Dates for Your Diary

Upcoming events can be found on the calendar on the website School Life → Calendar but we have outlined upcoming events here for easy reference. For daily updates and news follow the HeadStart Facebook Page

A Day at the Movies Dress up Day

In support of the BamBoo School Family we are inviting students and staff to come to school dressed up as their favourite movie character on 23 November in exchange for bringing in an Eco-brick, if you can. You can look forward to: A spectacular photo booth in the atrium made by HSIS mums. Primary catwalk to model outfits and win House points. Secondary costume competition with 3 categories: Best group dress up / Most Creative / Who wore it best. Secondary students also have the chance to vote on the best dressed teacher!

A Night at the Movies: an Oscar Winning Performance Not to be Missed!

On the 11th of December the CAPA Academy will present an Oscar winning performance. We will be performing scenes from movies such as Grease, High School Musical, Sing!, The Sound of Music, Star Wars, Hunger Games, Frozen, The Wizard of Oz and many more. The CAPA Academy consists of very talented students in Year 5 - 13. The students have been working very hard perfecting their singing, dancing and acting and the show promises to be one that cannot be missed. Save the date - tickets will be available soon.

HeadStart World Scholars Team in New York

Our World Scholar’s Cup students have landed in New York! This week they have explored New York high and low.

Day one saw students walking New York’s High Line: a 1.45-mile-long elevated park, greenway created on a former New York Central Railroad spur on the west side of Manhattan in New York City. The end of the High Line took us to Chelsea where we participated in a food tasting tour at Chelsea Market as we tried to get over our jetlag.

Day two began with a little rain so we walked through Times Square to the warmth that greeted us at MoMA: The Museum of Modern Art. Here students took part in a scavenger hunt, exploring art from the likes Frida Kahlo, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. We also went to Central Park and visted the observation deck at The Top of the Rock at the Rockefeller Center, viewing the whole of New York City and seeing inside the building of NBC Studios, where shows such as ‘The Tonight Show’ and ‘Saturday Night Live’ are filmed. We finished with an evening on Broadway, viewing the powerful show, ‘Dear Evan Hansen’.

On our second last day and final evening, we took the hop on and hop off bus tour around Manhattan, visited the iconic Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and remembered September 11, 2001 visiting the 911 memorial and museum. The evening was completed heading back to Broadway to view ‘Wicked’.

On our final day in New York, we began a bicycle ride around Central Park before getting stuck in a snow storm! New York’s first snow fall of the year, covered Times Square and Manhattan with six inches of snow.

We are now making our way to New Haven to attend the opening ceremony at Yale University tomorrow morning. Here the competition will begin and the years worth of debate and essay writing skills and studying the syllabus will all pay off in the final round of this year long competition.

Stay tuned next week for an update from the students about their experience at the competition.

Lest we Forget…

It was meant to be the war to end all wars, but instead The ‘Great’ War resulted in over 16 million deaths and helped to create fertile ground for World War Two. To honour the centenary of the armistice on November 11th 1918, HeadStart built a WW1 trench wall that acted as an exhibition to remember those that had fallen in that war and since. This involved participation from all corners of the school. Art students, led by art teacher Sam Gill, created the wooden facade out of recycled cardboard and the sandbags were in fact rice sacks filled with recycled paper! On the trench was a WW1 gallery of colourised images from the front line, a wall of ancestral memories from the HeadStart community and projected videos of life in the trenches. Thank you very much to those that had sent in stories and to Joanne Colling for bringing in her grandfather’s WW2 war medals to display.

Students in the History VAP Club researched letters that had been written by those who made the ultimate sacrifice and these were also displayed on the wall. Our Year 9’s sang the tragicomedy trench song “Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire” and the HeadStart Choir, led by Mrs Cramp, sang a beautiful rendition of ‘Danny Boy’ as the days began on Friday and Monday morning. Another big thank you goes to Mrs Cramp who spent most of her day setting up the display.

The British Legion, represented by Mr Phil Gallimore, had various items on offer that helped to raise money for members and veterans of the British Armed Forces, their families and dependents. Thank you to all those that donated - every bit helps. We were able to raise a total of 31,000 Baht in just 3 days. Also, a huge thank you to the Year 10 boys who arrived in their uniform to help The Royal British Legion and to honour the Thai soldiers that had fought in WW1.

Many parents, students and staff were affected by the exhibition and remembered that this war, although 100 years ago, is still close enough to experience directly, and many of us still have grandparents that fought in World War 2.

Foundation News

We have had a super week in Foundation with lots of active lessons and learning through play. We are already nearly half way through this half term and it has been fantastic to see the children learn and develop, we certainly very proud of all their efforts and hard work.

Security Gates

Just to remind parents that the Foundation gates are closed throughout the school day until 3.30pm. Please ensure that you close the gates if you are dropping off or collecting your child during the day.

Coughs and colds

We have had a few children absent this week with coughs and colds. When your child is ill, please do take note of our sickness policy and keep your child at home for at least 24 hours, or until all symptoms have passed. Please be vigilant and if your child is not feeling well, keep them at home to reduce spreading any germs and putting other children at risk.

Well done HeadStart mum, Khun Tanya for designing and making HeadStart Panther supporter shirts. What a nice way to show support for the football teams!

On Friday, 16 November, 15 girls from the HeadStart cheerleading competition with their coach Miss Lana, are heading off to Bangkok to participate in the 23rd Cheerleading Thailand Championships. These girls have worked really hard for the last 2 months and are now ready for this huge event. All the best to theses incredible girls! Team work makes the dream work!!! Go HeadStart Go!!! By Ms Fabienne Mester

Student News

The Pre-School children are really developing their confidence during swimming class and are even learning to put their face in the water. They are all able to go in the big pool and are developing their kicking skills. By Ms Danielle Jones

Reception have started learning about 3D shapes. We learnt about a cube and cylinder and made our own toy robots using these shapes. We’ve also been learning about toys so it was lots of fun seeing that we could make a toy using shapes and recycled materials. By Ms Candice Smithie

The children in Reception Yellow have really enjoyed our topic all about toys. They have been developing good communication and language skills using our fun toy shop role play area. The children were great at pretending to be customers buying the toys! We also made pictograms to show our favourite toys, learnt about positional language in our ‘where is the toy?’ game, and made lots of creative crafts including a super cute minion toy. The children love talking about their toys and sharing them with the class during show and tell. They also impressed us with their excellent phonics work; sounding out the names of toys in order to write a simple list for their dream toy box. Well done Reception! By Ms Hannah Kuusik

Miss Candice’s phonics group were busy doing lots of fun blending activities and tricky word races. They are confident with their letter sounds and are practising blending and segmenting words. They are also very good at recognising tricky words.

In English this week children have really enjoyed making their own comic version of our class story, Room On The Broom. They’re amazing! By Ms Charlotte Myers

In Maths this week children enjoyed a super fun lesson when learning about their left and right. We painted our hands and made some beautiful hand prints. We also took our shoes off and followed left and right instructions, which meant we all ended up wearing each other’s shoes! By Ms Charlotte Myers

Year 1 students are learning about Thai tone marks. They learned how to spell words with different tones through a fun game. By Kru Cherry

After Year 4 Blue’s productive beach clean last week, Year 4 White and Yellow returned to Ao Yon beach on Wednesday to clear it of any remaining rubbish. It was sad to see the litter people had dropped on the ground, however at least the plastic and other debris we collected will not end up in our seas! We felt proud to think we made a difference. By Ms Jen Rapkins

n Year 4 White, we investigated the effect various liquids (soft drinks) have on the enamel of our teeth by observing what happened to the shells of eggs when they were left to soak in them for one week. Coloured sodas stained the shells very quickly, however the most destructive was fruit juice! We saw for ourselves how important it is to look after our teeth and keep them clean! By Ms Jen Rapkins

Wednesday 14th November 2018, the Young Entrepreneurs did their Market Day. They are divided into four groups. First, ‘The Icy snowy’ that sold shaved Ice and garlic bread. Second are the ‘Ruby Tasters’ whose products are sushi and pizza. Then we have the ‘The Sweet and Sour’ team, who hand over sausage sandwiches, healthy fruit drinks and special Russian sweets. Lastly is ‘Jake’s Handcrafts’ who sold and explained how he made his handcrafts. Also, there were parents who helped our Young Entrepreneurs to manage their little business. By Mr Andrew Adviento

This week Year 6 White has been learning about solids, liquids and gases. We had a number of different materials we had to sort into categories. In addition to this, we looked at the different particles each state of matter has. This is us pretending to be a solid, as we all had to be packed tightly together.

We all had a fantastic weekend for the Duke of Edinburgh Bronze Practice Trip. The students kayaked from Ao Yon to Koh Lon, pitched their tents, cooked for themselves and practiced life saving skills in the water. I was so impressed by their hard work, determination and teamwork and want to wish everyone the best of luck for their qualifying trip in December. Well done everyone! A You Tube video can be found by clicking HERE By Ms Holly Strawbridge

House News

This week, during Tuesday and Wednesday lunch times, the students competed in a house bowling competition. It was very close with many competitors from each house achieving strike after strike. However, after adding up the points from all of the year groups, it was the Red Phoenixes who were crowed the winners. This has made the overall totals and the fight to be House champions of Term 1 even closer. The overall house points so far in Term 1.