Issue No. 15 (13 December 2019)

Dear Students, Parents, Colleagues and other members of the SIS Community,

I would like to start by wishing everyone a very happy Festive Season! A number of important milestones have already occurred this term, such as Eid ul Adha, Diwali, Thanksgiving Day, Bodhi Day – and now we head into the celebration of Winter Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah and the western New Year, which will be followed swiftly by Chinese New Year. Regardless of your culture, religion or customs, we trust that you will have an excellent break during the next few weeks, and enjoy some very special time with your family and community.

The importance of the SIS community has been extremely clear this term – and a couple of months ago, ESF commissioned a video to try to capture the essence of SIS. As usual, the leadership of our students is clear for everyone to see: we hope you enjoy watching this as much as I did!

When we return in January, we will have a busy few weeks up until the Chinese New Year break. As has been customary in recent years, our last working day before we break for Chinese New Year (Thursday 24^th January) will be a slightly shortened day, meaning that students should be free to leave shortly after 1pm. We have taken this decision to ensure alignment with our main Primary feeder schools and to ensure that families have plenty of time for their travel plans before Chinese New Year itself commences.

Looking further into next term, please save the date of Friday 14^th February for our rescheduled Nightfest! We know that this is also Valentine’s Day, but in terms of our overall schedule, this was much the best day for Nightfest. We are all very much looking forward to coming together as a community on that day, to celebrate everything that is so special about South Island School.

 It only remains for me to thank you for your ongoing support of South Island School. This has been a term that we will all remember, both for very good reasons and also owing to some challenges – and yet, it is a term that ends with our SIS community stronger than ever. It remains a magnificent privilege for me to serve as your Principal.

With best wishes,

Tom Vignoles

Principal, South Island School

Extra-curricular activities TERM 2

A reminder that the sign up period for term 2 activities is now open and will remain open until Sunday 15 December at 11.59pm.

We encourage all students to sign up for at least one sports club per term and there are more offerings in term 2 for students of all abilities, including fitness and strength and conditioning clubs that we have not offered before as well as additional off-site activities. Most competitions for our younger students in B, C & D grade start in Term 2 so it is important that students in Years 7-11 attend clubs in order to start preparing for when these start.  Most of our sports clubs have an open door policy, or we run recreational sessions alongside the team training, so anyone who has an interest in a particular sport is able to attend.

The extra-curricular activities programme is due to start on MONDAY 13 JANUARY unless stated differently on the sign-up sheet. We look forward to seeing even more students participating in our programme in term 2.

Sports team kit

For the last year we have been working hard to standardise and centralise all our school sports team kit so we have one company who is responsible for designing and manufacturing the kit for all our teams. We put this out to tender and had many companies interested in providing this kit for us. A requisite of the tender process was for the company to create a strong school identity for us around the South Island ‘Stingrays’ name, using our school colours of green, blue and white and also provide an online ordering platform with home delivery to be expected within a maximum of 14 days.

I am very pleased to say that we have recently signed an agreement with Kukri, a UK company but with a strong presence in Hong Kong, to provide kit for all our sports teams. The in-house designer at Kukri has created an amazing design for us and the new kit designs are attached below for you to have a look at. The new kit will be slightly more expensive to purchase than the kit the students have purchased in the past however the quality is very high and there will be a resale service available once students have outgrown their kit or moved on from South Island.  The online ordering platform will be up and running in the New Year although orders will not be placed until the kit is in stock at Kukri’s warehouse in Hong Kong. The kit will be available to be purchased by all students who are attending training and would like to represent the school at sport.

Here are some examples of the new kit. The full storyboard is on display in the PE corridor.

Thank you in advance for supporting this initiative and we hope to see all our sports team participants representing South Island School in their new kit from February onwards.

End of term Review

Now that the first term draws to a close I would like to thank all of the SIS community for their support during what has been a particularly testing period. In school, our  sport classes have been disrupted and continuity lost, our extra-curricular programme has been affected  in the same way with make-up sessions being scheduled to catch up on the valuable time lost, and our teams have suffered from matches being cancelled and rescheduled. We also lost our own school Athletics Day, which is one of the highlights of the year, although hopefully this will be rescheduled later in the year.

Despite all the disruption we have managed to keep our extra-curricular programme going and our teams going to competitions, when many other schools have cancelled their programmes for the rest of the term, or not allowed their students to have more time out of class. This is due to the support of our students, parents and staff who look beyond the classroom and see the value in students participating in other areas of school life.

Fortunately we have managed to achieve some good results despite the disruptions, with our A grade rugby boys winning the HK Schools rugby competition again, our A grade girls basketball team being in the final of the ESF competition as well as the semi-finals of the HKSSF competition, the A grade boys basketball team being close to qualifying for the HKSSF semi-finals, and the swimming teams doing exceptionally well at the HKSSF gala, with the B grade girls coming 1^st with the girls team finishing 4^th overall and the boys team 3^rd.

This school/life balance is really important in times such as these, and it is vitally important that students take time for themselves and the activities they enjoy doing, to help balance their mind and body.

With that in mind we wish you all a very happy Christmas and look forward to seeing everybody again, feeling refreshed, in the new year.

Regards

Jon Redding

Director of Sport & Activities

This year, our Namas MaD Week took place from 2nd December – 6th December to raise awareness for mental health and well being. So on behalf of the Namas Leadership Team, we would like to give a huge thank you to everyone who got involved in our events and supported us throughout the week. It was a massive success this year, and surely it couldn’t have been possible without YOU!

We managed to raise over $15,783 in total (a new record for the most amount of donations raised for Namas MaD week!) for Mind HK, a local charity that aims to improve awareness and understanding of mental health in Hong Kong by providing support to those in need.

On Tuesday, we had a great turnout for our first-ever teacher VS students dodgeball game! Thanks to those who came along and we really hope you enjoyed yourselves during the tournament.

On Thursday, our annual sponge the teacher took place. Once again, a special thanks to everyone who came to help, especially the teachers who gave up their time to get sponged despite the freezing cold weather! We raised over $4000 from this event – again, all donations will go towards Mind HK to support their cause.

Lastly, our dress casual theme on Friday was Christmas. It was great to see everyone getting in the holiday spirit and coming to school with their Santa hats, reindeer antlers and Christmas sweaters! Our donations from dress casual day were absolutely outstanding – over $10,000!

Once again, thank you everyone for participating in our Namas MaD Week and for MAKING A DIFFERENCE! Merry Christmas and happy holidays! 🙂

Sandrine Ma and Adrian Kwok

Namas MaD Council

Many thanks to all the students and parents who supported our musicians at the Christmas Concert.  It was a night of fabulous music, demonstrating the wealth of talent in SIS and we raised an amazing $16,000 for our chosen charity, ImpactHK.  That will make an enormous difference to the homeless of Hong Kong this Christmas. Well done to everyone involved.

Last Tuesday, over 50 SIS Design students attended ESF Design Day hosted at Renaissance College. The event was held in partnership with Business of Design Week as an educational satellite event. It was a great opportunity for students to make contact with industry professionals and learn about the wide variety of Design Paths for the future.  Students attended dynamic workshops to learn about fashion, industrial design, architecture, jewellery and many other creative industries.  It was an enjoyable experience that we are looking forward to again next year!

Ms Cook

Dear Parents

Technology plays an ever increasing role in all of our lives and as a school we are looking to explore further how our students engage with it. By gathering information on this topic, we hope to devise further strategies to ensure that students make the most of the technological opportunities available to them, but are also protected against some potentially harmful effects. We are writing to ask that you help us with this by completing a survey on your child’s use of technology at home. We hope that this will help to provide us with a more holistic picture of our students’ technology use. 

Specifically, we would like to use this data to inform future curriculum, parent workshops and pastoral interventions. All data will be collected anonymously, and you are of course welcome to skip any questions that you feel unable to answer. 

Here is the link to the survey:  Family Digital Device Survey

We would be grateful if you could complete the survey by Wednesday 8th January. We really appreciate you taking the time to provide us with this useful information. Thank you!

On Thursday 6th February (5.30-7.15pm) as part of our annual E-Safety focus week,  we will be inviting parents into school for a technology and well-being event. This will include a series of workshops focusing on a healthy approach to technology, and a screening of a documentary on teenage use of social media called “Like”. More information and sign up details for this event will be emailed to you after the Christmas holiday.  

Should you have further queries or concerns regarding the Family Digital Device survey please do not hesitate to contact me. 

Kind regards,

Lucie Purves              

Vice Principal