Friday 20 May 2016

33: Friday 20th May 2016

From the Director


I would like to begin by thanking you for your support for the Somos Fernando campaign and reminding you that we are wearing the T shirts to show our solidarity next Friday as well. It is still possible to purchase a shirt if you want one from one of the Offices.

I hope everyone got to see the message we sent home yesterday about recent medical concerns in the city and how they may affect school. We are confident our school premises are protected as far as possible with cleaning and sensible precautions. We need you to report medical diagnoses to us and we will keep the community informed of any further precautions required. Can we please reiterate that if your son or daughter is unwell please do not send them to school. Otherwise we are confident school is safe and please trust us to take the necessary precautions.

We have been reviewing our Community Concern events which we launched last week with Grades 2 to 5. You can see a report of the meetings on the ABC Newsblog. One of the issues raised which has caused us much concern is the way uncontrolled access to the internet children have through mobile devices and especially their phones. Please note that school has comprehensive protection against adult related content on our school computers and laptops. However when children bring their own devices to school with 3G or 4G connectivity these phones do not connect the internet through our system. It is therefore possible for children to be exposed to inappropriate adult content while waiting in the car park or in a break time and then sharing this content with other children. In order to avoid this problem in future we have decided that next year children up to and including Grade 8 will not be permitted to bring smart phones to school. We would also ask you to monitor closely your child’s use of their smart phone at home if they have one as they are often one or two clicks away from very inappropriate material. We will explain more about this mobile phone policy later this term but please be warned that children up to Grade 8 will not be allowed to bring smart phones to school next year. 

We have met with the Madres Enlaces for other feedback on protecting our children and we are finalising our plans to move forward with this campaign. We have decided to run a number of specific events to support parents in this area which we will be announcing next week. We are going to invite parents of Grade 6 and 7 to these follow up events and so we are not planning to hold the general introductory meeting for Grade 6 and 7 next week. Thank you for your participation which is vital if we are going to work together as a community that cares.

I would like to give you the good news that one of our Prepa teachers, Marianne Taylor recently gave birth to a baby daughter and we would like to welcome her to our community. Mother and daughter are both doing well!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Digital Video Awards yesterday and a special thanks to the school ICT Department and to Victor Hugo from the Class 2017 who showed his talent and creativity as both a participant and an organiser.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend

Primary News

Dear Parents and Carers,

I was able to attend the National Swimming competitions last week. Once again the school team pulled off an amazing coup and achieved second place. Some of our swimmers increased their personal best swim time and many won their heats. They also behaved impeccably and were a credit to the school in every way. Well done to our swim team, their teachers and the parents who were helping out. I felt very proud.

3rd Grade Camp was a great success despite the wet weather. Thank you to all the staff who supported the students with this event. It takes a lot of preparation and planning, as well as staying awake most of the night to ensure these events are a great experience for your children.

For several years we have not accepted an outside book club due to shipping issues and mix ups with orders but this year we are going to give Scholastic Book Club a try. They have a new online ordering and payment system that should be fool proof. Please look at the detailed information in the Secondary Section of the Weekly. We will be able to let you have our primary section order sites in the next few days. As a school we value books and reading very highly and we rely on you as parents to encourage your children to be avid readers and develop a love of books and stories. We ask that you model reading by demonstrating that you like to read yourself. So please order a book or two to keep you and your child going over the summer.

Please remember Primary students are not allowed internet phones during the school day or on the school grounds. They may have an ordinary phone if absolutely necessary and this must be handed into the secretary at the beginning of the day and collected at the end. This is a matter of promoting student safeguarding and wellbeing as internet phones have been used inappropriately and there is worldwide concern about some of the items that children have been inadvertently exposed to when accessing the internet without supervision.

There have been one or two reported cases of illness in school and I have noticed in the press some articles about Leptospirosis. As you would expect, our students are out and about in a variety of locations outside of school and they are often together. If there is an illness going about our students can catch it anywhere. The school has a rigorous cleaning programme that is applied every single day. If we didn’t we would have continuous illness all the time! Children sneeze on each other, hold hands and then chew their fingers and so on, no matter where they are. We are also lucky to have an experienced and vigilant doctor on the premises to advise us continually on medical issues. She has been sending out the appropriate advice directly to you.

We are changing our end of year Assembly Format slightly this year. We would like to recognise the achievement of each student in line with a growth mindset and therefore the end of year Assemblies are being renamed ‘Effort leads to Success’ assemblies. All parents are invited to attend. However, please be aware that there are restrictions on numbers and only two family representatives per child will be accepted. Please do not bring more adults and suffer the embarrassment of having them turned away. The specific dates for each grade are listed below.

Our Olympic Exit Point will be on the 8th June at 8.00am and your children we be rounding off the their studies and the year with a School Olympic Closing Ceremony and handover to the next location of Japan. Please send them to school in their PE kit on that day.

We will be beginning our preparation for the second part of the Lower Primary build in the next few weeks. There will be some small changes to arrangements in order to allow this preparation to take place. Please bear with us, the final outcome will be worth any inconvenience. 

Best wishes for a great week ahead.

Sharon Short
Head of Primary

Dates for your diary

Lower Primary
June
Thursday 2nd: First grade trip to Polideportivo 8:00am -12:15m
Friday 3rd: Moving up day
Friday 10th: Lower Primary reports go home
Thursday 16th: Trip to Maya Club 9:30am - 1:00pm

Upper Primary
May
Wednesday 25th: IPC 2nd Grade-Feel the force- Field Trip to Tin Marin 
Friday 27th May: Somos Fernando T Shirt Jeans day for 4th and 5th Grade only
Friday 27th: 4th Grade Camping
June
Thursday 2nd,3rd June: 5th Grade to 6th Grade Induction Days
Thursday 2nd June: Grade 5 Parent Partnership Meeting: Secondary Induction
Wednesday 8th: Whole Primary School Exit Point The Olympics
Friday 10th: Primary extra-curricular classes - End of 5th session 
Friday 10th: End of the year field trip 2nd Grade
Friday 10: Upper Primary reports go home
Monday 13th: 2nd Grade Effort Leads to Success Assembly 7:30 am thru 8:30 am
Tuesday 13th: 3rd Grade Effort Leads to Success Assembly 9:00 am thru 10:00 am
Tuesday 14th:4th Grade Effort Leads to Success Assembly 7:30 am thru 8:30 am
Tuesday 14th: 5th Grade Field Trip to Atlantis 8:00am thru 2:30pm
Wednesday 15th: 5th Grade Moving on Assembly 7:30 am thru 9:00 am
Wednesday 15th: 4th Grade Fun Trip to Atlantis 

Secondary News

Dear Parents / Guardians,


This week, as part of our efforts to promote a values-based education, the ABC’s focus turned to ethics. As part of our programme to communicate the importance of this value, the Grade 9s were given a link by Head of Year Mr Rombout to a very interesting article which I thought I’d also share with you:


Please have a look at this article and please then have a discussion with your child/ren about the importance of this value.

Secondary Swimming Gala 2016


This week took place the Secondary Swimming Gala 2016 from 6th to 9th grade. All the students who participated had an excellent performance, and most of them had the opportunity to receive a medal. Well done to all the students who took part, you are all winners! 
Ana Cecilia Hernandez Caceres
Head of Secondary PE

Results:
MUN Cross School Debate


On Wednesday 18th May The ABC MUN team hosted a cross school debate. Many thanks for the American School for attending and adding to a lively debate concerning the security issues of immigration and the dangers of terrorism and extremism many countries (especially Europe) have faced in the recent past. This is only the second time this event has happened and is a credit to the MUN students and members of the Student Council who arranged and led the excellent event. With the inclusion of the French School as observers, and hopefully participants in the future, we hope to see this event grow and become a regular fixture on the school calendar. Many thanks to Paul Davis and Majo Linares for all their work and to Ms Gregory for helping host the event. 
James Merry
Head of History

Grade 8 'Ethical and moral choices' empowerment afternoon - Friday 20th of May
Today we had the Grade 8 empowerment afternoon. Thank you to everyone, especially the students, for making the afternoon such a success. 

Linguistic Competitions 
On June 7th the students in KS3 will participate in the now traditional ABC Linguistic Competitions. This activity, through the use of games and group activities, will give a fun closure to the contents studied during the school year in the subjects of Spanish, English, and French. 
Maria Eugenia Rossi
Head of Spanish

DVA - Thursday 19th of May
Creativity is intelligence having fun”. Albert Einstein


The 6th Annual DVA was a Fantastic success. This was a gala event in which students, teachers and parents came from across the school in celebration of ABC student digital video work. A wonderful audience was in attendance to witness the numerous awards that were given out during the evening. 

The Movie of the Year, Time to Move, was won by a team of three 11 grades: Victor Hugo Salazar, Gabriela Zedan and Mauricio Velasquez.

We would like to offer an additional word of congratulations to Victor Hugo Salazar in 11th grade, who this year became a member of the DVA Committee and produced the final video production for the show. 

Do have a look at our Flickr Album, The LRC Facebook page and the LRC Blog for photos and details about this event.
Jennifer Garcia
KS3 ICT Teacher & Learning Resources Centre Coordinator


Our new Scholastic Book Club is up and running!

We are pleased to announce that we will now offer Scholastic Book Orders to our school community. 

The school has set up special sites with Scholastic, which parents can use to order books online, through the school, for their children. The Secondary Site is managed through the LRC and offers books for students of all ages. 

Parents can access the site as of today. Please go to http://world-schools.scholastic.co.uk/academia-britanica-cuscatleca to browse the latest books, at your leisure and place an order online. For every $1 you spend on this month’s Book Club, our school will earn 20¢ in Scholastic Rewards.

Please be aware that all of the ordering, including payments is done by parents, online through this website and there is a 20% charge for shipping and handling which will be added at the checkout.

Book orders should arrive prior to the end of this school year, just in time for summer reading. 

In order to ensure that your books on time, we ask that you place your order online by May 27th, 2016.
Jennifer Garcia
KS3 ICT Teacher & Learning Resources Centre Coordinator

IB Examinations and G12 Clearance 
I am pleased (although I am certain that the Grade 12 students are even more pleased!) to report that today, Friday 20th of May, was the last IB examination. Well done to the Grade 12s.

Now that the examinations have finished, we need to collect in resources (books etc.), and organise our resources, for next year’s Grade 11 (the current Grade 10s who will be commencing their IB studies in August 2016). Therefore, on Monday 23rd of May the Grade 12 students are required to bring into school any books, and other materials, and return them to their subject teachers. All Grade 12 teachers will be in their usual teaching rooms between 2.00pm and 3.00pm on Monday. 

Kind regards,

Stephen Spicer
Head of Secondary

Secondary dates for your diary
Friday 27th May: Somos Fernando T Shirt day
Monday 30th May: End of Grade 9 exams
Monday 30th May: Health Awareness Week
Tuesday 31st May: Thanksgiving ceremony for Class 2016
Thursday 2nd June: Moving up day- 5th Grade to 6th Grade and Parent Partnership meeting “Secondary Induction” 6.00pm PAC
Friday 3rd June: Moving up day - 5th Grade to 6th Grade
Friday 3rd June; Class 2016 Headmaster's Reception
Thursday 9th June: Class 2016 Graduation Day and Graduation Ceremony at 5.00pm Auditorium
Friday 10th June: End of IGCSE exams for Grade 10 students
Monday 13th June: Grade 6 and Grade 7 Award Assembly; Lap of Honour at 7.00am; Logros Event at 6.00pm PAC
Tuesday 14th June: Group 4 Science project 
Wednesday 15th June: Grade 8 and Grade 9 Award Assembly
Thursday 16th June: Grade 10 and Grade 11 Award Assembly and CAL Report issued for Grades 6-9 and 11
Friday 17th June: Last day of School Year

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