This week started with us asking all of our community to do a self-test before entering the school premises on Monday morning. We asked this of everyone to make sure that we can keep Covid-19 contamination at bay. We were very pleased to see that our primary families and staff really took this seriously and handed in their tests on Monday morning. Only in a handful of cases did we need to follow up. This is an excellent outcome and we hope that next Monday morning we will see a repeat of this as we will request self-testing after every weekend until we are in “safer waters”.

It is apparent that it is only possible to limit the amount of Covid cases in any school and unfortunately we now had to deal with some positive cases in our school as well. We wish to communicate as clearly and timely as possible so that our community is in the loop at all times. We aim to provide all the information that families need and actively trace positive cases in school to identify close contacts. Those who have been identified as close contacts have been asked to self-isolate. A big thank you goes out to our parents for their flexibility, their support and understanding!

In line with what already has been happening, please notify the school if your child has tested positive for Covid. We need to report this to the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health. This is even the case if children have not been in school.

Over the last two weeks, we have been talking with the children about the RECIPE value of communication. In our assemblies, we combined this with talking with our children about the school’s mission and vision. We explored with them what it is that they want out of school and what it is that teachers and leaders think we need to achieve as a school. We used the idea of an imaginary and invisible rucksack in which the children could place all the good things they wished to experience when in school. They all had an opportunity to write to me and in today’s assembly, I shared with them the things that were mentioned the most.

The top 15, out of many things that were mentioned, of what they wanted to see happen in school was as follows:
To become smart - to get a growth positive mindset for learning - to gain Knowledge, Skills & Understanding - to get a bigger brain - for the teachers that we love - to be in school and not online. Even mentioned more were: for friendship - to have fun (enjoyment) - the RECIPE - to learn new things. Finally, mentioned by almost everyone was of course: learning!

This aligns beautifully with how the primary team has described their vision and mission. We wish to achieve that in our school, we shape the atmosphere, culture and environment to ensure that, through well designed and well-delivered lessons, all brains are learning all the time. We strive for personal, international and academic excellence so that everyone can take their place as resilient individuals, global citizens and responsible leaders in a global community.

We use the Quantum Learning system to facilitate learning in all three areas. Our curriculum covers goals for academic, personal and international learning. For the personal learning aspect, we have our Taylor’s RECIPE (Respect, Excellence, Communication, Integrity, Passion and Enjoyable Environment).
We love that our children mention the growth mindset and the passion they have for learning. It is very nice that they too mention knowledge, skills and understanding as the three kinds of learning they wish for themselves. It does seem that we all want the same things out of our precious time in school!

In the same assembly on communication, we were very proud to announce some very strong communicators of our own: our student council representatives for 2022. They did an excellent job communicating to their peers how they would be the voice for them and what ideas they had for the school. This got them elected and we expect great leadership from all of them. After they were introduced in our assembly, they were handed their certificates and badges by Ms. Tania, Ms. Jayne and myself. They will wear their badges with pride.

Finally, at the end of this letter, we need to say goodbye to Ms. Shalini, our TA in EY. After Monday she will engage in her new challenge in education. This week we welcomed to our community two new teachers who have joined us. Ms. Annisa is our new assistant head of primary school for KS2, an online introduction for all KS2 parents will follow soon, and Ms. Audrey has joined us as TA in our Early Years. We are very glad that they have joined TISPC and wish them lots of success.