From the Director
As we approach the end of yet another term in online learning mode, I am acutely aware of the levels of stress in our learning community. I am delighted that our Primary school was able to offer their Well-being Week this week and Secondary will be offering their version in the new year. I was also very pleased to note that 31 colleagues attended the staff wellbeing workshop that we offered earlier this week. However, it tells you something when so many colleagues felt that they would benefit from that support.
I remember when I was a young teacher the frustration I used to feel when trying to explain to people the pressures of the work in my newly-chosen profession. Of course, the responses commonly were somewhere between gentle mockery and outright incredulity and almost certainly made reference to the enormous holidays that teachers enjoy! I cannot deny that fact that teachers have fantastic holidays but year after year surveys of average working hours confirm that, even taking this into account (i.e. calculating numbers of hours worked across an an entire working year and then dividing by the total number of working days in a year i.e. 260 minus public holidays), teachers work longer hours than any other professionals including doctors, lawyers and businessmen. However, although I would sometimes use this argument with my gently (or otherwise) mocking friends, as well as, of course, the age-old complaints about hours spent marking, these are not in my (now better informed) opinion the chief causes of the levels of stress in the profession. Nowadays, if asked I would say that there are two less obvious areas in which teachers work a good deal harder than some people might imagine.
The first is in lesson preparation: if a lesson is to be properly pitched, have the correct level and pace and challenge and be differentiated to the needs of individual learners, while keeping pace with the demands of syllabus coverage, then one can easily spend as much time preparing it as actually delivering it.
The second area is in the sheer amount of emotional energy that goes into managing so many relationships during the course of a working day. For an example from the far end of the scale, a secondary Humanities teacher in a large school might interact with as many as 220 children during the course of one working day; and all of these children come from different homes where there are different expectations from them in terms of their behaviour and values. The children in their classes all have their varying emotional needs and sensitivities (or even troubles) and not only does the teacher have to manage his or her relationship with each of them but theirs with each other and all of this before we consider the relationships with colleagues and parents that also have to be managed….a recipe for stress there can be no doubt!
In conclusion, please do remember that your children’s teachers are only human and what they do is a little more skillful and perhaps a good deal more stressful and time consuming than may appear on first glance. So, if you get a chance this next week to offer one of them a little praise and encouragement, I can assure you it will mean the world to the recipient!
In other news, I can confirm that our plans for re-opening the school in hybrid mode in the new year have been approved by the Senior Management Team and by the Board and will be presented to you very soon. A great deal of time and thought has gone into developing them. They are flexible and differentiated and firmly rooted in the school’s values. I believe they strike the best possible balance between health and educational prerogatives. They will not, I am sure, please everybody, but I know by now that I can trust you to give them careful and thoughtful consideration before reaching a balanced view about them. Please also remember that whatever decision you end up making for your child, we offer a strong online learning provision and that this will continue to be available to you if you have concerns about the plans for in-person learning.
Wishing you a great weekend,
Stephen Lang
Director
From the Head of Primary
This week I am sharing pictures from the Primary Wellbeing week and Ideas for Christmas presents. Firstly, I just want to let you know that our primary plans for reopening were this week presented to the board. We are now looking at how our plans fit with the guidance from MinEd and I hope that very soon they will be ready to share with you. Please remember that attendance will be voluntary and that even if you opt for in-school sessions for your child, they will still be able to stop attending and access our online curriculum instead at any point.
Please can you make sure that your child has contributed their video to the Christmas shows. It is important that they continue to feel part of their class community. We are also encouraging students to earn the money to donate to our Christmas Baskets campaign. More information can be found here. It's especially important to teach children that they are part of a larger community and that everyone is responsible for those around them. By giving the value of charity a central role, we can encourage our students to grow up with a healthy sense of compassion and a strong charitable spirit.
Primary Wellbeing Week
Here are some examples of the wonderful learning that has been happening this week:
Cooking and Picnic Session, 2nd Aviles
Angry Faces, Prepa Francés
Healthy Eating, Kinder Suarez
Creating a Mindful Jar & Sensory Play, Kinder Rampone
Acrostic Poem, Giuliana Cárcamo, 5th Grade
Yoga, Prepa Francés
5th Quijano
Feeling Grateful, Prepa
Expressing emotions through chalk art, 2nd Padilla
Christmas Toy Shopping
It is that time of year when some have already finished their Christmas shopping whereas others are just thinking about starting. I do not believe that toys should be bought for educational purposes only, but here are some present ideas and things you might like to think about when shopping for toys this Christmas.
Toys that Improve Executive Functions
Children need practice to strengthen their executive functioning skills. Executive functions are the processes in our brains that help us accomplish tasks. We use them when we plan our day, organize our materials, begin a task, focus on important information, use our time wisely, and work through challenges until we accomplish a goal.
The specific skills include: planning, organization, time management, task initiation, working memory, self-control, metacognition, attention, flexibility, and perseverance. While all children could use extra practice with executive functioning skills, the ones who need it the most are often disorganized, struggle to finish assignments, lose items, have difficulty paying attention over periods of time, and give up on tasks that are difficult.
SCRABBLE
Skills: planning, organization
How to Play: In scrabble, kids use random letters to build words and keep score as they go. Planning and organization is required because you need to build off of each others’ words as the game progresses.
PICTIONARY
Skills: flexibility, time management
How to Play: This game has children drawing phrases on paper or a whiteboard that others must guess correctly. Children need to use time management to best draw their phrase before the time is up.
JENGA
Skills: self-control, flexibility, planning
How to Play: In this game, children pull blocks from a tower carefully. They must plan and be careful so they are not the one who causes the tower to fall over.
CHESS
Skills: planning, flexibility, working memory
How to Play: It may surprise you to know that most children can pick up the basics of chess by the time they are five or six years old. Chess requires children to learn specific rules for different pieces and then use those skills to take out their opponent. This game requires a tremendous amount of planning, flexibility, and working memory to think through your moves ahead of time.
PUZZLES
Puzzles can have a profound impact on your child's development. Puzzles develop your child's problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, both crucial for mastery of other skills later in life. Puzzles can also help children with pattern recognition, memory, and both gross and fine motor skills.
The Importance of Loose Parts Play
Has your child ever prefered to play with the cardboard box rather than the toy? Loose parts are materials with no specific set of directions. You can make your own loose parts with stones, stumps, sand, gravel, fabric, twigs, wood, pallets, balls, buckets, baskets, crates, boxes, logs, rope, tyres and shells. Loose parts are better for children’s development because they encourage creativity and imagination, investigation and experimentation. When looking for presents for your child, you might want to consider open ended toys like Magnetic Tiles that encourage this type of creativity.
These two photos demonstrate how toy companies have changed the way children play. On the left is an advert for lego from the 1970’s. Lego was advertised to both boys and girls as a toy to promote creativity, children were the designers and engineers. On the right is a modern lego product for girls, which leaves much less room for imagination.
Considering Gender in Toy Marketing
Clearly divided pink and blue aisles with dolls and tea sets on one side and trucks and building blocks on the other is actually a pretty recent development. As recently as the 1970s, toys were not always marketed with clear gender distinctions.
While it may seem like a trivial issue, toys help children to learn new skills and develop intellectually. Dolls and pretend kitchens are good at teaching children cognitive sequencing of events and early language skills. Building blocks like Lego and puzzles teach spatial skills, which help set the groundwork for learning math principles down the line. Both genders lose out if we put kids on one track and they can’t explore a wide range of toys. Gender preferences for toys only show up after children learn about their gender. Babies show no preference, research says.
Between ages three to five, gender is very important to children. So when children see clearly divided aisles with reinforced gender cues like pink or blue toys, they pay careful attention. In experiments, if you take a truck and show a girl a group of other girls playing with the truck, that girl will be more likely to play with it and see it as a girl’s toy.
For example, in one experiment, researchers took toys that kids had not seen before and put them in stereotypical girl boxes or stereotypical boy boxes and gave them to a group of children. Girls played with the toys in the girl boxes and boys gravitated to the toys in the boy boxes. Both genders focused on the toys in the boxes meant for their gender and did not pay much attention to toys marked for the opposite gender.
However it’s hard for parents to ignore the marketing and get their kids' toys or costumes meant for the other gender. While some parents may try to broaden the toys their children are exposed to, there is often a social cost to the child for crossing gender boundaries.
10 Reasons Lego (and other construction toys) are Great for Children
1. Teamwork and Social Skills
2. Communication and Language skills
3. Problem solving, Mathematics and Spatial Awareness
4. Creativity and Experimentation
5. Physical Development
6. Perseverance and Management of Frustrations
7. Self-Confidence
8. Lowering Anxiety and Stress
9. Patience
10. Focus and Concentration
December
Friday 11th: Last day of Extracurricular Activities
Friday 11th: Deadline for donating to our Christmas Baskets campaign
Friday 11th: Deadline for completing ‘Parent Comment’ for your child’s report
Wednesday 16th: PK Christmas Show 12pm
Wednesday 16th: Kinder Christmas Show 1pm
Tuesday 15th: 2nd Grade Christmas Show 4pm
Tuesday 15th: 3rd Grade Christmas Show 5pm
Wednesday 16th: Prepa Christmas Show 2pm
Wednesday 16th: 1st Grade Christmas Show 3pm
Thursday 17th: 4th Grade Christmas Show 4pm
Thursday 17th: 5th Grade Christmas Show 5pm
Friday 18th: Last Day of Term
Monday 21st: Christmas Holidays start
January
Monday 11th: School resumes after Christmas Holiday
From the Secondary Leadership Team
It’s inspirational sitting in a meeting with students. On Thursday I met with the Grade 12 Student Leadership Team. As I listened to their ideas on how to celebrate the end of the year, as well as ways to welcome in 2021, it dawned on me that these were all incredibly impressive people. They excel as students. Their grades may not always be the best in every subject but I have no hesitation in repeating my point, they excel as students.
These are all busy people with numerous deadlines looming yet they willingly began a meeting at 3:20 and finished at 5:00. Throughout the entire time, their energy and creativity never waivered. Their collaborative skills were obvious; their ability to listen to and accommodate one another’s commitments beyond the task under discussion exemplary; and their organisational skills, the type that many of us aspire to. In addition, all of them are keeping on top of the IB Diploma Programme, rounding off university applications and like everyone else, coming up to the end of the ninth month since we began online teaching. It’s this ability to successfully juggle so many things that convinces me that these are excellent students.
LSU recently delivered a Life Skills session to Grade 10 that provided insight into how these students have become the role models they so clearly are. Grade 11 and 12 will soon receive the same session.
The session explored student ownership of learning. It’s not enough to know what the curriculum consists of; students need to reflect on why and how they learn. The content might be equations, osmosis or paragraph writing but is this the full picture?
No.
There are two more stages beyond simple content:
Awareness and behaviour
Cognition
The former gives the opportunity for students to identify weaknesses and suggest actions, whilst the latter identifies the deeper, longer lasting, transferable cognitive skills: the development of visual-spatial processing for example or sequencing.
The Grade 12 student leaders are self reflective learners who are not just honing subject knowledge, they are transferring their study skills into real life situations that will benefit themselves moving forward and the ABC community now.
As parents and teachers we all need to remain aware of education as a tool towards forward thinking, self empowerment and not an end product. This way we can motivate future students, regardless of what grade they are in, to purposefully take control of their learning and develop the type of skills that allow them to happily immerse themselves into enriching tasks whilst juggling their academic commitments.
Screen Time:
Thanks to Ms. Fenlon, we have recently come across some screen time advice that Ms. Chávez has put into a useful visual. Thank you both:
Christmas Shopping:
Grade 11 have been busy putting together a list of local sustainable and/or organic businesses for you to consider when buying gifts or supplies for Christmas. Follow this link for your gift ideas
Have a great weekend,
Colin Hogan
Assistant Headteacher- IB Years
Dates for your diary
SECONDARY
December
Monday 7th - Real Spanish Oral IB Exam
Tuesday 8th - Grade 9 virtual Learning Review Day
Friday 18th - Last Day of Term
Monday 21st - Christmas holidays start
January 2021
Monday 11th - First day of Term
Monday 18th to Friday 22nd - G12 English Orals
Tuesday 26th to Friday 29th - G7/8 Mock Exams
Wednesday 27th - IB Spanish EE
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