This week was Challenge Week in Secondary, which meant students from Year 7 all the way up to Year 13 participated in a range of residential trips across Thailand. The trips had been designed to create maximum ‘challenge’, meaning that all students were taken outside of their comfort zone and took part in a huge variety of challenges during their time away, developing their leadership skills as well as resilience and teamwork skills. Year 7 spent their Challenge Week in the beautiful Khao Yai National Park, Year 8 in rural Chanthaburi, Years 9 and 10 in mountainous Chiang Rai and Years 11, 12 and 13 spent time in tribal villages also in the Chiang Rai region. All students and staff returned to school on Thursday, tired but full of amazing stories and experiences which they will always remember. The week ended with the King’s Birthday celebrations and it was fantastic to see so many parents joining us on WP to take part. Winter Wonderland is this week and I hope that even more parents will come along and enjoy the festivities the students, staff and PTA have planned. Tickets are available from Khun Trini so please do pick these up from the school office!
On Friday, we celebrated the King’s Birthday. I was on the Early Years campus for the morning and was impressed by the community feel on the campus, as parents, staff and children came together, sharing food, songs and activities. I would also like to thank all the families that generously contributed toys to be donated to Camillian Home later this week. On the Windsor Park campus, the King’s birthday was also a success, with families coming together to celebrate this special day and the successes of the year so far. The celebrations were followed, later in the day, by the Primary Fantastic Finish. For the first time, our Student Exec were able to coordinate the show: they did a great job and showed how much they have grown in confidence. All classes showed films they had made from their activities during challenge week. We all enjoyed sharing our student-led celebration with our families. This week, we are looking forward to the Winter Wonderland event. If parents have not got their tickets yet, there is still time to pick them up from the school office. Come and join the celebrations!
It is hard to believe that we are now only two weeks away from the end of the first academic term – it certainly has been action packed with a huge amount of exciting learning experiences and enrichment events for all our students. Last week saw both the WP and EY campuses celebrate Loy Krathong and my heartfelt thanks go to our Thai department for their amazing work in organising both events. In addition, our newly formed PTA did a wonderful job in organising the stalls, snacks and refreshments after both events. If you would like to get involved in the PTA this year on either campus please contact our parent liaison officers for further details. This week our Secondary students are away on the residential trips and I look forward to hearing all about their enrichment activities next week on their return to school – our students certainly learn a lot from these off-campus experiences and they play a huge part in their ongoing personal development as global citizens. Finally, I look forward to seeing you all next week at our ‘Winter Wonderland’ celebration on the WP campus.
Boarding has seen a couple of quiet weeks, with the Primary challenge week and now the secondary boarders all away on their various adventures. For the Primary students, I am pleased to say that the boarders all had a great time, and being away from home was taken in their stride. For me, it was great to see the year 2 and 3 on-site this week, with the year 3 students staying over night after a really exciting day. After a hot chocolate and marshmallow drink to settle before bed, the year 2s went home and the year 3s set up camp in the Tudor House study room. It was great to read for them one of my favourite stories, ‘A Bear Called Paddington’, with the excellent assistance of Ms Huntsley helping to enact the female voices for the reading. For our weekend trip on 22 November, we visited the Cartoon Network Water park. This was very popular and also gave the maintenance team a chance to complete the regular insect spraying and keep everyone away from any fumes, which should keep us safe for a couple of months. A big congratulations to the senior basketball team, which includes many of the Windsor House boys. We have now given out the names for the Secret Santa event on the penultimate day of term, I am working with the local golf course to set up our Christmas meal and Ms Ho is planning a scavenger hunt that she is keeping very secret! As a boarding team, we are all working hard to review the recent reports that were sent out to adapt the boarding provision and offer additional help and support where needed. If you feel that your child(ren) would benefit from any help in a specific area, please contact tminh@bromgrove.ac.th as he is overseeing our study support sessions. Finally, I wish the absolute best of luck to our Korean BDST students who are taking their exams this week: your dedication to study will hopefully be reflected in your grades.
As we approach the end of this busy term, it is fantastic to see everyone in the Bromsgrove community still working so very hard. Life seems to get busier from day to day, and no sooner had the Primary pupils returned from their fantastic Challenge Week than the whole school was immersed in their preparations for our Loy Krathong festival, which was celebrated so successfully on both campuses last week. Prior to this, we welcomed back our ‘World Scholars’ from their competition at Yale University, where Bromsgrove was showered with medals, proving us, yet again, to be amongst the best in the world. Last weekend, I took a group of our teaching staff on a trip to beautiful Khao Yai National Park, which was a great teambuilding activity, and also a fantastic chance for many of them to experience this beautiful corner of Thailand for the first time. Finally, last Friday, Ms Bennett and I visited St Christopher’s International Primary School in Penang, Malaysia, with whom we are about to begin a number of exciting, cutting-edge collaborations – one involving some of our Reception pupils and parents, and another to develop a professional development model around a Teacher Exchange. More details will follow on these exciting opportunities to help make Bromsgrove better and better.
Last week, our administration team was busy with the set-up for the Loy Krathong festival at both the Early Years campus and the Windsor Park campus. The festival was successful, with good cooperation from parents, who brought several traditional Thai desserts and dressed up in the Thai costumes to promote the Thai culture together. While children are having fun in this festive season, the school has to ensure their health and safety, and we have recently arranged for mosquito repellent spray to be administered throughout the campus, to help protect everyone against mosquito-borne illnesses. Our Head of Marketing and Business Development has just come back from a student recruitment tour of Russia. Several Russian parents are interested to send their child to our school. This is a good news, as the school wants to have a good balance of students from various cultures in our school. Finally, we have now begun to process applications for those students who want to take advantage of a term in Bromsgrove UK, and we hope this initiative continues to be a great success.
Determination, resilience and positivity were key words in Primary a fortnight ago as students on Windsor Park took part in the first Bromsgrove challenge week. It was a fantastic week with children working outside their comfort zones gaining a whole range of new experiences. Our Year 2s stayed late at school for the first time, playing flashlight tag around the atrium and working in teams to complete a challenging obstacle course. After a trip to the Science Museum, our Year 3s returned to school to spend their first night away from home. We were very impressed with how sensible all the children were, especially our Year 3 boarders who took on the role of experts to ensure that their classmates enjoyed their time away from home. Our Year 4s, 5s and 6s went even further afield, going on trips all around the country. Their challenges included: living on a barge, staying in tree houses, trekking through the jungle, cooking their own food and learning about how different communities in Thailand live. I am very proud of all the students and I am looking forward to our Fantastic Finish that will take place this week. Students are using the videos and pictures from their trip to make a class film. These will be shown this Friday in the auditorium so that the whole of Primary and their parents can celebrate the successes of the last week.
Students at Bromsgrove International School would like to ask you some questions…
Should robots run the justice system? Does democracy suit all cultures? …..
Students at Bromsgrove International School would like to ask you some questions…Should robots run the justice system? Does democracy suit all cultures? Do dictatorships cause more progress than regress? Can we compare technology to a prison?
Big questions like these are at the core of The World Scholar’s Cup, a prestigious academic competition expertly designed for the best and brightest worldwide. Students from across five continents and dozens of countries compete in a range of challenges designed to put their minds to the test in innovative and rigorous ways, competing against each other every year for the ultimate prize: a place in the ‘Tournament of Champions’ at America’s prestigious Yale University. However, equally important is the enormous fun and celebration of learning along the way.
Opportunities for the gifted teenager to develop in the sporting arena are commonplace, as are opportunities in the Arts – but the chance to flex their mind muscles in an arena such as this is more unusual. This is where the World Scholar’s Cup steps in, designing a rigorous programme to challenge these students and develop their skills in a range of areas, aiming to inspire a global community of future scholars and leaders.
Bromsgrove’s Junior Squad outside Yale University’s Battell Chapel
Gifted students are able to exercise their talents by taking the floor in dynamic debates, putting pen to paper in erudite essays, and examining the depth and breadth of their knowledge in a mammoth ‘Scholar’s Challenge’. Finally, they enter the ‘Scholar’s Bowl’, a three-hour team quiz which takes on a unique and ingenious look at the entire syllabus, challenging students to accrue as many points as they can with a gambler’s recklessness and every ounce of divergent thinking they can muster.The same format was followed in dozens of regional rounds around the world, from Houston to Perth, from Nairobi to Doha, and from Surabaya to Tokyo – including here in Thailand last March, when Bromsgrove students swept the floor with a formidable line up of Bangkok’s best and amassed an impressive medal and trophy haul. The massive Global Round in Kuala Lumpur in June saw over three thousand of the top students from each regional round pitted against each other in fierce but always fun competition.
Bromsgrove’s Senior Squad at Yale University
The curriculum this year explored the World Unbound, an exciting array of topics which made students question the role of heroes in our society, whether technology liberates or imprisons us, the challenges of movements towards freedom and why cultures clash. Encouraging students to think outside the box is the forte of the World Scholar’s Cup and linking high brow subjects such as Karl Marx to modern day social media is all in a day’s work.On a crisp, autumnal afternoon in November, the very best students from the Global Round arrived in sleepy New Haven, Connecticut for the final leg of a journey which, for many of them, was a life-changing learning opportunity and an immersive taste of future university study tantalisingly close ahead. Among those 666 young Alpacas (the mascot identity participants adopt throughout the programme) were three teams from Bromsgrove International School pitting themselves against the top students in the world in this championship of minds. In fact, the students brought home from Yale a glittering array of prizes to adorn the trophy cabinets of Bromsgrove.
The Bromsgrove Alpacas on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut
One of the Junior teams consisting of students Andrew Couper, Joon Ho Byun and Daisy Savage finished 5th in the debating competition with a finish in the top 16 for the whole competition. Our Senior team of Meetu Bharati, Sydney Tarrant and Thomas Savage came away with a trophy for finishing 4th place across all of the Senior teams in the Scholar’s Bowl, with one team member, fifteen-year-old Thomas Savage finishing an impressive 20th across all categories above all the Senior Scholars.The achievements of the students of Bromsgrove are hard to beat and a tough act to follow, but this year’s competition will soon be underway with preparations for the Bangkok regional round commencing shortly. This year’s regional round will be hosted at Bromsgrove March 19-20 2016, with the global round right on our doorsteps, as the World Scholar’s Cup are bringing the alpaca spirit to Bangkok in June 2016.
For more information about the World Scholar’s Cup, visit www.scholarscup.org
Bromsgrove International School is hosting the 2016 regional round of the World Scholar’s Cup in March. To learn more above Bromsgrove International School, visit www.bromsgrove.ac.th
Bromsgrove’s Junior Squad at the prestigious MIT campus
On 2 November, K. Thada Savetsila, the author of the book “People Champion”, shared his knowledge and experiences with local staff. This was such a great opportunity to learn from the guru. On 12 November, we arranged a Parent meeting to brainstorm ideas about how to support the next two big school events: the Loy Krathong event on 25 November, and the Winter Concert on 10 December. The meeting went very well. I am very proud of our parents, who always give full support and find ways to build a great learning atmosphere in school. The school will send a letter to inform all parents about the detailed program soon. Meanwhile, at the Early Years campus, the new Parent Teacher Association (PTA) has been set up with very good cooperation from parents. Everyone now now preparing for the fun Loy Krathong event on 24 November. With such good cooperation between parents and teachers, we can ensure that our children will be happy and can make progress as planned.
