Newsletter October Term 1

ISF WATERLOO INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL

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Welcome to School Year 2013-2014!

The new school year is now well under way. The students are already enjoying and making use of the extensive improve-ments made to the facilities over the sum-mer holidays.

In particular the Sports Arena has trans-formed the playground and is a hub of ac-tivity at every break time. Children are enjoying playing football, basketball and volleyball just to name a few.

This year has also seen some changes to the curriculum, the Middle Years students are now learning about Project Manage-ment. The students are already organis-ing this year’s Winter Show. This year we are breaking with tradition and the stu-dents are working under Ms Orla’s direc-tion to produce one all school production entitled ‘My School Musical’. Please save the date and new starting time in your di-ary- Friday 13th December at 17:30.

The School Board and l are committed to continued improvements this year you can follow the updates via our new web-site www.isfwaterloo.org and you can ‘like’ us on our Face book page https://www.facebook.com/ISFWaterlooInterna-tionalSchool .

Belinda Yates

Head of School

New staff

ISF Waterloo welcomes 2 new full time teachers: Mr Jan Slama who will be teach-ing Class 3 and Project Management and Mr Nadim Bayeh who will be teaching MY 1 and IGCSE Science and A Level Biol-ogy.

Mr Jan Slama

Mr Nadim Bayeh

First Aid

During the Summer holidays twelve ISF Waterloo teachers attended a 3 day Red Cross First Aid Course. Our teachers are ready should an injury arise.

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New School T-shirts, Reflector Jackets and Sport’s Bags

All ISF Waterloo students have been provided with new school items. We are sure you will agree the children look very smart.

Welcome drink

The PTA alongside the school organised a welcome drink and hotdog afternoon on Friday 13th September. The event was held inside at the last minute due to the bad weather but luckily the rain didn’t stop parents and children from attend-ing. It was a good way for new parents to meet other families at ISF.

Curriculum Evening

On Monday 9th September ISF organ-ised a Curriculum evening. Parents from both Primary and Secondary heard about changes in the school and then had the opportunity to meet their children’s teach-ers and other parents from the class. Thank you to all parents who attended.

Book Fair

On Friday 27th September ISF Waterloo had an English Book Fair. We sold 800€ worth of books.

Recycling printer cartridges and old mobile phones

This year we are continuing to recycle empty printer cartridges and telephones. It is good for the environment and the school receives a discount on future printer cartridge purchases!

School Buses

ISF Waterloo now has 3 school buses. The buses are used for morning and af-ternoon pick-ups, swimming runs and day school trips. The buses have been ‘wrapped’ in our logo and will also act as a driving advertisement!

Reading Room

Thank you to people who volunteered to hear Primary children read from 9-10 one morning a week. We are still looking for volunteers. Let Mrs Yates know if you can help.

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Homework Club

Every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday children can attend the free homework club to have a quiet supervised place to do their work. There is a teacher on hand to guide the students and answer ques-tions, however please remember it is not an individual tutoring session as the teacher cannot work one on one with ev-ery student.

School Flag

During the summer one of our parents Mrs Aurelie Malou designed a flag for ISF Waterloo. We thank her for her efforts. The flags are proudly flying on our flag poles near the main carpark.

Birth announcements

We would like to congratulate 2 ISF Wa-terloo Staff members who have had ba-bies.

Mr Sean, the class 6 teacher and his wife Michelle welcomed a son Sean Michael Mc Gonigle on Monday 15th July, weigh-ing 4kg!

Mrs Analida Anguizola and her husband Diego welcomed their second son Thiago on 9th September, a brother to Aitor.

Sean Michael

Thiago

International Day

On Friday 18th of October, ISF Waterloo celebrated International Day. We have a rich and diverse school population with over 30 different nationalities from across the globe. This year, the chosen theme was ‘Sport and Games’ from around the world. Each house group was given a selection of games and sports from dif-ferent countries around the world, which they had to set up for everyone to play and create a set of rules to explain how each game should be played. During the course of the day each team was able to move around school and play all the dif-ferent games. Each group also decorat-ed a snake and a ladder and these were used to make a giant game of Snakes and Ladders! All the children loved play-ing this game.

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We had our usual International Lunch. We got to taste lots of wonderful food from around the world, prepared for us by the parents and served to us by our dedi-cated PTA. This year we all ate in the gym and parents were able to join their chil-dren and eat together. To end the day, we all came together in the gym in our house groups, we were given the task of setting up a Domino Track. This was tricky but great fun and it was a good team building activity as we all had to work together. The day was a great success and a won-derful celebration of the many nationali-ties in our school community.

We would like to thank Mrs Hodges and Ms Klepkou for organising such a won-derful day, the staff and students for their enthusiasm, the parents for coming along and supporting us and for the delicious food, the PTA for all their hard work and finally the Board for joining us on this special day.

By Orla McLoughlin, Primary Years Co-ordinator

Class 1 - Writing our names

Class 1 have been working very hard on their handwriting. They have been prac-ticing tracing and forming letters and numbers and writing their names correct-ly. The whole class has been enthusias-tically practicing everyday and they can now confidently write their own names. They are writing their names on all of their work and copying modelled writing every week in their journals. Everyone in Class 1 received a certificate as an award for their hard work and effort. We put them up on the notice board to show everyone our new skill! Well done Class 1.

Adding numbers in Class 2

Following our time counting and writing numbers from 1-20, in Maths Class 2 has been working on adding numbers from 1-20. To help us we have used number flash cards, our fingers, cubes, and Euro coins. In this picture we are working on a worksheet in which we must add numbers written inside elephants. We started by counting out both numbers using differ-ently coloured elephants and then adding all of the elephants together.

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Then we checked our answers using our number lines. It was very impressive how quickly the students grasped the concept of using a number line to add numbers with totals greater than 10. Next on to adding three numbers as well as sub-tracting numbers!

Class 3 - International Peace-Day

Last Friday Classes 1, 2 and 3 celebrated the International Peace Day during their Tutorial time. We talked about this spe-cial day when all the countries around the world agree not to fight. We also dis-cussed that fighting should not be allowed in schools and that everyone should be nice to each other and care for one an-other. Children brainstormed some of the silly behaviour they sometimes display in their class and in the playground and promised that they won’t allow any fight-ing around them. Class 1 and 2 went to their classrooms to celebrate the day by making beautiful peace doves and Class 3 wrote a lovely peace poem. You can see their wonderful work on display in front of Class 1.

Class 4 - Math: 2-d shapes and symmetry

Class 4 has been very busy learning fun-ny words like quadrilateral and octagon. We’ve been taking a look at 2-d shapes and drawing them with a ruler on squared paper. Once we got a hang of that we started talking about symmetry. We’ve learned things like; circles have many lines of symmetry and parallelograms don’t have any. In some of our bookwork we used mirrors to find lines of symmetry on mandalas. If you haven’t tried this, it’s not as easy as it may sound but Class 4 is pretty good at finding them.

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Class 5 - Footprints from the past: Dinosaurs.

In IPC we are learning about Dinosaurs. In September we went to the Dino Expo in Brussels to find out more about Dino-saurs. It was a lot of fun and we have learned many things. We know now that when scientists talk of dinosaurs, they mean a special kind of creature that lived on land during the Triassic, Jurassic, or Cretaceous period. They lived millions of years ago – long before people lived on Earth. Like detectives, we will try to dis-cover what dinosaurs looked like, what they ate and what might have happened to them in the end.

Class 6 are ‘Fit for Life’

In their first I.P.C. unit of the year class 6 have been looking at how best to keep their body fit and healthy. They have looked at the effect of exercise on their pulse rate and breathing as well as study-ing the human circulation system. They researched fitness activities across the world that included T’ai Chi, Zumba, Musk Ox Push and Karate and they also discovered the unique diets of the coun-tries from which the activity originates. ‘I enjoyed learning about the heart and how the rest of the body gets oxygen from the lungs.’ Nathan Levy ‘Doing the freeze frames outside was fun and measuring our pulse rate before and after the game Here, There and Everywhere was fun too’ Chiara Quintieri

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Class 7 - Magritte Museum Visit

At 9:00 am we walked to the buses and put on our safety jackets. We had to wait a little bit and then we boarded the buses for a one hour trip to Brussels. At the museum we entered a door to a hallway and we were surrounded by little shops. There was a huge room in front of us. A guard had us put our reflective jackets into a black tray and then we started our visit. We passed through a little tunnel that had a million names of different art-ists and found the name Magritt.

We then went down the escalators and looked at different paintings. We saw that most of them had birds. Then we went up in an elevator and admired more paint-ings. We saw the “This is Not a Pipe” drawing. It was very funny! We then went back to the buses and back to school.

By: Flavian Dumelie

Whole School House meetings

On Friday, all four student houses gath-ered in the gym for the first time to take part in a fun competition to win extra points for their house. Mrs. Mayer pre-pared a scavenger hunt, a list of 15 various objects that the students had to collect as fast as possible. Some of the objects had to be even in the same colour as the houses so it was quite challenging.

Small and big children scattered around the campus, eagerly searching for the necessary items and bringing them back to the gym. The green team managed to collect everything on the list first and re-ceived 40 house points. In the second place was a blue team winning 30 points, third was a red team with 20 points and last place took the yellow team earning 10 points. All the students and teachers had a lot of fun and we all look forward to doing another house activity again.

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ISF Waterloo International School IGCSE Class of 2013

ISF Waterloo wishes to congratulate our graduating class of IGCSE students from June 2013. They achieved fantastic re-sults in their IGCSE examinations, a re-flection of their hard work and their mo-tivation over the duration of the 2 years of the programme. They received a very good range of A* to C results across the different subject areas, with no results below a D. We wish all of the graduating class all the very best of luck in their fu-ture endeavours, academic or otherwise.

Kate Morrison

Secondary Years’ Co-ordinator

International Day by IGCSE2

This year’s International Day was fantas-tic with a large ceremony where everyone introduced themselves and where they were from. From then on, everyone went into their house groups and started their fun activities. We started off by colouring, drawing and painting snakes and lad-ders for our very own snakes and ladders game. This year’s International Day was all about creating and playing unknown games, which were mostly created by our students. There were a bunch of fun games such as mini-golf and a mix between bas-ketball and volleyball. After everyone had a chance to play some games, everyone from Pre-School to A-Levels went down to the big gym and got the chance to eat foods which were brought in by parents from all over the world, there were foods from over 32 countries in total. We can gladly say that all the students enjoyed the food and it was really a highlight of the day. Even with all that food, there was still a little bit left, even after everyone ate.

After our meal, we went back up to have some more fun and play some more games such as Mikado and Down, Down. All the students enjoyed this wonderful and fun day.

By Thomas Coolen, IGCSE2

IGCSE 1 - English Descriptive writing

Crowded Market

It was a warm, toasty day, but not like any normal day. It was the day the

market came to town. Bright, sunny weather, pleasant climate. The sounds of people talking, yelling, laughing and children giggling filled the air. The hills

smelled like pie and fruit.

The green bedding of the hill was covered in little colourful patches, like a quilt on the earth. People of all ages and sizes gathered around tiny market tents. Approach a stall and you would hear the

salesmen shouting at the top of their lungs, and grown men and women chat-

tering away.

The atmosphere was filled with dif-ferent noises, pleasant and just noise, people shouting, children crying and

some laughing, happiness and joy and sometimes even little animals helped fill the atmosphere with quiet chirping

or loud mooing. Also filling the air were the different aromas, pumpkin pie, sweet smells of flowers, the smell of the earth and fruit all coming together to create

‘the smell of the market’.

This was the day that everyone came out of their little shells. No matter what, they would all come to the market. It was the day everyone looked forward

to, the day the market came.

Kavinga Ranaweera

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Today I had a brief encounter with a beautiful creature…

Going through the corridor on a busy school day, I hear a strange noise from the photo-copy room. Easily overtaken by my curios-ity, I go in to find out what is making this strange noise. I see what seemed to me like a moth-like butterfly trying to go out through the closed glass of the window. Without even stopping to think, I opened the window for it. It landed on the outside sill and spread open its wings, and what a sight!

The deep red-orange dominant color was striated with yellow and black on the top side while two bottom wings had two very clear eyespots. Both pairs of wings had lilac mark-ings. It just laid there, posing, waiting, as if asking me to take a picture. My camera was already out and taking one snap after the other.

It was a Inachis Io, commonly known as the European Peacock Butterfly. As with all but-terflies with eyespots, it is used scare the enemies. When it opens its wings, usually in the face of an avian attacker, it sends a clear warning to its predator.

But not all its predators respond to this ma-neuver. Rodents in particular are dangerous to this delicate creature in winter when it is hibernating. In the dark wintery setting, visu-al communication does not always work well. So the butterfly has another secret weapon, It produces a hissing sound which scares off the attacker.

Every time I stop for a brief encounter with one of the many creatures with whom we share our home, I am left at awe in front of the beauty, complexity, yet at the same time elegancy of such small and delicate being.

by Nadim Bayeh

In and about the science lab

Everyone is in eager anticipation of the new lab. In the mean time it is business as usual in all the science classes in and out of the lab.

The MY1 students have been busy learn-ing about how to use microscopes and dis-covering the world of the cell. They used their lab time to learn about the different shapes and roles of the specialised cells. They have also taken a look at onion cells and cells of the inside of the mouth. They also learned about plant reproduction by dissecting a flower.

The MY2/3 students have been learning about their own body. In the lab they test-ed their lung capacity, with surprising re-sults sometimes. They also learned about enzymes in the digestive system by study-ing the effect of their own saliva on starch and observing the results in a controlled lab environment. The IGCSE1 students, for their lab sessions, have been testing the different separation methods in the lab. They learned how to tell if a water solution is pure or not, how to separate salt from sand using filtration and evapo-ration, and how to measure the volume of an amorphic object and tell whether it is denser or lighter than another substance.

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Clown Fish research project

During the past half trimester, the IGCSE students have been each working on a re-search subject. The subjects ranged from The Working of the Wind Turbine to Open Heart Surgery. They have then presented their findings to the class. Here below is one of those researches.

We all know the Clown Fish made famous by the Pixar and Disney movie Find-ing Nemo. Few of us however know how strange the life cycle of that little fish is. Tristan De Suys from IGCSE1 decided to find out more. Here’s what he discovered:

• All clownfish are born male.

• Clownfish are hermaphrodites: that means that at any time the clownfish can change sex.

• When two male clownfish pair up one turns female so that they can mate.

• When a female dies, the largest clown-fish will take her place by turning into a female.

• The clownfish is one of the cleverest fish. It is one of the only fish that can make itself immune to a sea anemone’s sting.

• Clownfish lay their eggs close to their host anemone. Depending on the species of clownfish there could be hundreds or thousands of eggs.

• The clownfish and the anemone help each other out. Basically they help in their quest for survival. The clownfish eat the dead fish that have been stung by the anemone and in return the clownfish keep the anemone healthy by eating the damaged or rotten tentacles.

For their biology classes, they have suc-cessfully incubated three types of seeds in the lab, once germinated, they then transferred their practical study out of the class to the vegetable garden to plant their seeds in the ground and observe their growth and development.

The IGCSE2 students have been test-ing the properties of springs and trying to measure different forces including the gravitational force of the earth.

We are all looking forward to continuing our exciting exploration of the world of science in the new lab.

by Nadim and Jana

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MY 3 girls - Samavia Abassi

MY 3 boys - Logan d’Ursel

IGCSE girls - Gloria Nwanegbo

IGCSE boys - Samuel Pinker

A level - Alfie Salsby

Apprendre le français, c’est aussi s’ouvrir au monde franco-phone

Nous avons appris à nous présenter et à présenter nos frères et sœurs.

Nous avons découvert Paris et ses monu-ments.

Nous avons découvert des célébrités francophones.

• Clownfish are very territorial and can get aggressive if there are intruders in their home.

• Whenever a clownfish finds a home in a new anemone it performs an elabo-rate dance, during which the clownfish brushes its tail and fins on the anemone’s tentacles. This may be how the clownfish adapts itself to the sting of the anemone

Secondary cross country race

Thursday 24th October the secondary students took part in the school’s inau-gural cross country race. We all walked to the local forest where Alfie Salsby had measured out a route for all to run, (he being the expert runner in our school). There were four races. MY 1 had to do 1 lap, MY 2, 3 and IGCSE girls had to do 2 laps and the IGCSE boys had to do 3. Each lap was 1200m. Everyone ran with enthusiasm and cheered each other on.

Well done to all the runners and a big thank you to Diego d’ Alcantara and the teachers for all their help.

Our champions are:

MY 1 girls - Danah Al Flaih

MY 1 boys - Santiago d’Ursel

MY 2 girls - Raheeg Khalifa

MY 2 boys - Atif Abassi

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In the Art Class

Pictures of the month:

Observational study of my favourite shoe watercolour study by Elsa

Vermoesen (IGCSE 1) chosen by Dylan Chaouat

Observational study of my favourite shoe pastel study by Logan

d’Ursel (MY3) chosen by Mrs. Hodges

IGCSE 2 students designed a decorative ‘Surrealist chess game’ as an illustration for the International Day’s theme of this year ‘Sports and Games’.

Nous avons localisé des pays franco-phones en Europe et dans le monde.

Nous avons découvert des prénoms fran-çais.

Nous avons appris à nous repérer dans la ville.

Nous avons appris le nom des bâtiments en ville.

Nous avons commencé à parler de la mé-téo.

Nous avons parlé de l’amitié et nous avons présenté nos meilleurs amis.

Nous avons parlé de nos activités de loi-sirs.

Nous avons appris à nous renseigner sur les sports et les équipements sportifs.

To learn French, it’s also to learn how to open up to the French speaking world.

We learned how to introduce ourselves and how to present brothers and sisters (PY45).

We discovered Paris and its monuments (MY123).

We discovered French-speaking celebri-ties (MY123).

We looked at countries in Europe and in the world (IGCSE).

We learned about common French names (MY123).

We learned to find our way in town (PY67 and MY123).

We learned names of buildings in town (MY123).

We have started to speak about weather forecast (MY123).

We discussed our friendships and we talked about our best friends (IGCSE).

We commented on leisure activities. (IGCSE).

We learned to find out about sport clubs and sport equipment (IGCSE).

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MY1 studied the kinetic artwork of Alex-ander Calder thoroughly and after their preliminary research in their sketchbook, they designed their own Calder inspired mobile in wire, which is now been exhib-ited in the Buonaparte building.

Student council photos and in-troduction

PRESIDENT

My name is Dylan Fradji Chaouat , my team’s goals and mine as the new Presi-dent of the Student Council are very sim-ple, entertain the students of the school and solve any issues a student might have. I decided that my team and I should meet once a week to talk about ideas and plans we have. Not all our ideas are pos-sible but we try to do the maximum to im-prove anything that needs to be improved and to change anything that needs to be changed.

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VICE PRESIDENT

Hello, my name is Gloria Ngozi Nwaneg-bo, I am 15years old from IGCSE 1 and I am a British born Nigerian and I am the new Vice-President. Being Vice-Pres-ident requires a lot too. I am ready to take responsiblityby bringing more school trips and fun activities as well as educational activities. I hope this year will be a great year and am looking forward to the excit-ing things.

Upcoming events

5 November

- Secondary Parent Interviews

11 November

- No School

22 November

- Teacher In-service day- no school

13 December

- Winter Show 5:30pm