IGBIS Weekly Newsletter. Issue 79, Week 1, June 2016.

IGB International School’s Weekly Newsletter - Issue 79, Week 1, June 2016

IGBIS Grade 12 graduates ~ May 27, 2016 (1st graduation ceremony).

Inside this week’s Newsletter

Upcoming Events

Message from Head of School

School

Head of School

News from Primary School

- IGBIS Instrumental Music Academy : End of Semester 2 Concert ........................................................................................

Primary School Principal

Athletics & Activities

News from Secondary School

- KLISS U15 Badminton Championship Makeup Tournament @ Taylors ........................................................................................

Mrs. Anne Fowles,

....................................................................................

Mrs. Claire McLeod

....................................................................................

Mr. Lennox Meldrum,

Secondary School Principal

....................................................................................

Action & Service - Student Leadership Mr. Phil Clark,

Middle Years Programme Coordinator

....................................................................................

Athletics & Activities

Friday, May 27 ~ 2:00 pm

Wednesday, June 8 ~ 4:00 pm

Thursday, June 9 ~ 4:00 pm

- KLISS U15 Boys Volleyball Plate Finals @ Taylors - KLISS U15 Girls Volleyball Plate Finals @ IGBIS ........................................................................................

Saturday, June 11 ~ 9:00 am

- Primary Badminton Championships @ IGBIS

Ms. Jasmine Brawn,

Athletics & Activities Director

....................................................................................

Community Corner Mr. Wayne Demnar,

Admission & Marketing Director

Igniting Minds

Impacting Lives

1

Message from Head of School Dear IGBIS Parents and Community Members, I’m currently in Beijing conducting a verification visit for the IB. This encouraged me to reflect on the progress we have made. It is hard to believe that two years ago we had just moved into the administration area and we were waiting for the rest of the school buildings to be completed. Now we have a fantastic school campus, some of the best IB teachers in the region and we offer a world-class education to our students.

There are only two more weeks in the 2015-16 school year. We hope to see many of our parent community at the instrumental music and end of year assemblies.

Mrs. Anne Fowles Head of School

One of the areas of huge growth this year has been in our offering of after schools activities. While much of this has been due to our participation in interschool sports such as KLISS, the offerings in the arts have also grown. During next week two assemblies will take place for the instrumental music programme to showcase students’ progress and talent, please check these on the calendar in this newsletter.

We have been again chosen by the IB to host regional workshops. Around 150 teachers and administrators from around the globe will be attending a choice of eight MYP workshops at IGBIS over June 10-12.

News from Primary School Mrs. Claire McLeod Primary School Principal .......................................................................................

It has been a very busy week for everyone as we head towards the end of the year. Please watch out for important dates that will help you and your child prepare for our final day on Thursday 16th June at 12 o’clock.

PVO Thank You All our staff had a beautiful lunch on Thursday 26th May courtesy of our supportive PVO families. Most of us selected too many tasty treats and felt rather guilty later! Thank you to everyone who provided us with a wide range of delicacies.

Student Visitor to the ES Office This week l had a visit from one of our Grade 2 students who wanted to show me a book that he had made. Over a period of time he had created a beautiful story about a ballet dancer and then illustrated it with care. He proudly shared it with me and read every page. Whilst l really enjoy spending time in classrooms, it is especially rewarding to have students visit me to proudly show their work.

Hand Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD) HFMD is a common childhood illness that is found in most schools around the world. In most cases the reactions are mild and can be easily managed with care at home. We appreciate the support from our Early Years parents recently and hope that the illness has run it’s course.

2

Igniting Minds

Impacting Lives

News from Secondary School Mr. Lennox Meldrum Secondary School Principal .......................................................................................

Thank you to everyone in our community who came to our first Grade 12 Graduation last Friday.

It was an afternoon full of emotion, memories, and celebration of the years of learning our graduates have successfully completed, both at IGBIS and their previous schools. We are very proud of all of their achievements and look forward to hearing more from them through our alumni organisation.

Thank you and congratulations also to the families of the graduates for all they have done for their children and our community. Your support, advice, and trust has been invaluable.

We have a busy week ahead, as we move into our transition for the 2016-17 school year. Grade 5 students will have the opportunity to have a taste of some MYP classes, while Grades 7 and 9 will learn from the Community Project experiences of our

Grade 8 students as they prepare to take on their MYP Projects next year. Our Grade 10 students have had an extensive course selection process with Mr Marshall and Mrs Davidson over the past few months and we will have a couple of days where they get to see what the DP classes are like. It will be a great learning experience for all involved.

At our final Secondary School Student Council Assembly this week, Mrs Elke Boehncke and her student research group outlined some ways to view challenges that students can face and strategies that can help turn these moments into more positive experiences. It is a part of a continuing project into developing positive wellbeing amongst our students, teachers, and wider community. Feel free to drop in and chat with Elke on level 6 if you wish to learn more.

We are looking forward to our Music Academy students showing us their talents next week in a couple of concerts at 2pm on Tuesday and Thursday in the Theatre. Drop in if you are at school and enjoy the performances.

Igniting Minds

Impacting Lives

3

Action & Service - Student Leadership and video. Their ultimate goal was to create our Mr. Phil Clark school yearbook.

Middle Years Programme Coordinator .......................................................................................

Action and service are key components of all IB programmes and one important way our students demonstrate student-led action and service is through student leadership opportunities at school.

This year I have had the privilege and pleasure of working closely with two incredible groups of student leaders.

Our Secondary School students are very familiar with their Student Council - the Executive Committee members (President - Yin Xzi, Vice President Abdallah, Treasurer - Zulaikha, and Secretary - Tien Xzi) along with all the homeroom representatives.

They have been the voice of the students this year, have organised events for students and have led our monthly Secondary School assemblies. Our current Student Council will continue to serve through to September to ease the start of next academic year.

A new Student Council will be elected in October.

I would like to take this opportunity to formally acknowledge and thank our Student Council for their dedication and commitment and for everything they have contributed to the life of our school community this year.

The second group of truly amazing student leaders I would like to acknowledge and thank is a new group called the Editorial Board. The co-creators, Yin Xzi and Ernest deserve a special mention.

Back in August, they approached me with the idea of creating an Editorial Board - a team of student journalists who would document the year from a student perspective, reporters who would write and photographers who would capture the year in image

it’s a tricky thing, giving a speech and having to walk the fine line between saying what you need to say precise, concise, specific to the given texts-ah… i mean, context… is everything! there are those yawning in the audience, half-awake ears and drifting minds, i’m sorry to be boring but do you even know, can you even comprehend all of the wondrous things that we have accomplished during these thirty five and a half weeks of school? [and yes, for those of you counting, we only have around two weeks of school left.]

4

Ernest and his camera have been in action at almost every school event this year and he has amassed hundreds, if not thousands, of photos. He was lead photographer at our first Grade 12 graduation and is head photographer for the yearbook. Photography was the focus (pun intended) of Ernest’s MYP Personal Project, and the Editorial Board must have consumed half of Ernest’s life this year. The yearbook will be a tribute to his dedication and his photographic skills.

If Editorial Board consumed half of Ernest, it almost completely swallowed Yin Xzi. While there were many contributors to the yearbook, including Ernest and his many photos, the yearbook exists because of Yin Xzi’s vision, planning, communication and editorial skills - and because of her 100% commitment to everything she does. The yearbook has taken hours and hours, every week for nine and a half months to create - and Yin Xzi led as Editor-in-Chief every step of the way.

When you receive your yearbooks in the final week of school and flick through the pages, remember that you have the student Editorial Board, the contributing staff members, and Adi and Arvin from our school publications team to thank.

In our final Student Council assembly of the year last Wednesday, we reflected on some of the highlights of 2015-16. Before you have your yearbook to thumb-through, we would like to share some assembly musings from our Editor-in-Chief, and Student Council President, Yin Xzi:

but… can you begin to comprehend what we have achieved? teachers have established house systems, inspired by hogwarts, i’m sure - but everything changed when the fire nation attacked - still, I knew Aang, born an aerbender would come out on top. there are teachers who have spent long, long, over 24 hours long hours on this campus with us as we made art, music, made IGBIS history by placing first in sports competitions, students and teachers alike who have spent hours taking photographs, being in photographs, sorting through said photographs fun fact; the stuco social that took place right before spring break was the only event of the school year in which no one from the editorial board

Igniting Minds

sported a camera. all of these words that you hear all of the time - IB, MYP, DP, global, learner profile, IGBIS… even words you see all the time now in an illuminated sign resting on the top of the school: igniting minds, impacting lives you might not be aware of this but they are all subliminal messages - think brave new world for those of you who’ve read it MYP authorization usually takes 3-4 years and here we are doing it in two. we’ve had our first graduating class, and, yes, speeches were long, the ceremony dragged on [kind of like what i’m doing right now] but you don’t understand the sheer amount of stress involved in surviving - thriving in the DP.

Impacting Lives

i should alter that last sentence - for those not yet in grade eleven, you don’t understand quite yet, you will, one day, for grade 10s that day is sooner, rather than later, and i assure you the jokes and rumors about IBDP and the lack of sleep are all true - unless you’re me and insist on getting off your laptop at around 10 every night. our parents mean well with their bedtimes and curfews, with their never-ending supply of food and fruit, water. the occasional complaint, and their flowers, spilling over windows to thank our teachers through haze days and thirteen-day-long school weeks. [yes, that happened.] at the start of the school year returning students were half-stunned into silence

by the color of the walls, now they’ve faded and become a natural part of the patchwork that creates this school community.

IGBIS’s own resident santa claus with his gentle smile. holding a red air horn in a gym full of students, sleeping like the dead. dressed up in a shark costume, because it makes students smile a little harder. a permanent fixture of the school hallways, and an adopter of cats born on Friday the thirteenth. Mr. Meldrum with a phone, a coffee cup - two sugars? - attached to his hand, dimples etched into his face. A person we cannot help but remember with a fondness and a genuine smile. thankfully it is not yet time to say goodbye the number of kids that spent hours running around our track, students showing up on the weekends to tour new families around the hallways, all of the tables and chairs moved for conferences,

meetings, instruments rolled to the theater, black shirts and white masks donned to create and perform a show. the sheer amount of effort that goes into trying to do something in this school is something to be proud of, something to hold on to as the year draws to its eventual thirty eight week end. thank you so much.

by: yin xzi ho

Athletics & Activities Ms. Jasmine Brawn Athletics and Activities Director .................................................................................

Just a few reminders this week...

Regularly scheduled activities will run until June 10th, 2016 with a few exceptions.

Please see the finance counter if you have yet to pay for Season 3 activities.

Our last assembly of the year was held this week.

Athletics and Activities showed a brief overview of some of the photos from this year’s experiences at IGBIS. To see the presentation please go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0nUkCX5j2E For more news and highlights on Phoenix Athletics and Activities go to the blog @ https://sites.google. com/a/igbis.edu.my/igbis-activities/home Coming Up in Sport...

• Thursday, June 2 - KLISS U18 Girls Volleyball @ ISP • Thursday, June 2 - KLISS U18 Boys Volleyball @ IGBIS • Wednesday, June 8 - KLISS U15 Badminton Championship Makeup Tournament @ Taylors • Thursday, June 9 - KLISS U15 Boys Volleyball Plate Finals @ Taylors • Thursday, June 9 - KLISS U15 Girls Volleyball Plate Finals @ IGBIS • Saturday, June 11 - KLISS Primary Badminton Championships @ IGBIS

Igniting Minds

Impacting Lives

5

Community Corner take personal responsibility and drive slowly and carefully when in the school grounds

Mr. Wayne Demnar Admission & Marketing Director ................................................................................

Open Day Feedback Our Open Day last Saturday was successful in terms of the response from the families attending.

We received very positive feedback about the interaction with our staff and students and there were lots of interesting questions about the IB programmes. The student ambassadors were kept busy helping with the tours and fielding questions prospective parents could not help but be impressed with their communication skills and confidence. A big thank you to all students and staff who helped out on the day - you certainly did a great job of promoting IGBIS. Thanks also Ms. Arvindar Kaur for co-ordinating the Open Days throughout the year.

Mathematics Assessment in the PYP The PYP Maths Assessment workshop last Thursday was appreciated by all who attended. It was an opportunity for some of our ES team to share the strategies they use in mathematics to assess student learning and understanding. Having students reflect on their understanding and verbalise their thought processes, is a powerful tool for teachers both in assessment and when planning future learning experiences for their students. Parents reflected on their own experiences when learning mathematics and this led to some very interesting discussions Thanks must go to Ms Blakeway, Ms Johanson and Mr Millward for facilitating the session..

Safety in our Carpark We are asking for your assistance in making sure that we don’t have a serious accident in our school grounds and in particular, in the carpark. It has been a cause for much concern that the safety of our students, parents and staff is being put at risk by the actions of some. Reports of drivers going too fast, texting while driving and generally ignoring the directions in the carpark mean that we all need to

IGB International School Intrumental Music Academy End of Semester 2 Concerts

7th & 9th June 2016 | School Theatre | 2:00pm

6

Igniting Minds

Impacting Lives

Photos - PVO Staff Appreciation Lunch | 26th May 2016

Igniting Minds

Impacting Lives

7

Photos - Grade 12 Graduation Day | 27th May 2016

8

Igniting Minds

Impacting Lives