Dear Parents and Carers,
I would like to wish you all a Happy New Year. I think everyone is hopeful that the coming year will see a return to normal operations in school. The children miss their friends from other classes and there is a lot of social value in interacting with others outside your peer group. Our Primary students returned in a very happy frame of mind and were very eager to return to our current school routines, see their friends and to learn more interesting and exciting things.
We continue to have new families visiting our school and signing up for their children. Please do not hesitate to recommend us to your friends.
Thank you to everyone who joined us for the primary workshop on reading last night. We hope you found the information useful and that it gave you an overview of the process of learning to read in our school. As usual there were a couple of technical hitches, one of which was the alarm going off in school, which caused those of us who were presenting from school quite a headache. I have been told that the ‘audience’ couldn’t hear it too badly. I hope that was the case. There was a lot of information in the presentation and so we have shared it with primary parents today.
As a school we belong to a group of international schools in Belgium. I think that I have previously mentioned that I am the chair of the Primary group this year. Last term we undertook a project which we called ‘Voices Around Belgium’ where we recorded children singing the song ‘Lean on Me” in different schools and then edited the videos to make one performance. The video has been shared on our social media and you may have seen it. I would like to thank Ms Nichols, our music teacher for organising the event, working with our group of students and editing and preparing the video. Working with other schools is an important part of the education process and as we have been unable to meet face to face, this sort of project has been a great idea. We are hoping to do some similar projects over the next two terms as well.
Some of our students will be taking part in the Maths Olympiad Competition in the next two weeks. The covid restrictions mean that the way the competition is administered is very different this year. The test is online and the students are allowed to do it at home with very strict criteria. We pride ourselves on having a very honest and upright community but this is obviously a situation where integrity is essential. SOF has put in place a variety of security measures to enable the test to take place fairly. We wish our students all the best for their competition but we are proud of them all for taking part.
All of the children were very excited about the few drops of snow we have had over the last few days. Any moment they have been outside they stand staring upwards and trying to catch the snowflakes. A layer of snow does have a magical effect on the world. We think there may be more snow this weekend. Please do dress up warmly and get outside to enjoy it together.
Have a lovely weekend.
Sharon Short
Head of Primary
Designated Safeguarding Officer