October 2015

The ISL Headlines

“Striving for

Excellence”

From the Head of School : Mr. Martin Gough

As you may know, the school is authorized and accredited by a number of organisations. In the past two years we have completed self-studies and been re-authorized to deliver the International Baccalaureate Primary Year (Nursery to Year 6) and Diploma Pro-grammes (Year 12-13) for the next five years. In both cases we received very supportive reports from the IBO.

We are also jointly accredited by the Council of International Schools (CIS) and New England Association of Schools and Col-leges (NEASC). The current 10-year accreditation is coming to an end and we have started the process of re-accreditation with these two organisations. The process starts with a preliminary report,

now completed, followed by a visit from representatives from both organisations, which will take place from 7-10 October. Assuming that we are then cleared to go ahead for re-accreditation, the school will start the 12-18 month self-study, leading to the production of a series of reports. This stage will be followed by a visit of 8-10 educators from other international schools who will read and analyse our report and spend a week visiting the school to confirm that we meet the requisite standards and indicators and that the school is progressing. The self-study process involves around 15-20 separate commit-tees mostly made up of teachers and other staff, but with representatives from parents and students in some areas of the study. If you would be interested in being part of an accreditation committee, please do get in touch with Sunita Nair, Primary Principal (primaryprincipal@islzambia.org ) or me (headofschool@islzambia.org ). The main areas considered in the accreditation process are:

School Guiding Statements Teaching & Learning Governance & Leadership Faculty & Support Staff Access to Teaching & Learning School Culture & Partnerships for Learning Operational Systems

By the time you read this the PTA Carnival held on Saturday 3rd October will have taken place. I would like to thank the PTA for the time and effort they put into the Carnival this year. The event was intended to be smaller than in previous years whilst the PTA and school explore other ideas for community and fund-raising events.

The electricity situation at school has been ameliorated by the use of the 20kVa genera-

tor, which allows us to run the Admin block, Secondary Library and all the IT teaching

labs. The number of cuts during school hours has been quite low in the past two weeks

and this has also helped. The school is investigating the costs and benefits of installing

a larger generator and/or solar power to supply electricity to all or the majority of the

campus during cuts. The initial capital costs of a large generator are sizable, but still

lower than a solar solution. However, there are concerns about the high operating costs

of a large generator given the possible increases in fuel price, especially if more and

longer cuts come into operation. On the other hand, a solar solution may have capital

costs that the school just cannot afford. We will keep you posted once a larger scale

solution has been identified.

Important Dates

Head of School 1

Primary princi-pal/Early years

2

Upper Primary 3

PYP 4

Secondary Princi-pal/IGCSE/IB

5

CAS 6

Yr 7 Wild Tracks 7

Yr 8 ICT 8

Contents

Yr 11 trip to Tree Tops

5th Oct

UN Day 16 Oct

Mid Term Holidays

19th

Oct–

23rd Oct

Yr 10 trip to Wildtracks

2nd Nov

Hello once again

School has begun in right earnest for both students and teachers alike and I was pleas-antly surprised that it was time for the second newsletter- a month has flown by!

Our Professional Development days- September18th and 19th were very successful. All teachers in Primary School got a lot of ideas to use in classrooms and were inspired by our IB workshop leaders Peter Ndung‟u and Alexandra Francesconi from Kenya and Malawi. A big thank you to them from ISL!

Our Year 6 students and teachers along with Ms. Duvivier and Mr. Kowa returned safely from Treetops with lots of stories to share. We missed them and are very happy to have them back!

Our Year 2 teacher Ms. Anne Marie Phiri leaves us at the end of this month to have her first baby. I take this opportunity to wish her well on behalf of the school and look forward to the good news in November. She will be replaced by Ms. Bhaga from Nursery. Mrs. Reddy will hold the fort in Nursery with our very able teaching assistants.

Recycling is something we believe in at ISL. If you have newspapers, magazines or books, to get rid of, please hand them in to us and we will recycle them for you. We send them to APTERS at UTH for making aids for disabled people and our Art Department finds good use for them too. If you have plastic bags at home you want to get rid of, please hand them in to Mrs. Bentley in Learning Support Department. They get sent to Chikumbuso where many ladies create beautiful objects using them.

Look out for a green idea in our next newsletter!!

ISL Headlines! Page 2

Message from the Primary Principal: Mrs Sunita Nair Primary

This year I would like to use our monthly newsletter as a chance to showcase some of the amazing work coming out of our Early Years department. As always the school has been a hustle and bustle of inquiry and exploration. Under the or-ganising theme of How We Organise Ourselves, the Year Ones have been learning how Many products go through a process of organised change before they are used. The children used the story of The Little Red Hen as the basis for the process used to make bread. They then went to Spar's bakery to watch bread making. This unit has also seen them head off to Fringilla Farms where they watched and understood the process of change meat went through to become sausages. As it starts to warm up and while we wait for the much-anticipated rains, please be sure to pack enough water for your child as well as a hat. Mid-term break is just around the corner and on the last day of school, Friday 16th October, we will have our annual UN Zambia Day. Its time to start thinking about your child's national dress and getting their outfits ready for our Parade of Nations. More information will be heading your way closer to the time.

From the Early Years Coordinator: Mrs Karen Hedstrom

It was one of those nervous but exciting mornings on Monday 21st September. The Year 6

students happily set off in the buses as their parents waved them an anxious and maybe a

slightly tearful goodbye. Off they went to Treetops and didn‟t they have an eventful week!

Jumbo the elephant welcomed the Year Six.

Year Six spotted these hungry cheetahs on the Busanga plains, probably plotting

their next move. A hyena robbed them of their kill the previous day! The two chee-

tahs are participating in the Zambia Carnivore Program, an initiative aimed at un-

derstanding why hunters target carnivores. Note that one of them has a collar.

My Treetops Experience by Jerry George Matthew

The cold, spine chilling breeze flew through the window and touched my feet. Well, that was my version of

an alarm clock in the bush in Treetops. I knew I was up for a new day and a new adventure! The high-

lights of my Treetops adventure were seeing the cheetahs on the Busanga Plains, lions mating, waiting for

hippos to come up, but the best part was seeing a leopard up close in the creepy, scary night drive. We

ended with a braii at the Busanga Plains. We had so much fun at Treetops, I give it 100%!

Upper Primary Events

Our first Interhouse Competition began with a splash of colour. Kafue, Luangwa and Zambezi houses participated in

an Interhouse Art competition. Each house had to produce a collage celebrating diversity at ISL. The children came up

with so many creative ideas and everyone really enjoyed the competition, including the competitive teachers! Thank

you to the judges, Mrs Gough, Mrs Nair and Mr Patterson. Results will be announced in Friday‟s Upper Primary as-

sembly.

From the Upper Primary Coordinator: Mrs Tasneem Mohmed

ISL Headlines! Page 3

On 18th and 19

th September, 31 Primary Teachers attended a fruitful workshop

which gave them a greater insight into how assessment works in the Primary Years Programme. This was facilitated by two fantastic IBO Workshop leaders, Peter Ndung‟u and Alexandra Francesconi. The teachers participated in a variety of activities, shared knowledge and re-flected on their own practices. Two days seemed like an hour as the workshop was so interesting coupled with a lot of humour - just what we all needed! At the end of the workshop teachers demonstrated their learning in different media for example, skits, songs, poems, and photomontage. These were exciting, hilarious and wonderful moments. I am proud to say that the knowledge that was acquired during this workshop is being implemented successfully in our classes.Thank you teachers for your dedication and team spirit. ISL is a community of life-long learners and I believe that together we can become educational role models to children. Therefore, we have planned a parent workshop in October on „Being a PYP Parent‟. We would encourage you, our parents, to come along and participate. Hope to see you there!!!

Message from the IBPYP Coordinator: Mrs Grace Kambeu

ISL Headlines! Page 4

From the Secondary Principal: Mr. Craig Patterson

It doesn‟t seem to take very long for a school to get back to full speed after a summer holiday comes to a close. In the few weeks since our return, the students and teachers are now in-volved in a myriad of activities and events from the CAS and Community Service programme to ISL sports team-training and inter-school competitions. We‟ve also elected our House Cap-tains who are preparing their teams for the first inter-House competitions next week. The Stu-dent Council is busy preparing for Spirit Week and the elections to be held in the near future. At the same time, the Camps programme is well underway with Year 7 having completed their trip to Wildtracks, Year 11 on the way out to Tree Tops next week, followed by Year 10 the week after that. In amongst all this we also have the usual after-school programme, the les-sons, projects, homework, tests and assessments! I encourage everyone to keep up the good work. Changing gears can be difficult, but with commitment and perseverance, good habits will develop. This year we have revised the Secondary reporting cycle to give students much earlier feed-back each semester. This change means that the first report cards will be issued in a couple of weeks, giving students a snapshot of how they are faring thus far. This report will be supported by the Student-Parent-Teacher Conferences which are an opportunity for students and parents to meet the subject teachers, discuss strengths and weakness and set some goals for growth over the next few months. More details on the conferences will be sent to the parents in an-other communication. As always, do contact the Secondary office if you have any suggestions about how our school can continue to improve.

Secondary ISL Headlines! Page 5

October is the trip month for Years 10 and 11. Year 11 leaves for Treetops campsite in Kafue National Park on Monday 5/10. It is en-couraging that most students have signed up (27 out of 31). There will be time for game drives but the main objective is some fieldwork projects on adaptations, behaviour and classification. Year 10 will depart a week later to Wildtracks in Lower Zambezi, and again, the number of students that are signing up is high, higher than in the previous 2 years. Their program contains a mixture of environmental, cultural and teambuild-ing activities. More about both trips in the next newsletter.

From the IGCSE coordinator: Mr R Van de Velde

After almost two months back at school, the students would probably agree with me that the “honeymoon” period is over, as they are now experiencing the busy, challenging but indeed ex-citing life of an IBDP student!

The IB2 students are currently completing their Extended Essay, which needs to be handed in on the 6

th November, soon after the October break. Some of the students have also started

working on their university application, including their personal statement, with the help of our college counselor, Miss Rapaport.

This month Professor Marion Hetherington, from Leeds University came to visit ISL and spoke to the Biology and Psy-chology IB1 students about her research into food/feeding of children. A huge thank you to our guest for sharing her knowledge of Biopsychology with the students!

IB Corner! From Nathalie Vignard

CAS reflections…. In the IB Diploma Programme, all students go out into the community to work with community schools. They plan the lessons they are going to deliver and often have large groups to deal with. Our students are not trained teachers but they seek advice from our primary teachers and take ma-terials from school to support their teaching and we believe that these experiences help them to mature and change them as people. Part of the CAS process is to reflect on their experiences and the following excerpts show some of the difficulties and rewards of their service projects.: Today was my first day actually leading/teaching at Sunspring School. We combined the "babies" and the grade one children to work on shapes and colours. The group of children we had today was quite large and many of them don't speak English, especially be-cause they are young. This made it harder for us to communicate what we wanted them to do….We then split them into three groups, with one big paper each, so that they could stick the previously cut out shapes onto the paper to make a "town" out of the shapes. The kids really liked doing this as it was a very hands-on activity. How-ever, it did get quite hectic….It was great working with Nahia be-cause if an initial plan didn't work out, we could very quickly work together to change it to suit the situation. It was difficult for us to communicate through all the noise, but I really couldn't have done it without her. Ruella Che IB1

When we visited Sunspring School last Thursday, we were organized and had all our equipment and activities ready for the lesson... Firstly we had a plain graph that we stuck on the wall; we printed some pic-tures of animals and told them to pick their favorite out of the selec-tion we gave them. We plotted their choices as a bar graph and ex-plained graphs. It was quite difficult to explain graphs, but I think we need to provide more examples and activities involving graphs to help them understand….After we were done with the graph we drew a but-terfly and told them to copy it on paper. In each butterfly wing we had

a mathematics problem that they each had to solve….We had a very good time and the children seemed to enjoy the activities we gave them. They colored the butterflies very well.

Helen Pikira IB1

I chose to work with the ‘baby’ class with Dhruvin. The children were so adorable and I was excited

to start to begin my classes with the little kids…..We had planned to read a story about a farmer

duck. In addition we had also prepared flash cards with different farming utensils as a reference for

the kids. As I was reading the story I noticed many of the children seemed a bit lost. I thought it was

due to their low level of English understanding, so I simplified the story completely. I chose to focus

on the illustrations rather than the text….We decided to end our lesson by allowing the children to

draw pictures of the various flash cards we brought. I was really impressed with the high quality

drawings we received.

Srivatsan Rajagopalan IB1

ISL Headlines! Page 6

CAS News from Mrs Cherry Gough

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FUN AND

ADVENTURE.

I really enjoyed Wildtracks. I learned about

animals, nature and birds and gazed at the

stars. They were especially beautiful.It was a

truly enlightening experience. The people

that were there were inviting and helpful.

They went out of their way to make our trip

the best possible.We fished, made art,

climbed a HUGE baobab tree and explored

the bush. The baobab was quite fun. Though

I did get a bit scared, I enjoyed it all the

same.All in all, I had loads of fun at Wild-

tracks and can’t wait until Year 10!

LUSHOMO KONI

Wildtracks was really fun and we did so many activi-

ties. The boys were lucky because we got to sleep in

chalets, but the girls had to sleep in tents. My group

started with fishing, then climbing the baobab tree.

Next we cooked our own supper with tuna, pasta and

made a dessert. Later we did an obstacle course and an

art activity. We had lots of fun and I was kind of sad to

leave the place. I learned that I don’t need T.V or video

games and I also made more friends.

LUAAY MOHSEN

CONTACT US The International School of Lusaka

6945 Nangwenya Road

Lusaka, Zambia

Phone: +260 211 252291

Fax: +260 211 252865

E-mail: info@islzambia.org

www.islzambia.org

http://www.cois.org/ http://www.cie.org.uk/

http://www.neasc.org/ http://www.ibo.org/ http://www.pamojaeducation.com/

Microsoft Excel is Not Only About Facts and Figures………..

Grade 8 Give It The Creative Edge

Grade 8 students have had great fun expressing their creativity in an unexpected way. Microsoft Excel is well known for being a software tool used by Accountants and others to record facts and figures, perform formulas and mathematical equations and maintain files.

In Middle School ICT, students have been recording information in an entirely different way, designing pic-ture puzzles and undergoing police training to enable them to become temporary cypher experts, unearthing the guilty party in an attempted murder mystery.

Working in collaboration with the Social Studies and Science departments, students chose an interesting topic (Egypt topping the list), researched and collated 16 questions and answers and provided instructions for users to uncover the hidden animal in their puzzles. Colourful formatting and images completed the „picture‟.

As cypher experts, they collaborated and worked alone to decipher a number of hidden messages to uncover the culprit in the attempt-ed murder of Mr. Burns. They used their detec-tive skills and a range of encryption methods (including the Caesar Wheel, Jumbled Alphabet and Morse Code) to uncover the culprit. The final test was to design their own cypher and to bamboozle their fellow students with their exper-tise.

Technology can stimulate the creative!

ICT Coordinator—Ms. Sharron McDuncan-Bain

ISL Headlines! Page 8