Welcome Welcome to the start of Term 3 after a very short Easter weekend. I hope that everyone is ready to start the online classes again with a renewed energy and excitement after a couple of days extra rest. As always, we have been reviewing the way in which we have been teaching and working with students and we will be making some additional tweaks and changes as we move forward. In Early Years we will be sharing videos of our teachers with our youngest children because we know how important it is for those students to see their teachers and for us to support those parents in as many ways as possible. We also welcome our Early Years parents to Canvas and their own blogs. In Primary and Secondary we will be holding parent-teacher-student conferences in a few weeks where we will be able to share feedback on the online effort and engagement of students and offer personal and individual support and guidance. As always there is much to be thankful for during this time and one of those things is the development of a different set of learning skills for all of us – teachers, students and parents. I have seen some remarkable outcomes to learning tasks set and led by the teachers where it is clear that students have been truly inspired by the lesson content and delivery. Students have built their own museums, made their own jewellery, planted their own seeds. Around the world people are finding something to smile about, such as when Jacinda Arden announced that the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are all keyworkers in New Zealand. Or when Wagamama launched their Wok from Home initiative. Here you can see how to fold and cook gyoza! https://www.instagram.com/p/B-cfYW6h1f8/ I hope that during the long weekend you too were able to find something to laugh about and something to share together. Please also spare some time to think about our teachers from the UK who do not have family and friends close by and are unable to be with them at this uncertain time but are continuing to work as hard as they can for your children. Parent Teacher Conferences. The communication between school and home is an extremely important part of the learning process – more so now than ever and as a result we are scheduling parent teacher conferences on Monday April 20th and Wednesday April 22nd through our online learning platform – Canvas. Mr Madden and Mr Wild will share more details about appointments. Important Announcement. To allow us to get messages to you quickly and efficiently we will be increasingly using our parent portals – Canvas for Years 1-13 and Memo for Nursery and Reception. PLEASE make sure that you are logged onto these platforms using the invites you have had from school. From the Staff and the Students Continuing with our teachers and their stories about e-learning this new period. This week we have the Ms. Aditi Sadotra and Ms. Valeria Cano from Secondary and Ms. Coronel from Primary. Ms. Aditi Sadotra – Secondary Maths Teacher Gratitude During our life and learning skills lesson last week all secondary students were asked to think about gratitude and spend some time focusing on the things we can be thankful for during this difficult period. There were so many lovely messages of gratitude from all students and it was a real pleasure to read them all. All of the messages were collated from every tutor group and are displayed in the picture below. Family was by far the biggest thing that we are grateful for as a community during this time. The extra time you are all spending together is certainly greatly appreciated by the students! This session was a great reminder to students and staff of all the positives that we can focus on during these times to support one another. Ms. Valeria Cano – Music Teacher Online music learning It has been amazing to see the commitment that students have to their online classes. In music we have been learning about different topics. With year 4 we have focused on learning about opera and the students had an opportunity to see one and be music critics for a day. Years 5 and 6 have been learning about orchestras and the instruments that make them up, seeing examples of orchestras playing songs that they enjoy. In year 7 and 8 the students have been working on different composers, getting to know their life and works. The year 9 students have been working on learning to make chords (triads and 7th chords), with which they will be able to create their own music very soon. Year 10 and Year 11 have been continuing their IGCSE preparation process, Year 10 students are making progress in musical genres, ensembles, instruments, and their preparation for the instrumental assessment, while Year 11 students have been dedicated to completing their compositions in different genres, with examples of waltz, blues and classical. I am very happy with the way things have developed and very proud of my students as I can see the effort they have put into online learning. Ms. Antonella Coronel – Head of EYFS Dear parents, It has been a short yet exciting week, filled with great new learning opportunities. We have received amazing examples of this through Tapestry. Thank you parents for your work and excellent guidance. The children also worked very hard on getting ready for Easter. They made some wonderful and colorful Easter eggs! The children have also been exploring through their imagination with forts and camping tents. Some have travelled to incredible new places. Others met new friends and together they made wonderful new memories. All of these through the comfort and safety of their homes. Through this very simple and fun activity the children work on vocabulary, communication skills, resilience, gross motor skills, investigation and many other skills that are essential to the different areas of development. We are also happy to share the very exciting news that we will begin live teaching sessions this week! There will be more detailed information to come regarding this later on today! We also want to remind everyone of our EYFS challenge, camouflage yourself then reveal yourself. We are excited to see the great ideas you all come up with and share them with our BSQ community. Remember to read all the guidelines and restrictions before submitting your video to [email protected] until this afternoon. Enjoy the rest of your week! Ms. Coronel Emma Newman Principal Being BSQ – Primary Update I hope you were all able to enjoy the long Easter weekend and some well-earned rest and perhaps some Easter chocolate! I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your continued support, both for your child and our staff, during this difficult and unprecedented situation. Here at BSQ we live by our values and work tirelessly to help instil them in our community. It is a testament to your dedication and resilience that these values still shine brightly and clearly through your interactions with us and your child's continued commitment to their learning and development. The staff here at BSQ will support your child through this challenging period, answering their questions and making sure that the end of the academic year runs as smoothly as possible in the circumstances. The Primary Team are looking forward to meeting with you next week at the Parent Teacher Conferences to share your child’s progress, discuss their adaptation to the Online Learning and talk about their next steps in their development. I will be sending you further details about these conferences tomorrow and separate details about arranging a suitable time will also be sent to you by your child’s class teacher. These conferences will be on Monday 20th April and Wednesday 22nd April – on these days, all Primary students will be given appropriate activities and learning for them to complete, but there will be no online conferences in those two days. Thank you to all the parents that have already signed up for our Parent Portal – if you have not done so already, click on this link Parent Portal to activate your membership. Finally, we look forward to welcoming the Early Years students and their parents to the Canvas portal later this week – full instructions have been sent to these parents on how to join this exciting development. Marcus Madden Head of Primary Being BSQ – Secondary Update When we began this journey, all of this was new to us. Since then, and with your help and support, we've adapted very successfully to the online environment. To ensure that learning continues uninterrupted, we have maintained the structure of the school day and school week, while reacting to your concerns by reducing lesson duration and therefore screen-time. We have also experimented with ways of getting students to engage with learning away from their laptops, while at the same time developing new ways to record and track student progress so that we can offer consistent and meaningful feedback and assistance. We continue to meet as a team to look for more ways in which we can improve. The lessons being taught each day have been superb. I have witnessed IB Visual Arts students presenting analyses of van Gogh paintings to their classmates, Year 8 Humanities students reading powerful speeches on human rights, Maths teachers using visualizers to model concepts on the screen, and a great many small-group and whole-class discussions. It really is like a normal day at BSQ. Years 13 and 11 have faced challenges as the exams themselves were cancelled, but have attended, engaged, and worked brilliantly. They are assured now that their courses will be completed, and teachers are working tirelessly from home to ensure that the grades and certification that students will receive from the IB and Cambridge respectively will be a fair representation of the skills and knowledge they have learned, developed and demonstrated across the two years of their course. Year 11 will soon begin their pre-IB preparation. Year 13 will begin preparing for the Ineval examinations. There will be an opportunity in a couple of weeks for face-to-face parent and teacher conferences to discuss student progress. Thank you all, so very much, for the positive feedback you've given us, and the support you've given your children, as we all continue to strive for success and happiness Jim Wild Head of Secondary From the BSQ Counselling Team This week our school counsellor, Andrea Carrera, talks about ways to make children enjoy chores.
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May 2024
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