Weekly Update #7, 7 October 2022

Upcoming events can be found on the website under School Life → Calendar and are outlined here for easy reference. If you have questions or require further assistance please email [email protected]

Best of Luck to Our Military Service Students

The HeadStart Military Service students are currently on a physical training course at Rajabhat University in Phuket town for 10 days. We wish them a safe and successful training experience. -Kru Nee, school Director

Wai Kru

Students, teachers and parents are invited to attend our annual Wai Kru ceremony. ‘Wai Kru’ is a very important and traditional Thai ceremony that takes place in all schools in Thailand at the beginning of the academic year. It’s a chance for students to show their appreciation by giving flowers to their teachers. The Foundation, Primary and Secondary ceremonies will take place in the Sports Hall starting at 8.15am. More details provided in the poster below. -Kru Nee, School Director

Halloween

It’s that exciting time of year again and what better time to prepare Halloween costumes than a mid-term break! More details regarding activities and events will be announced after the break. For now, get those costumes ordered, sewn and ready for the big day!

Welcoming Erik Böhm - Community Sports Liaison

Erik Böhm is a Phuket based running coach and HeadStart parent of two daughters in Primary school who joins us in the capacity of ‘Community Sports Liaison’. With an extensive background in Health & Physical Education as well as Sports Science, Erik lives and breathes Sports, Health and Well-being. He joins HeadStart with the aim to promote community engagement through Sports & Activities for all. In this capacity, you can see him leading a ‘Morning Wake-Up’ family-activity every Tuesday beginning on the 18th October from 07.15-07.45.

You can often find Erik lingering around a coffee machine if he isn’t at the track. If you have any suggestions and ideas for community activities, please don’t hesitate to come and speak to him and we’ll see if he can bring your idea to life! -Mr Carter, Director of Sport

Year 1 Parents Meeting on 4.10.22

A big thank you to all the parents that attended the Year 1 meeting on Thursday this week. We hope you all found the information Mr Williams and Mr Khan shared with you useful. Thank you for being such a wonderful audience. Please find below the presentation from the meeting. If you would like to contact any of our Primary management, send an email to Mr Khan (Head of Foundation & Primary) at [email protected], Mr Tony Williams (Deputy Head of Primary - Academic) at [email protected] and Ms Rebeca Ross (Deputy Head of Primary - Pastoral) at [email protected].

Parent Committee Meeting on 20.10.22

The HeadStart Parent Committee members have been invited to the first meeting of the 2022-2023 academic year on the 20th of October at 8.30am in the Conference Room. All parents are welcome to send in points for discussion to the members of the committee by the 18th of October. If you are interested in doing so, please write to [email protected]. To learn more about the roles and responsibilities of the Parent Committee please visit our webpage for detailed information here: HeadStart Parent Committee

UPrep Presentations on 18 & 20 October

A warm invitation to all Thai parents to attend a presentation on ‘Thai University Application & Admission Requirements’ on the 18th of October at 8.15am in the Secondary Hall. Following shortly after, there will be a presentation on the 20th of October titled ‘Choosing Subjects and Careers’. This will take place in the Secondary Hall on the 4th floor at 8.15am and we encourage anyone available to attend this very helpful and informative session with our University Prep team. Below you will find downloads of the UPrep talks that have been made to date. For ore information on our UPrep programme to and find all presentations in one convenient place, visit our webpage: HeadStart University Preparation Programme Webpage.

Well done to all of the boys and girls who competed exceptionally well at Tuesday and Wednesday’s cross country event at BISP. Special mentions go to -

• U9 Girls: Nayana - 1st place
• U11 Boys: Mason - 2nd place and Aleksei - 3rd place
• U13 Boys: Nathee - 4th place
• U15 Boys: Colin - 4th place
• U15 Girls: Anoushka - 3rd place

Thanks also to Ms Hydie who helped with the Primary event and Mrs Marsh and Mr Paice who helped support the team and also competed in the Open Race.

PE Faculty Week

This week has been the PE Faculty week with a focus on Tag Rugby. All students have taken part in a tournament with their year group to earn points for their house. Students have shown great team work, resilience, kindness and leadership. It’s been a fun week with activities running during lunchtimes and lessons! -Ms Lucy Wilson

Football

Girls Panthers Academy v HeadStart Staff Team

This week saw the round 2 of the HeadStart Panthers Staff team versus the Academy Girls teams. The match saw some fantastic football from both teams however the staff team ran away with the win with some well taken goals. The Academy team had many chances on goal however their own goalkeeper playing for the staff team was brilliant in goal to stop the shots and keep a clean sheet. We look forward to round 3 after the break, GAME ON! -Coach Frost

HeadStart v Republic U15

Well done to the Panthers U15 boys who took on Republic Academy in an away fixture. Credit to the players who pushed themselves despite the unfamiliar conditions on the day. We learned a lot from the game and look forward to more matches after half term. -Coach Frost

Student of the Month

Congratulations to our Primary Students of the Month for September.

In Science this term Year 2 have been learning all about the different habitats around the world. Over the past few weeks we planned and designed our very own habitat. We had so much fun! -Ms Megan Meck (Click to expand photos)

This week the Primary Thai 1 classroom was filled with Thai herbs and aromas as the Year 5 Thai 1st language students learned about them. -By Kru Way

Year 10 students in the ‘Thai First Language IGCSE’ class have been practising writing essays. Their chosen topic was ‘Thailand’s captive elephants’. In order to fully understand the situation, they went to visit the Nopparat Elephant camp in Kathu. This gave them the opportunity to interact with the elephants at the sanctuary and gain first hand knowledge about the problems, solutions and progress that has been made over the years. -Kru Karn

Primary students are using different ways to explore the beauty of Chinese characters and reinforce their understanding of Chinese words. Our KS1 students are practicing writing strokes and numbers in Chinese, while KS2 students are showing their character reading ability through various activities. -Ms Wei Wang Coordinator & Teacher (Mandarin)

In English, Year 10 Gogol have been studying the elusive and visceral poetry of Ted Hughes at the start of their IGCSE course. As a culmination of their half- term’s work, they worked collaboratively to produce creative, abstract responses to different poems of his, together with rationales explaining how their choices connect to the text. This approach, combined with the rigour and structure of their essay writing, will surely lead to deeper understanding and sensitivity towards Hughes’ pieces. -Mr. Pollicutt, Head of English

The poem which our group explored is “A Memory” by Ted Hughes.

In the first stanza we were struck by the image: “The morass is bulging and aborting- Mother, mother, what am I?” The word “morass” means an area of mud, however it could also mean a complicated or confused situation, which could relate to the idea of the foetus. We interpreted this as a reference to Sylvia Plath having had a miscarriage during the time. ‘Bulging’ connotes a sense of desperation: this idea that the morass is metaphorically given the aftermath of fury and wrath. This visual image of swelling further connotes despair, discomfort and slight deleteriousness.

Throughout the poem, Hughes embraces us with a periodic scale of levels. At the beginning we are presented with this apparition of a child who feels alienated from his birth, with a lost identity, as if he is not in the right place. For us, this created a sense of the unknown and estrangement: a child who is not really a child yet but already is questioning its role assigned to them in this world. We tried to reflect this in the way we read the poem and the music we used.

Further into the poem, in the surreal visual imagery of “mother, the eel in the well is eating the moon!” We saw this as a literal reflection of the moon in the water, giving the sense of confusion and something uncanny, what is the eel doing in the well? Is it that the child has reincarnated itself into an eel? The moon is associated with both feminine sexuality and insanity, which we again read as being oblique references to Plath.

The uncomfortable mood of the poem: we decided to draw this idea as something being misplaced, not right, giving the sense of unease and came up with the image of three ducks and one of them being brown, standing out of the crowd, which could suggest that the child in the poem never belonged in this world. -Written by Yeijin Lee and Emma Palop Watch the video they have made here!

In Hughes’ poem ‘Football at Slack’, he writes about men playing football and enjoying life, which largely contradicts Hughes’ usual attitude towards human nature- that the world is a horrible place.

Our analysis of the poem was quite literal as, unusually for Hughes, the poem is quite explicit. We chose to focus on the aspect of the men in their mirthful game of football. Throughout the first six stanzas of the poem, the setting is seen as positive, through the use of visual imagery of the ‘colourful men’ playing the match. Whereas in the last stanza of the poem, Hughes returns back to more grim normality, describing the world as ‘a golden holocaust’. In this line, Hughes uses the technique of juxtaposition to contrast the words ‘golden’ and ‘holocaust’. The word ‘golden’ representing the rays of the sunlight shining down, whereas the word ‘holocaust’ has obvious negative connotations of genocide from The Second World War. In the sixth stanza of the poem, Hughes begins to write about how ‘the humped world sank’, mirroring the image of the ‘evil world’ being buried.

The background music we chose to use reflects our general feel throughout the poem, with a soft, cheerful melody, resulting in a diminuendo towards the end of the video as the men return back to the misery of real life.

Our choice of setting towards the end of the video was at the school garden because of the colour representation of the flowers, matching with the golden sun rays, which juxtaposed with the stress and pressure both the men in the poem feel as the game of football ends and we feel as Mr Pollicutt loomed over us at the end (!)

We thought that we would combine our voice recordings to read out the poem as our voices are quite calming and match with the soft, jolly mood of the poem. -Mali Bell, Pee Mai Kongsawad, Seungha Lee Watch the video they have made here!

Year 9 English

As a fitting send-off to their fantasy narrative writing unit, Year 9 were lucky enough to view the 1986 film Labyrinth, starring David Bowie. Using the film as a stimulus, they were challenged to produce a variety of creative responses, ranging from interviews with the late rockstar to a redesign and recasting of the film for a Gen Z audience. The students then worked on their presentation skills to share their work with the class! -Ms Tuppen and Mr Pollicutt

Drama Presentation

This week our year 11 Drama students performed their first performance exam of the year. In IGCSE Drama students are tasked with performing three different pieces: a scripted piece, a devised piece and a monologue. Their first performance was scripted; an extract from Find Me by Olwen Wymark. The students did an excellent job of portraying the challenges of mental health and explored challenging themes and styles as they created this piece. -Ms Alia Sillett, CAPA Director

This week our HeadStar of the week goes to Nadia Hauke in year 9. Nadia was nominated by Mr Wells, her DT teacher. Mr Wells recognised Nadia’s hard work and commitment to making good progress in lessons. He was particularly impressed with Nadia’s presentation skills. Well done Nadia! -Ms Sillett, Director of Creative and Performing Arts

The TwirlStars had so much fun showing off our new twirls, rolls, flips and tricks we have learnt over the past five weeks. We cannot wait to continue Twirling after half term! -Ms Megan Meck

The students from Eco Club promote and support World Animal Day

The Eco Club meets every Friday lunch at 12.45 until 13.20 in the DT department. You can add yourself to the dedicated Eco Club Google Classroom to find out about all the great activities organised by the club to help create a more sustainable future. Activities such as building Bee Boxes, recycling and up-cycling, nature walks, beach clean ups and making useful products from recycled plastic are just some of the things you can get involved with. You don’t have to come every week, or to every activity, just have a passion for a better future! -Mr Wells DT Coordinator

Halloween Promotion

𝓑𝓞𝓞…Trick or Treat!?! Let’s be honest it’s always a treat. Maybe you do not have a birthday party this month! Don’t worry our 𝐇𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐎𝐖𝐄𝐄𝐍 𝐂𝐎𝐎𝐊𝐈𝐄 𝐃𝐄𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐊𝐈𝐓𝐒 ARE AVAILABLE NOW UNTIL 31st October. All of MY KINDA PARTY cookies are nut free and baked fresh daily! Spookily tasty home made cookies, with icing and sprinkles to decorate as you wish. Perfect activity to keep your kids busy this Halloween 🎃👻💀 The box includes: 5 x Halloween cookies/2 x Containers sprinkles/3 x Coloured filled Icing bags. Message us to place your order

Melbourne Cup Charity Fundraiser

Welcoming everyone to the ‘Melbourne Cup’ charity fundraiser taking place on the 1st of November at ‘Firefly’ restaurant at the Pavilions Hotel. There will be free flow bubbles and other beverages from 10.00am to 1.00pm with special racegoers’ rates on beverages thereafter. Delectable free flow brunch. Live coverage of all the races from Flemington Racecourse. The highly anticipated and hotly contested Fashions on the Field with prizes for Best Hat and Best Race Attire! Exclusive live and silent auction prizes and raffle tickets sold by the arm length.

💃 Dress code: At the races. 📌 Venue: Firefly. 💝 Donation: THB 3,500 NET *pre-purchase only, cut-off date: 15th October 2022. 👉 Book Your Tickets at: [email protected]