Ta l a n o a Newsletter of International School Suva
Volume 7 30 October, 2015
Principal’s Report Dear Parents and Guardians, Welcome to the final term of 2015. As our year 10 and 12 students will soon start their final examinations as the courses they have studied for the past two years are coming to an end, I take this opportunity to wish them good luck. This is a very exciting time and the thoughts of the ISS community are with them.
Inside this Issue Engrave Your Legacy Gymnastics Fiji Update Reflection on Year 7 Camp
The end of the academic year is always a busy time with students and staff both finishing off the current year and looking forward to the coming year. For our students moving out of the Green Cottage and Year 5 it is an exciting time of transition. This planning for transition has already begun and we know that it is often done with both excitement and trepidation as they gear up to swap their green shirts for blue, and for some an introduction to the sulu. I have great confidence that the primary and secondary teaching teams are working hard to ensure a smooth transition. Other students are making some tough decisions. The year 8 students have been asked to consider the subjects they would like to take in year 9, and year 10 students are choosing their options for year 11. In both cases students are entering into systems involving external examination and assessment, and parents and students alike are asking questions to equip themselves with the knowledge needed to make the appropriate choices. Finally, I take this opportunity to introduce you to Romeo McKellar who is joining us to teach Middle School PE until the end of the year. Romeo is well known to many of you as a former teacher who has been a member of our primary and middle-school teams. As mentioned in my earlier email to you all, Romeo joins us as we say goodbye to Fesaitu Mario who has resigned to take up an exciting opportunity to further his athletics coaching career. I am also vey happy to inform you that Romeo will be returning fulltime to the staff of ISS in 2016. Looking forward we still have the primary concert, the Middle and High school presentations and later this term, the farewell assembly where we will say goodbye to students and staff leaving at the end of the year. Please see the school calendar on the ISS website for more details and I look forward to seeing many of you at these functions. Anna Marsden Principal
Alumni Visit Richard Tanumi visits ISS PTFA Corner We are Communicators Primary Update Library ISS Garage Sale Upcoming Events
Engrave Your Legacy Dear ISS community, Want to give back? The Year 12 class of 2015 presents you with The Wall which will give you that opportunity. All members of the ISS community (i.e. current students, former students, teachers, parents and anybody who has been involved with the school) are invited to purchase a plaque with their message to be placed on the wall and will remain for as long as the new building stands. The funds collected will go towards an account for future Service projects initiated by students of International School Suva. The plaques will be made out of stainless steel so as to ensure that your legacy remains for future years to come. You are allowed no more than 100 letters per plaque. Each plaque will cost $200.00 and will be installed on the wall opposite the entrance of the Amphitheatre. Please find the slip below to write the name and the message you wish to put on the plaque. Payments can be made at the business office and remember to take this slip to the business office as well. First round of instalments will begin in week 8 of term 4 so be sure to get your orders in by Friday 20th November (week 7). Some examples of messages include:
Gymnastics Fiji Update Gymnastics Fiji began at ISS on Thursday 11th October 2012. This was and is the first ever Gymnastics Club set up in Fiji and the South Pacific. Thanks to the Principal and managers at ISS, Gymnastics Fiji were able to set up in the Multi Purpose Hall, an excellent space and venue for running such an exciting sport. The Club is growing steadily and has shown that all children from all walks of life are able to take part in gymnastics, no matter what their ability. Whether for competitive gymnastics or recreational gymnastics, children from 5 years and above can enjoy a session of one to two hours under the guidance of their coaches Robert Yeal, Simione Savu and parents who kindly volunteer and assist the coaches and gymnasts. Three years on and Head Coach Robert Yeal began proceedings for Fiji's first ever Gymnastics competition.
“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching, Love like you'll never be hurt, Sing like there's nobody listening, And live like it's heaven on earth.” ― William W. Purkey
On the 7th October 2015 ISS opened its doors to spectators and competitors from ISS and the Pacific Harbour Multi Cultural School. With shouts of encouragement from friends, peers and spectators, the gymnasts competed on Floor, Vault, High Beam and P-bars. For some children, this competition was their first competing as an individual in front of Thank you for helping with the continuous success of the Community and Service spectators. Many of the children competing had never taken part in gymnastics, let alone seen the sport before the arrival of Gymnastics Fiji. programs at ISS. Sincerely, Student Leadership Team of 2015
Name :_____________________________________________________________
With the kind support from Gymnastics Australia, Karen Norden and Brooke Kneebush judged the competition with the assistance of Mr James Young (one of only 2 qualified Gymnastics Judges in Fiji). Karen and Brooke arrived two weeks prior to the competition to hold gymnastics courses in Nadi, Lautoka and Suva as well as have numerous meetings with relevant Ministries and FASANOC. The result being, The Gymnastics Federation of Fiji.
In its infancy, The Gymnastics Federation of Fiji is currently electing its Board members and is again the first of its kind in Fiji. Encompassed by the Oceania Gymnastics Message: _______________________________________________________________________ Federation there are 5 countries included. These are Australia, New Zealand, Guam, _______________________________________________________________________ American Samoa and now Fiji. _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ With the Federation being set up, this opens our doors and enables Fiji to send gymnasts _______________________________________________________________________ overseas to compete against other countries. _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ Date :______________ Signature :___________________
REFLECTIONS ON A YEAR 7 CAMP Dedicated to Miss Shelly because (…. as all year 7 students know ) Miss Shelly LOVES reflections! Miss Shelly organises Year 7 camps with military precision. The students had a full
and tight schedule of activities designed to keep them busy and exhaust them so that they would go to sleep early both nights. Unfortunately, this plan didn‘t work so well on the first night, as there were voices heard up until midnight. Thankfully they were all exhausted by the second night, so we all had a relatively sound sleep. Miss Shelly‘s whistle and clipboard are king! Like Pavlov‘s dogs, Year 7 students
come running to the sound of the whistle and ‗By Jingo‘ ( a favourite Miss Shelly-ism) they had better look out if they aren‘t where they are meant to be after the whistle has been blown. Many of the Year 7 students will need to be monitored for pyromaniac tendencies as
they grow, judging from the number of attempted camp fires spotted around the camping ground. Having said this, it won‘t really be such a big problem in the future, because the fire lighting was in general not successful.
Talking of volleyball… Yang Rui, Max Zhu and John Jiang are all volleyball stars,
with Yang Rui in particular impressing everybody with his serving skills. Year 7 students love games! From Capture the Flag to King of the Hill, and song and
dance competitions, they are all incredibly energetic participants, and organise themselves into teams efficiently and fairly. Two of my favourites were Radar – where students were blindfolded then had to walk a course, and Truth or Dare. We did this on the last night around the covered picnic tables, all huddled together trying not to get rained on. Rani‘s 2 minute crazy dancing, imitations of Moimoi, Shanya running to the bathroom and back 3 times in the rain, and Vasiti doing the caterpillar crawl on the picnic table were all very funny highlights. Our last day concert revealed that there are some seriously talented Year 7 students.
Alex and Breea will no doubt go on to impress the world with their ability to sing Abba songs. And Sam, Lucas, Michael and Sean did a self- described ―awesome montage of song and dance!‖
Some of the Year 7 students need extensive cooking lessons. Tommy and Elian in
particular have learnt the hard way that chocolate can‘t be melted in a pan directly over fire. On the other hand there were a number of groups who had fantastic menus for the camp. Most notably Ella‘s group who cooked Casa Dias for dinner the first night. Much better than the ubiquitous instant noodles in a cup. Miss Shelly likes to wake students up at 7am by banging on the cooking pot with a
spoon. She has a keen disciple for this activity in Michael, who entered into the spirit of annoying his fellow classmates with great enthusiasm. Fortunately (although there were a number of students who would have liked to see this happen) she never did have to follow through on her threats to throw buckets of water on slow rising students. Mr Pana, Lai, Eddie, Mr Dona, Lai and Tima ( staff from ISS) are great to have on
camp for many reasons including fixing badly erected tents, lighting proper fires ( see above) providing a never ending source of boiled water for noodles and tea and coffee, administering first aid, making fantastic bonfires, organising loud volleyball games and catching assorted wildlife to eat.
Visiting Alumni - Joanne Rogors ( ISS Primary 1977- 81) Project Manager, Advertising Agency San Diego, USA. ―My earliest memories would be watching the building of the new school block (the current middle school block) and playing in the vast grounds and rolling down the hill. I had such happy memories here and loved my time in ISS.‖
RICHARD TANUMI visits ISS Australian born singer, dancer/choreographer and former Acrobatic champion of Australia, Richard Tanumi was in the country for a short visit and was invited to share his exciting journey with the performing arts students of ISS. Richard Tanumi has worked with various artists like X-Men star Hugh Jackman and singers, Britney Spears, Fergie, Christina Aguilera, Janet Jackson, Kylie Minogue, Delta Goodrem, Jason Derulo and various others. He spoke about his experiences and inspirations and gave the students a lot of encouragement. Having attended Brent school of performing arts in Sydney, Tanumi spoke about his perseverance and struggle to be accepted into Brent. Richard was also amazed to learn that ISS showcases the biggest stage Productions in Fiji and these productions are all student led. Richard is currently based in LA but frequently visits Fiji (maternal links) and has promised to do a dance workshop for the students of ISS on his next visit. Tanumi says his main aim is to open up a Performing Arts School in Fiji in the next 5 to 10 years.
PTFA Corner The end of the year is near again with only a few activities to run before we commence an exciting 2016 at ISS. Our annual Curry & Quiz Night Back to the 80‘s at the Royal Suva Yacht Club was sold out. Congrats to the winners!
“You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” Lee Lacocca
Communicators, as defined by IB, understand and express ideas and Thank you to all those who dressed up for the occasion and especially a big thank you to information confidently and Justine Ryan with her dazzling team of Gary Frost, Mike Leahy, Georgina Cope and creatively in more than one language score master Dan Burden. and in a variety of modes of co mmun i c at i on . Th e y wo r k Arrive early to bargain hunt with your colleagues, family and friends at our Biggest Best e f f e c t i v e l y a n d wi l l i n g l y i n Garage Sale in Suva on Saturday 14 November at the MPH, from 9-2pm. collaboration with others. (IB Learner Profile) 50 tables are booked including food stalls. Have your say in how we Budget and Spend the funds your PTFA raises. Send your proposals to ptfa@international.school.fj. Social Hour – a special Thank You event dedicated to our Active Parents; the parent liaisons, event coordinators, and career seminar speakers included, will be held on Wednesday 18 November - you will be invited to one of our PTFA members' homes. All those who offered their time and effort to enhance our school community through PTFA related events will receive their invitation shortly. Sadly our last PTFA meeting for 2015 will be held on Wednesday 25 Nov at 2.40 at the Staff Room (New Building). Feel free to join! Will you be available in 2016 to join your PTFA Committee?
Here are some activities to help promote the Learner Profile of Communicator: Encourage your child to stay in touch with relatives and friends who
live in other countries, states, cities by writing letters, using the telephone or sending email. When working on math homework, encourage your child to explain
his answers to you orally or by drawing a picture. Ask your child thought-provoking questions and encourage him or
her to discuss them with you. For e.g. should you do chores around the house? Why or why not? Help your child to improve his listening skills. Being a good listener
is an important part of communicating with others. Catch your child being a communicator. Make sure your child knows
she has done something good. Expressing your approval is a powerful way to reinforce the learner profile, communicator. After reading a book, spend some time considering how the people
in the book were able to communicate what they were thinking. How were ideas expressed by characters? Through talking? Writing? Drawing? Were the characters good communicators? Why or why not?
Primary Update October 30, 2015 With school based assessments and the school year coming to a close, teachers are currently busy writing report cards for students. Student report cards will be available only in the last week of term, being sent home with students on Tuesday, December 1. If your child is not going to be here in the final week of school, reports will be made available for collection from the primary office at the beginning of the 2016 school year unless prior arrangements have been made with the primary office. It is end Week 4 already and we have just completed our international assessment (Years 3 – 10) and school based PAT assessments from Reception up to Year 5. Over the course of the remainder of Term 4 and into the beginning of Term 1, 2016 we will spend time analyzing our results and data. Having spent most of last weekend and this week, inputting data and results into our spreadsheets, I have witnessed a marked improvement with student results in all areas, particularly maths and reading comprehension. As to whether the same improvement will be highlighted in our ISA results, we will not know until the end of the year. Seldom it is by chance that scores rise, it is the result of a concerted effort by an entire staff – an effort that has included focused professional learning for teachers, a more frequent monitoring of student progress and other strategies employed to target student learning improvement. More work will be done with teachers in analyzing data and class/ individual scores particularly in identifying students’ specific strengths and weaknesses enabling them to set goals at a year and class level and in turn, providing students the opportunity to set their own individual learning goals.
Of late, we have seen many students at school before even staff arrive, close to 7am or just after. Please, this is far too early to send your children to school. We encourage all students to attend school no earlier than 7.40am as there is no supervision for students until this time. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter. We send out a huge thank you to our PTFA Halloween organizing committee, primary staff and students for contributing to our very successful Halloween evening on Thursday. What a terrific evening of ‘frightful’ but fantastic fun for our students. Remembering, it’s all for them! Our focus learner profile attribute is ‘Communicators’. You will find an information sheet in this issue of the Talanoa.
Congratulations to all of our athletes who competed in the recent zone carnivals. Lucas Nili, our very talented long jumper has been selected to participate at the next As teachers focus on analysis of individual and class scores, we do the same at a level, the Chow Games. Well done Lucas! Ms Emele should also be given special whole primary level. We look for patterns and seek to develop new strategies and mention here as she has attending many late night meetings over the past few weeks methods, tailoring our professional learning needs to cater for improvement in those to help our school become part of this process. Thank you Ms Emele. specific areas. We are moving away from the smile and file mode of assessment in which we get back test results, smile as we share these results with students and Please keep an eye out in Week 6 for our second last edition of the Primary Press for parents and then file them away, never to look at them again. It is also important that 2015. we avoid evaluating teachers based on what their students score in assessments. As we all know, there are many variables in the assessment equation. While we want Karen and the Primary Team students to improve year to year, we are also very interested in what they tell us about our curriculum and teaching. It is also important to remember that these assessments are one piece of a big assessment jigsaw puzzle for each of our students throughout the year and results should not be the ‘be all and end all’ of their year’s learning.
Walk a while in their shoes…..Who was, series
Library
Magazines in the library
As we start the final term of this academic year, we wish all students the very best in the Keep up with the forthcoming exams. This is a very short term and we know students have no time to waste. In this latest news, world news, issue we highlight our online subscription databases, which will help you in your research and sports, locate reliable information for assignments. business, comments, analysis,
reviews, humor and kid‘s magazine!!
Our subscriptions are for:
These databases have full text curriculum related articles including encyclopedia dictionary, newspapers, primary source documents, Audios, videos, animations and images. All these resources are available through the library webpage and can be accessed after school hours from home. Username and passwords are also available in our library webpage. To correctly reference your work, try using the online referencing generator Citethisforme https://www.citethisforme.com/ Library Blog—Since the end of term 3, our primary students have taken part in posting their reflections in the library blog on the books we have read together. This enables our students to publish their writing easily. You are welcome to checkout the library blog page in the library website. In readiness for our annual stock take, please note that Week 6 will be the last week that we allow students to check out books. In week 7 we ask that all our library reading books, primary resource readers and textbooks be returned to the library. Middle and High School students who wish to borrow text books for the holiday, can do so provided they first complete their end of the year Clearance. Thanks for taking note of this.
For more information, please contact : Ms Salu Vaciloa - Teacher Librarian Email: library@international.school.fj Webpage: http://issfijilibrary.weebly.com/
Upcoming Events (Term 4 Week 5 - Week 8) Term 4 T4 Week 5 Tuesday, November 3 IB Diploma Exams begin Secondary Activity Program ends Thursday, November 5 Sec Music Concert Governance Friday, November 6 Last Day Y12 ACT 8:15am Primary Assembly - Year 1
T4 Week 7 Tuesday, November 17 6:00pm Year 5 Graduation Friday, November 20 8:15am Primary Assembly - brief due to primary concert 10:00am Thank you Morning tea for ISS helpers T4 Week 8 Monday, November 23 Primary Concert - whole primary rehearsal EE/Group 4 Project Y11 IB Pacific Schools Games in Australia Work Experience Y10
T4 Week 6 Monday, November 9 Exam Week y9, 11
Tuesday, November 24 DELF exams 6:00pm PRIMARY CONCERT
Tuesday, November 10 Diwali dress up day
Wednesday, November 25 DELF exams 2:40pm ISS PTFA Monthly Meeting
Wednesday, November 11 DIWALI PUBLIC HOLIDAY 5:00pm ISS PTFA Social Hour Friday, November 13 Primary Press Year level Update 8:15am Primary Assembly Saturday, November 14 BIGGEST GARAGE SALE (9am - 2pm)
Thursday, November 26 DELF exams Y7 visit to Alliance Franรงaise Council Finance ISS Blood Drive Friday, November 27 Farewell Assembly Year 12 Talanoa