From the Head of Secondary 02.07.2022

This week has been filled with excitement, not just in Secondary, but across the whole school!

On Monday we had a fantastic Science Day. Primary and Secondary staff and students came together to celebrate all things Science. Students set up their stalls in the Hall to show off their hand- made boats, all shapes and sizes, colours and designs. It was wonderful to see the results of the teamwork that Key Stage 3 students had been working on in their Science lessons. Later on, it was all down to the front of school where a pool had been set up. This was the big test! Would those boats actually sail? Would they flounder? Would they capsize? Would any of them complete the task, to make it from one side of the pool to the other?   Tension was high as Ms Service gave the countdown to each race ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1’ and off they went! Or rather, off they didn’t go, in some cases, or some seemed to prefer their own route, usually round and round in circles [at quite impressively high speeds!]. In the afternoon we were all in the hall to watch the House Challenges, the final one involving throwing, eggs, and catching-baskets. Some eggs splattered onto the floor and Mr Bryant was despatched to the washroom to get lots of paper towels to clean up. It was all good fun, with House points being accrued.

Well done to all the students and the staff, especially Mr Colbeck and Ms Service!

As I write this on Wednesday we are looking forward to Arts Day, which covers a range of Drama, Music and Art activities and includes the KIS Talent Show. This promises to be an amazing event, and again many thanks to our Creative and Performing Arts Department, Ms Yuen, Ms Tretter and Mr Bryant for working so hard, with Primary colleagues, to give us a day to remember. (Scroll down for list of ‘KIS Has Talent’ winners!)

We were able to hold our first Secondary Celebration Assembly in the Hall for two years on Thursday morning, the final day of term. Lots of awards were given out, including Bronze, Silver, Gold and Principal, and academic awards for ‘Top in Subject’ and ‘Most Improved in Subject’. In addition our leaving staff said a few words to mark this final day. Many thanks to Ms Service, Mr Davis, Mrs Davis and Ms Milligan for everything they have contributed to our school, and we wish them the best of luck for the future.

Have a Wonderful Holiday!

Kind regards

Mrs Margaret Renshaw

Deputy Principal / Head of Secondary

Global Citizen Awards 2022

Some months ago I asked the KIS community to nominate students for the Global Citizen Award 2022. A Global Citizen understands ‘that we are all connected, and upholds the values of equality and actively contributes to the development of a better world’.

In the final assembly two Year 9 students received this prestigious award for everything they have been doing, over some years, to raise awareness of the environment and what we can all do to help.

Tiggi Mornington-Sanford: Global Citizen 2022

Tiggi was a Founding member of the EcoWarriors when she was in Year 5. In Kudat she regularly clears the beach near her home and she is involved in protecting the sea turtles, identifying and protecting their nests and being there to release the hatchlings into the sea.

She confronts local politicians to find out what they are doing to protect the environment. After meeting up with Ben Chong (Kudat) on two occasions to highlight the rubbish problem and with added pressure from various people, Mr Chong has arranged for a weekly rubbish collection all around Tanjung Simpang Mengayau.  Tiggi is also intending to meet up with Datuk Masidi to follow up on banning plastic bags completely in Sabah, the use of straws, single use plastic and general education in relation to the environment.

This year, Tiggi has assumed joint leadership of the Secondary EcoWarriors, organising the weekly meetings, checking matters arising and ensuring that members are following through on their tasks. She represented KIS and spoke at the WWF EcoSchools 10th birthday celebrations. She has chosen her Eco Warrior Co-chair position as her leadership skill for her Duke of Edinburgh Award.

Tiggi wrote the article for ‘Earth Hour’ for the KIS newsletter which was then incorporated by other team members into the Eco Warrior presentation in assembly. She has also contributed several other articles for the newsletter, all raising awareness, not just of her own activities, but of what we can all do to protect the environment.

At the end of Term 1 Tiggi created and presented part of the Eco Warriors assembly presentation which was to the whole of KS3 and then another assembly to KS4 and detailed their achievements to date and current aspirations for the year ahead.

On her own initiative, but run under the Eco Warrior banner, Tiggi has instigated the ‘plastic bottle collection’ at KIS. This was motivated by a project run by Green Shoots at Tanjung Aru who are aiming to collect 20,000 plastic bottles to build a greenhouse for a community project. Following on from another beach clean Tiggi contributed 182 bottles towards the Green Shoots project, having spent hours taking off the labels and washing all the bottles. She then decided to write to Dr Gross to ask if the school would be willing to have a bin outside the gates to collect as many bottles as possible to add to the project. Tiggi collected the bottles and took them to the Tanjung Aru collection point at the weekends. Tiggi achieved her target of collecting 1000 bottles for the initiative!

As Tiggi herself said in the article that she wrote for the school newsletter: “It’s great that we achieved our goal of 1000 bottles, but equally sad to see that we reached it in such a short time. This just goes to show how much single use plastic we use which was one of the key aims of this project; we don’t know how many people contributed the bottles but that’s an awful lot of plastic!”

This is just a very brief outline of everything that Tiggi has been doing. She has shown on many occasions that she thoroughly deserves this Award of Global Citizen 2022, and I look forward to seeing even more from her next year. Well done Tiggi!

Julia Aveline-Abenjoro: Global Citizen 2022

From the PADI website:

“Julia started her diving journey with PADI on her 8th birthday in Sabah, Borneo. She went on to obtain her Junior Open Water when she was 10 and her Junior Advanced when she was 12. Julia has taken her Junior Rescue Diver course and she also started freediving at the end of last year and is now a certified PADI Basic Freediver. Diving has helped Julia to find her passion in conserving the ocean, which caused her to create the Seed of Hope Facebook page to raise awareness through interviews and to raise funds for ocean causes.”

• Created the Seed of Hope Facebook page
• Became a Girls That Scuba Ambassador to help represent and advocate for women and younger girls in diving
• Joined twice (at 10 and 11 yrs old) a week-long turtle tagging program in Mabul – near Sipadan island
• Invited to join a big 4 month reef clean up collective project, involving different organizations and Sabah Parks

Bubbles of Hope

Julia is the founder of her Seed of Hope Group which though multi-media social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, has been raising awareness of environmental oceanographic and other global issues.

She has worked in the past year to widen her platform and increase participation from her peers, inspiring other students to join.

She continues to research, plan, film interviews and edit them professionally with a diverse range of adults and other young people showing immense maturity and awareness of the global issues through the questions she asks in those interviews.

As a Global Padi Ambassador for 2022 and as a Girls that Scuba ambassador for 2022 she has widened her platform, and her global links. She has participated in Reef net clearance dives, learned to free dive, completed Shark Awareness and conservation awareness PADI courses.

From Julia:

“A few months ago, I came up with the idea to create a group of teens who would dive with a purpose. Because I’m a PADI AmbassaDiver, it went great with their torchbearer initiative. Torchbearers are divers that stand up for the environment and act in conservation programs. However, you have to be at least 18 years old to join.

Because the younger generation are the adults of tomorrow, we need to get into the good habit of cleaning up after ourselves and taking care of the underwater world we depend on so much.

We set out on 2nd April with Dive Down Below to do some reef clean-ups!  We managed to collect quite a few bags of trash on each dive and it was so great to re-watch and see the good time that we had while contributing to saving the planet!”

Recently Julia undertook a speciality course: ‘Dive Against Debris’. She believes that everyone has a duty to help clean our oceans and to be part of the solution and says that thanks to Padi Aware’s app it is easy for divers around the world to record what they have collected and contribute to an impactful database of our planet’s pollution

Again, this is just a summary of what Julia is doing to raise awareness of environmental concerns, in particular for working with local and international organisations and individuals.  Julia is a true Global Citizen.

Well done Julia!

KIS Has Talent

Congratulations to the winners!