Developing Minds Developing Character Developing Community
To Educate for International Understanding
Issue 01: Respect and Collaboration 02: Integrity and Compassion 03: Choices & Risks 04: Balanced Lives
Beliefs in Action Highlights from our Community
Our students are passionately involved in community service projects that make a difference in the lives of others and the world around us. Throughout all aspects of school life, our community strives to show compassion and respect when interacting with each other and contributing to programmes that have a positive impact on our school and the local community.
Nurse’s Office Our ISA Nurses are a prime example of how our community acts with integrity and compassion in challenging times. During the pandemic, our Nurse’s Office has led our response to ensure our community’s safety and worked tirelessly to keep our school open for everyone to work and study, often throughout their weekends and evenings. While supporting our community, our Nurses continue to act with patience and kindness. We are endlessly thankful for their hard work and dedication! PTA Service Activities ISA has been investigating ways that our community can assist displaced individuals from around the world. Students, Faculty and Staff have come together with the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) to explore positive avenues of service. PTA and SHARE, an ISA parent group that helps student-led service projects, are working together to sell cookbooks, with all money raised being donated to UNICEF. The PTA also started collecting various items to be donated to those in need. A specific category of items have been collected each day in the Main Foyer of the school. Together, our ISA community can make a difference by showing compassion for those in need and will continue to help wherever possible.
Teacher to Teacher Cohorts 2022 ‘Teacher to Teacher Cohorts’ is our Lower School’s annual sharing of new ideas and professional inquiries. Faculty members are asked to submit proposals for presentations across two Friday morning symposiums, and their colleagues sign up to attend, absorb and engage. Ms. Loban, Head of Lower School, believes that the Teacher to Teacher Cohorts are a powerful example of ISA’s enduring dedication to professional development amongst its staff, and to the integrity of the school’s commitment to embody an authentic culture of thinking. She quotes the influential child developmental psychologist Lev Vygosky - ‘children grow into the intellectual life of those around them’ - and explains that it is vital that teachers be role models for their students in their dedication to learning, growing and curiosity.
A notable feature of the 2022 Teacher to Teacher Cohorts was the number of sessions that dealt with mental health and wellbeing (just some of the cohorts included ‘Mindful Classrooms, ‘The Role of Emotions and Feelings in Reflection, ‘Covid: Adult Agency and Our Shared Experience’ and ‘Artful Wellbeing’). It’s heartening to see how, even after almost 2 fractured years of curveballs and unpredictability, our teachers remain focussed on keeping ISA’s beliefs at the forefront of their work, showing compassion for both their colleagues and their students. ‘There’s a recognition’, Ms. Loban agrees, ‘that wellbeing needs to be a priority for teachers and students right now’.
“Children grow into the intellectual life of those around them.”
Did you know: since the beginning of this school year, ISA has welcomed more than 130 new students into Upper School? For the grown-ups in the ISA community who didn’t attend international schools in their youth, it’s probably something of a shared experience to have had a very stable group of classmates right throughout secondary school life. In most schools, big groups of students join at certain points (such as the start of Middle School or High School), and other than that new arrivals are a fairly rare occurrence. For those new arrivals though, joining a grade level where everybody has already been developing their friend groups and relationships for some time already can be a challenging experience. In international schools like ISA however, new students join at all grade levels at all stages of the school year. It’s less of a rarity, but even in a community where the average stay for families is around 3 to 4 years, so social groups may be likely less rigid, transitioning into a new secondary school can be tough. Each and every one of these new members of our community has their own story, their own excitement and hopes about joining a new school, and their own anxieties and fears too. We all have a big part to play in making new students feel like ISA is home, and somewhere they belong, from their first days here.
One particular group in our community plays a particularly important role in making new students feel welcome: the ISA Student Ambassadors. All of our new Upper School students get paired up with a Student Ambassador in their new grade level, and get contacted by email before they arrive in Amsterdam. Our Student Ambassadors are volunteers from our Upper School who, remembering what it felt like to be new at ISA, sign up each year to be welcoming, helpful and compassionate to their new schoolmates. It’s a testament to the great job that they do that many new students are then inspired to be ambassadors themselves : one good turn deserves another! We owe a huge debt of gratitude to all our Student Ambassadors - so here’s a big shout-out and thank you for being role models for everyone at ISA!
After School Care
Even More Fun, Friendship and Learning!
ISA is one of the longest-established international schools in the Netherlands we’ve been on the go for nearly 60 years now! As the school has changed and grown over the decades, so too has the diversity and demographics of our community. A development that has been quite marked in recent times has been in the increasing number of families where both parents are working. It was once much more common for families to move to Amsterdam on expat contracts where just one parent would be working, but this has been changing over the past few years. With this sea-change, there has been a growing demand for care provisions for children at ISA beyond the 15.30 end of school day. After much work and research, the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year saw the launch of ISA’s After School Care Programme for children in Preschool through to Grade 5. A core aim for the programme was to offer ISA parents some flexibility over collecting children from school, up until 18.00 each day. It was, however, very important to the school that our After School Care Programme not be merely a childminding enterprise, but an authentic continuation of the work that our amazing Lower School staff do with our young students every day. Our mission is to educate for international understanding, and this doesn’t end when the school day finishes!
Rosa Middendorf has been working at ISA for some time now, and is leading the new After School Care Programme. She has a background in counselling, and stresses how important the social, emotional and wellbeing elements of the programme are for the children. There is always a central focus on building friendships and embracing differences. The programme is broken down into two groups - Preschool to grade 1, and grade 2 to grade 5 - so it’s a great opportunity for children to meet new friends and work together with children outside of their grade levels. At Afterschool Care each school day, and then during vacation days too, children have the opportunity to choose from activities based on STEM, Creative Arts, Creative Cooking and Sports and Movement. Each activity is organised by a specialist teacher, and children are encouraged to work together, think creatively and have fun. Most recently, the children in the ISA Afterschool Care Programme have been using the Beijing Winter Olympics as an inspiration for firing up their imaginations. They have been creating their own versions of Winter Olympic events, from cross-country skiing, to figure skating, to ski jumping. Students were given complete ownership of the event from the get-go, using their creativity and ingenuity to choose their sports, film an opening ceremony complete with a 'dragon dance', design decorations and decide their sponsors. Everyone at the school is so delighted that we’ve had such a successful launch of the programme. We’re excited for how the connections between the PYP work during the day can continue to develop, and how the kindness and care the children of all different ages have been showing to each other has been flourishing.
Grade 1 International Day In January, two of our Grade 1 classes celebrated the end of their unit of inquiry, "Our International Class", with their very own day-long celebration: International Day! Students shared their own cultures through stories, writing, games, crafts, traditional dress and food and, in turn, were able to experience the wide variety of their classmates' cultures. The "Our International Class" unit of inquiry falls under the transdisciplinary theme "Where we are in Space and Time". Students have been learning about different countries and cultures throughout the unit to make connections and develop an appreciation of each other's cultural backgrounds, based on the central concept that "Learning about our countries and cultures helps us make connections with others". Students inquired into what culture means, what makes us who we are, the characteristics of our countries and cultures, and the similarities and differences between our own cultures, emphasising how learning about our cultures helps us understand and appreciate each other.
"Learning about our countries and cultures helps us make connections with others."
Some examples of cultural activities that students participated in during the celebration were writing their name in Hebrew, hearing a story read to them in French and making origami. Students were also invited to wear traditional dress or costumes, the colours of their flag, or something that represents their country. After the celebration, students came up with "Big Ideas" or takeaways from the unit to summarise round off their learning, such as: People live connected to their culture and language. People need to be open-minded to learn about different countries and cultures. Some people speak the same language but they are from different countries. Grade 1's inquiries into and celebration of culture and how it connects us is just one example of how our mission, to educate for international understanding, is practised and woven into the fabric of daily life in an ISA classroom.
Serve the City 'Reversed Advent' Food Parcels
Serve the City is a charity that aims to 'show kindness in practical ways to people in need' that ISA has been working with for around fifteen years. This year, the ISA community participated in the Serve the City's holiday 'Reversed Advent' event, organised by DP I&S teacher Marjorie Bone. The project's goal was to put together Christmas parcels of food for families living in poverty. Serve the City has around 500 families who use their 'unofficial' food bank every week, and unfortunately, the pandemic has disproportionately affected these families. So, Serve the City wanted to gift each family something extra when they came to pick up their weekly food to ensure that "they have food around Christmas and feel loved and cared for by many people." Several homerooms took part, with ISA community members donating food for the parcels, which were then gathered in front of the Christmas tree in the Main Foyer. Assistant Head of Upper School Paul Griffiths then dropped them off at Serve the City, where they were gratefully received to help those families most in need during the holiday season.
Christmas Decorations for De Luwte ISA has a longstanding relationship with the local nursing home, Zonnehuis De Luwte, located just down the street in Amstelveen. This relationship is particularly apparent around the holiday season when students typically perform an annual concert for the nursing home residents. In keeping with the ISA holiday spirit, a group of CAS students decided they wanted to use their artistic abilities to serve their local community. The students decided to create Christmas decorations for residents of the home to brighten up their windows and bring them some holiday cheer. Students hoped that the decorations would also show the residents that someone was thinking about them and doing something for them during the holidays.