From the Head of Primary 13.11.2021

With the exciting news that students will soon return, the primary staff are busy ensuring everything is in place to welcome our students back into school on Monday 22nd November.

The students have been so resilient through all the different periods of online learning, with this last one perhaps being the hardest as many students have never physically met their teachers, as well there are many new students who have never physically met other members of their class. I am sure they are all as eager as us, to finally meet face to face.

Look out for more information, next week, about the procedures we are putting in place, in order to keep our community safe. In the meantime, if you or your child have any concerns or anxiety about the return to school, please contact me: khitchen@kis.edu.my, your child’s class teacher or Ms Siti: snaim@kis.edu.my.

This week the ‘Spotlight is on….

Year 1’

This week the Y1 Topic project was based on the smallest members of the bear family; Sun bears. The students explored Borneo Island where Sun bears live and learnt about their diet and physical characteristics. They then had to create Sun bear puppets and make an informative video of themselves talking about all the things they have learnt about Sun bears.

In English, the students had to write facts about the Sun bears with the end results being information posters on them. In maths, they are starting to count in 10s and 5s, and think about the patterns created in these numbers sequences.

For World Science Day, the children learnt about thrust as a pushing force and they made balloon rockets. Check out some of their videos in the World Science Day section.

Saturday 13th November is:

Let’s all make a promise to do one kind thing for someone else this weekend. The students can continue to work on their ‘Random Acts of Kindness’ for the Fun Class Dojo challenge.

Finally, I would like to extend a very warm welcome to a new student and her family who joined us this week:

Jia Baek (Y3K)

Have a wonderful weekend.

Take care.

Ms Karen Hitchen

Acting Head of Primary

Online Website Blockers

While we are all very excited about the reinstatement of physical learning for the majority of our students, we also know that for some the return may be gradual and online learning, in one form or another, may continue for a little while. With that in mind, we have recently been reflecting on some the obstacles students have faced when it comes to remote learning.

One of the biggest challenges of online learning is, of course, online distractions. A short time ago, we sent an anonymous questionnaire out to students and 15% of them admitted that they play games or watch YouTube during lessons. This is something that is difficult to police – for both teachers and parents – and up until now we’ve had to rely on our students’ self-control and integrity. For the most part, we are very lucky with our students as they do genuinely want to do well. However, they are still teenagers after all and even as adults we know that remaining focused on the task at hand can be tricky when our laptops and phones offer such a variety of distractions.

A potential solution to this problem comes in the form of app blockers. This concept was actually introduced to me by one of our students who identified that this was a habit that was preventing her from being as productive as she could be in lessons. Having had it in place for a couple of weeks now, there have been definite improvements in her levels of participation and attainment. Therefore, if parents are concerned that their children are not always doing what they should be during lessons, I would highly recommend exploring the technologies that have been designed to help students with this problem.

I researched a variety of different platforms such as https://selfcontrolapp.com https://focusme.com and https://getcoldturkey.com all of which come highly recommended by existing users. There are some subscription fees involved if you want the premium packages but the one I would personally recommend, is a Google Chrome extension named Blocksite. Although subscription and premium services are available, the free, basic version has already proven to be extremely effective with regards to the options it offers.

Blocksite will allow you to temporarily block any websites that our students may be drawn to during the course of the school day such as YouTube, Spotify, Discord and gaming platforms. It also allows you to input keywords – such as gaming – and any website with that term will also be blocked. Once the sites you wish to restrict have been entered, you can set up a timer that will block such sites for the period of time you have set it for. You can also schedule breaks in between if your children want to use their laptops to relax over lunch and break times. Then, after school at 3pm, the timer will end and the students will regain full access to the sites they enjoy.

After speaking to the students, it seems a number of them are enthusiastic about the idea because, as I said previously, they do want to do well at school. Still, as I have already mentioned, like all of us, they sometimes need a little bit of support to achieve their goals.

If you feel this will be of benefit to your child I would recommend giving it a go but if you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact me for more details.

Emily Colley

Head of Key Stage 3