The students returned to campus after the break with gusto and the Student Council made plans for different Halloween events. While Halloween has a long history and has its roots in a celebration of the end of the harvest, it means different things to members of the ACG community.
Dear Parents, Caregivers and Students,
Welcome to the recap of the events and learning for the month of October. What a month it has been… we have had a non-uniform day, which helped to raise money for MAN11, which suffered the loss of 4 of their students and serious damage to parts of the school. ACG School Jakarta will be visiting the school in November to see how it can support.
ACG School Jakarta has also hosted SMKN57 in ‘friendly’ games of football and volleyball before the October Term break. ACG students acquitted themselves well, winning in football, and were able to demonstrate wonderful sportsmanship and energy on the field and court.
The students returned to campus after the break with gusto and the Student Council made plans for different Halloween events. While Halloween has a long history and has its roots in a celebration of the end of the harvest, it means different things to members of the ACG community. Coming into ACG, this is not something which was widely acknowledged at my previous schools, but something which the Student Council felt strongly was a part of the ACG student community. The students were able to dress up as a favourite character or monster and collected a little candy in a trick or treat parade. I was very impressed with how many of the students had costumes, and the inventiveness of them.
Please enjoy October’s newsletter.
Warm regards
Myles D’Airelle PrincipalDear Parents, Caregivers and Students,
It is my privilege to join ACG School Jakarta community as vice-principal, PYP coordinator and English Language Support teacher. I would like thank the teaching and administrative staff for the warm welcome I received, and look forward to meeting parents, as well.
I have many years of experience as an educator. My most recent work as International Baccalaureate (IB) consultant and professional development facilitator has taken me around the world. All that engagement with educators and school cultures in a variety of contexts has shown me that a foundation of respect is a fundamental truth of good schools.
IB stipulates that IB World Schools create positive school cultures, and defines school culture as ‘the written and unwritten rules that define how a school functions. It also encompasses personal and collective well-being, the effective utilization of physical and human resources, and the extent to which a school acknowledges and celebrates diversity.’
We can surely find a positive school culture signalled in the written rules such as the school mission statement and policy documents. However, the written words need to be seen, heard and felt, to truly define how a school functions.
That is what I have observed and experienced at ACG School Jakarta so far. Since day one, students of all ages have been greeting me in the corridors, and asking how I was. It would usually take much more than a general introduction during assembly to trust and show sympathy to a new school staff. Educators all around the world are discussing ways to heal the rift between students and the outside world, caused by extended social isolation as a result of the pandemic. So, I was pleasantly surprised when, within a day or two after my arrival, a Year 2 student casually asked me to help her with her mask during morning drop off time, a lower secondary student asked me to reach out to his pencil case which was stuck on top of his locker, and some senior students began initiating small talk with me whenever we meet around the school. Another teacher new to the school also expressed her surprise at how respectful, sociable and polite the students are. Such behaviour is a rarity in today’s education scene in many parts of the world.
Respect opens space for the development of trust, confidence and learning in any given community. It is quite obvious that ACG School Jakarta has a long-lived culture of respect, hence the students enjoy the gift of being able to trust and show respect to new members of the community. That, in turn, is one form of acknowledgement and celebration of diversity. Therefore, it is my privilege to join ACG School Jakarta, a community of entrepreneurial and compassionate learners.
Selda Mansur Vice principal and PYP coordinator
Dear Parents, Caregivers and Students,
I hope that all the Y13 students have had a restful break and I’d like to thank everyone for a productive and positive first term. I enjoyed meeting with many of you during the recent PTSCs.
We started off the academic year with our wonderful IB Retreat and welcomed many new faces into our IBDP Program. The students have been getting back into face-to-face lessons and it’s been great to see so many of them contributing to our school community in various sporting teams, events and CAS projects. During the last week of Term 1, Y13 students studying Chemistry, Biology, or Physics completed their experiments for their IAs. There were many interesting experiments going on and I’d like to thank the Science Department for their extra efforts in this time. We will be hosting a special information session for Year 13s on the 16th of November, so please stay posted for updates and I look forward to seeing you there.
Year 13: Now begins several busy terms of Internal Assessments (IAs) and the Mid-Year Examinations. It is vital that the Y13 students are spending some time after school working on their IAs, revision and Extended Essay, so please support them in staying focused. There are several Extended Essay deadlines coming up shortly, so students need to stay on track. The deadlines have been shared with all the students and have been staggered to avoid multiple assessments being due at the same time. It’s important that students complete their tasks by the due dates, otherwise the tasks build up, which causes additional anxiety and pressure.
Year 12: The students have finished their first term of IB classes. It is always an adjustment dealing with the increased rigor and workload of the DP. We have stressed the importance of students having a study timetable and a balance of outside school activities. Several important times are coming up this term, with the Mid-Year Examinations and the start of the Extended Essay.
I wish the students the best of luck this term and please reach out if anyone requires support.
Kieran Pascoe IBDP Coordinator
As an IB PYP (International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme) World School, we view “partnerships with parents and legal guardians as benefitting the students and value the perspectives they bring to the learning community. The partnerships between home and school provide the foundation to support students’ learning, growth, health and well-being and agency”.
To that end, we are organizing monthly meetings to further involve you in your child’s education. Each month, we will focus on one aspect of the PYP. Kindly complete the survey HERE to help us finalise the arrangement of this programme.
Fill in the survey here
In Year 4, we began our new unit of inquiry on Where We Are in Place and Time. Our central idea is ‘Exploration can lead to discoveries and new understandings. As part of our unit provocation, we participated in an ACG Treasure Hunt. Applying our newly acquired math skills of using an 8 point compass, we worked in small teams to successfully navigate our way around the school in a quest to answer a series of questions. Once accomplished, we then designed our own treasure hunts for our classmates to solve.
This Unit of Inquiry we are focusing on Sharing the Planet. The central idea is Resolving conflicts and promoting justice can help maintain peace. Our lines of Inquiry for this unit are Causes of conflicts, How peace and conflict affect us, and Strategies to resolve conflicts and maintain peace. Some activities that we have been doing have been posted to Seesaw already and include things like resolving conflicts from given scenarios, creating our own nations and communicating and working together through a game simulation, and researching past conflicts that we can learn from. I know that I am very much enjoying this unit and our activities, and I believe the students are too! I can’t wait to see what ideas they come up with for their summative presentations!
more photograph of the activity here
As part of their statistics unit, the Y11 math students conducted their own statistical analysis. They asked each other questions like ‘how long have you lived in Jakarta’, ‘how long do you have to travel to get to school’, ‘what is your shoe size’ and ‘how high can you stick a post-it up the classroom wall’. After recording the data, the students organized their data using tables and graphs, and analyzed the data by calculating mean, median, mode and range. Every time the students now leave the math classroom they will be reminded of this activity when they see the post-its on the wall (almost reaching the ceiling!) above the classroom door.
The senior football team have been training extremely hard this term and thankfully their efforts have recently paid off on the back of several victories. Coach Kieran has been putting them through a vigorous fitness program, including sprints, circuit training and an outside running challenge, while Coach Faheem has been focusing improving their skills and set plays. The combination of increased fitness and skills have turned our team into a formidable force, who have won their previous 4 matches. The boys have really taken the coaching on board and are applying pressure and intensity during matches. We have another two away games before the end of the season, so we’re hoping to keep our winning streak going. Go Wolves!
With an accredited/authorized school, a student has some assurance of receiving a quality education . Accreditation/Authorization is the recognition from an accrediting agency that a school maintains a certain level of educational standards.
In addition to the high standards set by ACG Schools and Inspired Education Group, ACG School Jakarta adheres to a variety of quality assurance processes under which our services and operations as well as education programmes are evaluated and verified by three external bodies: International Baccalaureate (IB), Council of International Schools (CIS) and Cambridge Assessment International Education. Through regular rigorous evaluations, these organizations determine whether their applicable and recognized standards are met at our school and at the same time they support our development through feedback and feedforward.
One such appraisal is our upcoming IB PYP and DP evaluation in 2023-2024 school year. Each IB World School is regularly evaluated to ensure that the standards and practices of its IB programmes are being maintained. As part of the process, the school engages in a self-study that is a key element in the school’s continual improvement.
On 24th October 2022, our school teaching and administrative staff started our self-study work by looking within (the mission statements that direct and guide us) and without (current state of and scientific predictions about life and education worldwide) to define ourselves as a community of entrepreneurial and compassionate learners. We began to study Circular Economy and Compassionate Systems Approach, and formed several groups and steering committees to lead our self-study work. As part of the process, in the near future we will also be inviting feedback and feedforward from our students as well as parents and caregivers.
