towards their learning and wellbeing. We are very pleased, and perhaps slightly surprised, that the headlines suggest our children are happy and are engaged and feel fulfilled by their learning right now. When we consider the challenges that online learning has posed for all this is a remarkable outcome. We now go to focus groups to drill down further and this then leads to an action plan to address areas that may need attention. Very valuable work indeed! Do have a good week everyone. Lee Moors Head of Secondary From the BSQ Counselling Team This week our school counsellor, Andrea Carrera, talks about whether you really "see" your child?
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May 2024
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