Important Reminders to Calendar:
Monday, January 27: Press Launch, SportFeva 7:50am - 8:30am, AISK Campus
Monday, January 27: Bahamas travel Football teams (Girls & Boys) will play against Kingsway on at 3:00pm. at AISK
Friday, January 31 - Reports will be sent home
Friday, January 31 - Representative from Florida Institute of Technology, 10:30am, Media Center
Thursday February 6 - Honor Roll Assembly, 7:50am
Tuesday, February 11 - Representative from NYU Abu Dhabi (RSVP - Ms Weekes)
Thursday, February 13 - Representative from Univ. of Waterloo, 12:30, Media Center
Thursday, May 29 - Graduation at Pegasus Hotel
Saturday, May 31 - Prom
Activities Reminders
Official Event Schedule 2014
Monday January 27, 2014: Press Launch, 7:50am-8:30 amAISK Campus
Sunday, February 9, 2014: ClayFeva, 8:00am-4:00 pm, Jamaica Skeet Club
Saturday, February 15, 2014: GolfFeva, 8:00am-2:00pm, Constant Spring Golf Club
Friday, February 21 2014
SoccerFeva, 8:00am-5:00pm, AISK Campus
TennisFeva, 8:00am-5:00pm, AISK Campus
DanceFeva, 8:00pm-2:00am AISK Campus
Saturday, February 22 2014
SoccerFeva, 8:00am-5:00pm, AISK Campus
TennisFeva, 8:00am-5:00pm, AISK Campus
TumbleFeva, 8:00am-5:00pm, AISK Campus
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Dear PTO, Parents and Students,
Last evening was Winter Wonderland and all the hard work of the PTO came to fruition. A standing ovation to the PTO for the planning and orchestration of this exceptionally large event.
BUILD THAT ROOF!
Recruitment for 2014-2015 takes me away this coming week. Please email or call if you have any concerns. Anna Wallace is Officer-in-Charge with support from Ingrid Fitt.
Thank you,
Shirley
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Dear AISK Families,
Grade 12
AISK Seniors are working hard to complete their final year of High School as well as prepare for their IB Exams in May. They are finishing off the requirements for Theory of Knowledge (ToK) and once this is completed, they will have the opportunity to use this class time for some well deserved Physical Education (PE) as well as having some time to complete CAS documentation.
Mock IB Exams are March 10-17 and the official IB Exams will begin Monday, May 5th with English Literature and end on Friday, May 23rd with Spanish. Please see the IB Exam schedule attached.
Please place the following dates on your calendar:
Graduation - Thursday 29th May at the Pegasus Hotel
Prom - Saturday 31st May at the Terra Nova Hotel
Grade 11
Hello 11th grade parents,
I will be meeting with the 11th grade for College Prep in the Media Center during homeroom beginning next Thursday, Jan 30th. They will be required to bring their computers and PSAT scores with them as I will be showing them how to log into the PSAT website and use the resources available there.
Below are the meeting dates for the semester:
January 30
February 13
February 27
March 21
March 27
May 1
May 15
May 22
Admissions Representatives
Florida Institute of Technology admissions representative will be here on Friday, January 31st at 10:30 in the Media Center.
A representative from the organization that recruits for NYU Abu Dhabi will be here on campus on Tuesday, February 11th from 9:30 until 10:30 in the Media Center. Please RSVP with Ms. Weekes if you plan to attend.
University of Waterloo admissions representative will be here on Thursday, February 13th at 12:30 in the Media Center.
Please contact Ms. Weekes, if you have any questions about any of these events.
HMUN
AISK will be representing the country of Hungary at the Harvard MUN Conference in Boston from January 29th through to February 3rd. The students have been working relentlessly on their resolutions and are well prepared to represent Hungary. We wish them well and look forward to hearing their stories upon their return. Thank you to Sylvi Browne and Nick Lewis for all their work with these students.
Jamaican Math Olympiad
AISK was represented by 17 students to progress through the local rounds of the Jamaican Math Olympiad on Saturday. These local rounds are eliminations to form a team that will represent Jamaica. It is also a great complement to SAT and ACT math sections preparations--an alternative to paying for standardized exam prep. The ensuing rounds will be preceded by preparation workshops usually a Saturday (a week) prior to actual round (the following Saturday).
At the workshops, the students are taught by UWI professors' assistants and in some cases, the actual professors on ways to approach the questions--theses questions are designed to discourage rote learning and develop cognitive analysis. The students are also served lunch between the two workshop sessions.
Thank you to Karl Savoury for guiding our students through this event.
Late arrival to school
If students arrive to school after 8:00am they must report to Ms. Tricia Rudd in the Middle & High School office. They will then be given a 'late pass' to progress to class. This includes during break time and lunchtime, and also upon their return after an appointment that requires them to leave school. It is important that AISK has accurate records on students who are on campus at any particular time for emergency purposes.
Reports
Semester 1 Report Cards will be sent home with students on January 31st. For Grades 8-12, this report card will include the Semester 1 Exam Grade. Please review this report with your child and if there are any concerns of questions, please do not hesitate to contact the teacher concerned.
Semester 1 Final Grades will appear on the AISK Official Transcript for Grades 9-12.
Honor Roll Assembly
As the Semester ends and Quarter 2 also ends, we get the opportunity to take a breath and celebrate those students who excel academically and thank them for their efforts by placing them on the AISK Honor Roll. The Honor Roll Assembly will take place on Thursday, February 6th at 7:50am.
New Faculty
AISK welcomes to the Middle & High School faculty Mr. Victor Ebanks. Victor has joined the PE Department and will be teaching PE classes from Grade 6 through to Grade 12.
Sincerely,
Susan Canobie
MS/HS Principal
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Dear Parents,
Sharing some updates on some of the many things happening in the elementary every week. Please also see some reminders herein.
Communication
Please continue to look out for and access communication from AISK in the following formats and places:
1. Newsletters in hard copy in your child's bag on either a Friday or Monday, giving updates on units of study and class specific matters.
2. Schoology learning management system and social network, where teachers are sharing, creating and managing academic content specific to each class.
3. Week Ahead email from AISK via Constant Contact, which tells of school-wide and departmental happenings.
In addition, the teachers and I are always willing to correspond by email and/or phone, as needed.
After School Pick Up
The end of our school day is 2:30pm, with afterschool activities beginning at 2:45pm onwards.
We are thrilled to have students in activities on and around campus. Please ensure that students are picked up promptly before and after activities.
It is also a great idea to call the school if you are running late so that we can be best informed and direct your child.
As of next week, those children not picked up by 2:45pm can be found in the room immediately outside of my office - Rm. 2104. This does not include children with scheduled activities.
Elementary School Garden
We started our school garden a few weeks before the winter holidays. Elementary students planted dill, basil, pak choi, tomatoes, watermelon, eggplant and cabbage.
Preschool made a great contribution to the garden as they carried out an experiment to compare and contrast Jamaican and American pumpkins and to find out if American pumpkin would grow in the tropics. This was very successful.
Each day, classes took turns watering and removing weeds from each plant bed. After a few days of manual watering, the work team installed a drip irrigation system in our garden.
Mr. Tantary was generous and donated rosemary, basil and a marigold plant that helped in pest control as we strive to make our vegetables organic.
After maintaining crops for a few weeks, the kindergarten class harvested six heads of pak choi. They prepared a delicious meal of Chicken Chow Mein with three heads while we sold the remaining three. All income from the garden will be used for replanting of different vegetables and herbs and for maintenance purposes.
We will have other crops ready for harvest in a few weeks to come.
This venture was quite educational and great fun for the kids in elementary school.
Certificates for Respect
Programme Character Counts pillars include Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring and Citizenship. At the end of each pillar, teachers observe each student's behavior and select one student who they believe displays behavior that is consistent with each pillar.
 
The students are now learning about the pillar of responsibility.
Anna Thwaites-Wallace,
Elementary School Principal
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A huge THANK YOU to all the AISK Parents, Teachers, Students and Staff, who helped make this year's WINTER WONDERLAND, the best one ever! |
Update to AISK School Community on Purchase of Instructional Resources 2014-15
Next year when students return to campus they will be very pleased to see in place an enhanced instructional delivery system to include best practice and most recent print/electronic resources in all 15 content areas and from early years to Grade 12.
A rich and rigorous set of instructional materials was generated after collaboration between staff, the Curriculum Office and administration between September 11, 2013 and January 20, 2014. The groups accomplished the following objectives:
- To conduct an inventory of all content areas and all grade levels;
- To combine these inventories into content area packets (Example: Science Early Years to Grade 12);
- To create content area representatives to lead the instructional resources renewal effort;
- Working in content area teams, to view packets to find gaps in instructional resources
- To find redundancies in instructional resources;
- To identify courses utilizing old resources, lowly-rated resources or out-of sequence resources;
- To discover areas where instruction was hindered, not helped, by technology;
- To establish a curriculum review cycle to renew core, encore courses in a 5 year, equitable cycle;
- To order sets of resources (K-5, 6-8 or 6-10) to allow for scaffolding of skills and knowledge.
Thanks to countless hours of work by staff and administration over the past 4 months, your child (ren) will walk into their classrooms next August and begin to avail themselves of a wide array of new and exciting instructional resources.
Below is a sampling of those resources:
- New instructional programs - a formal early years program, Splash into Pre-K, has been adopted, fully supported with literacy resources and one professionally trained teacher to implement Splash
- 2014 Publications - the most recent and highly respected resources have been purchased; for example, Oxford University Press editions of IB Biology, IB Chemistry, IB Physics and IB Theory of Knowledge
- Articulated K-5 programs - the Fountas+Pinnell Reading and Comprehension program will be implemented by a staff trained in F+P and fully supported by leveled readers in the 4 cores - Math, Science, Social Studies and Language Arts
- Articulated 6-12 programs - the Language Arts/English Department has adopted an age-appropriate, multi-cultural Grades 6-12 novel series with the addition of many new novel sets
- Online writing assessment programs - AISK has purchased the online writing assessment program called ERB or Educational Records Bureau (aligned to the 6 Traits writing curriculum for Grades 3-12) in order to improve writing skills
- Extensive purchase of text/e-texts - AISK has replaced old, poorly rated, or non-sequenced texts with recent, highly rated and sequenced (K-5, 6-8 or 6-10) publications such as in:
- Middle School Social Studies
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- High School Social Studies
- Middle School Science
- High School Science
- Middle School Math
- High School Math
- 6-10 Art
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- Expansion of World Language program - French Department to acquire set of 9 novels and subscriptions to 3 newspapers and Spanish Department to adopt a recent K-5 Spanish as a second language series and a set of high school self-taught Spanish novels
- Fully equipped science rooms - purchase of equipment to conduct pre-IB and IB lab experiments along with safety equipment
- Fine Arts enhancement:
- Art - extensive purchase of art supplies and technology such as IMac, scanner, printer and camera
- Music - K-8 instructional packets, new musical instruments (drums, violins, and guitars) and sound equipment
- Drama - stage equipment, amplifier, transmitter, speaker system, and acting edition of plays
- Physical Education Department ready for another season of sports and more - PE has not only replenished its sport supplies but also added equipment for personal fitness and weight training
- An investment in Technology - Here is a sample of tech purchases for the next academic year:
- o Apps
- o IPads
- o MacBooks
- o TouchBoards
- o Computers
- o Tablets
- o Scanners
- o Printers
- o Home theater projector
- o Database management system
Regards,
Sylvia Browne
Dan Phillips
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Dear Parents, Students & Staff,
- SportsFeva Press Launch Monday, Jan 27, 7:40am
- MS Hurricanes leave for Bahamas Wednesday, Jan. 29. Official send off 9:30!
- After School Play - Now also Mondays (Miss Smith: psmith@aisk.com)
- ES Homework Club - Mondays (Mrs Luck, room 2206) Thursdays (Mrs Myers, room 2201)
SportsFeva
It's a massive week with our SportsFeva Press Launch and the Hurricanes teams being put through the paces to see who makes the cut! The 'Feva' is building and the buzz is electric. I suggest you do everything in your power to experience and enjoy this amazing time of AISK's school year. You are invited to everything and please FEED THE FEVA!
Synchronized swimming
Congratulations to Christine O'Brien, Alex Loughlin, Phillipa Ryan, who all competed as Hurricanes against local schools/clubs in the 6th Island Aquatics Synchronized Swimming Jamaica Invitational. Our young team had fantastic results finishing 2nd, 3rd & 4th in the Novice 12 and under solos.
The AISK Synchro Team needs swimmers! If you can swim, have fun and fancy a challenge, please get in touch with Diahann Campbell: diahann.campbell@gmail.com
TumbleFeva
Meet our 2014 AISK TumbleFeva Team! Kate, Lila and Stella (members of our silver medal 2012 TumbleFeva team), with newcomer Bruna Melo.
If you have a child in the Elementary Department and would like him/her to try out for our TumbleFeva team, please contact me bransom@aisk.com or Keisha La Beach klabeach@aisk.com
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CAFETERIA MENU OF THE WEEK
Please click here for .pdf version
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