13 January 2017 Newsletter
Jockey Club Sarah Roe School’s latest newsletter is available to read now. Find out the latest news around the school and upcoming events.
Principal’s Message
Special Olympics @ 7th January 2017
Showcase – Therapy at JCSRS
ESF 50th Anniversary Secondary Concert @ 22 February 2017
ESF’s Got Musical Talent
Our thanks – from Crossroads
Dates for your Diary
Principal’s Message
Welcome back to a new year and a new school term. We have all returned feeling refreshed and ready for learning. Special welcome back to Sally Fryer in Ruby class and a huge thank you to Sam Saxena who was with us for term one. Also congratulations to Alfert Arrogante and his wife who welcomed baby Ariel to the family and our nurse Christine and her husband on the safe arrival of their baby girl. We also welcome and thank Pheobe Huang who is our nurse until Christine returns from leave.
This term we will work within our unit of work Materials Matter and once again I see a lot of creative and practical learning in classrooms (and other areas) across the school. The beautiful weather has been conducive to learning and play in our playground. The arrival of new equipment has encouraged and enabled students to explore and play together.
Thanks to Mike and parents for supporting student participation in the Special Olympics Track and Field last Saturday in Tsing Yi. I hear many students received medals. Well done to everyone, I am sorry I could not be there this year.
This week we had students from Kingston International School visit our classes. The students are working on a unit of work to inquire into how people worldwide face challenges which shape who they are. We are always proud to share our school and our students abilities with our local community.
At this time of year teachers are focusing on assessment in preparation for mid year IEP reviews and mid year reports. We are all using the new Evidencer platform to record student learning. This term we will email you the IEP evaluations and mid year reports as links to Evidencer but anticipate that by the end of the year you will be able to log into Evidencer to see these documents as well as other relevant information. There will be optional parent meetings on Tuesday 21 February. You will receive more details via email.
You can see that this is a busy year for ESF with the 50th Anniversary. Note that JCSRS students are included in the secondary concert on Wednesday 22nd February (see poster below). Helena Murchie, the music teacher from KGV has been working with a group of our students every week and they are sounding fantastic. I hope that many of you can be there as well as attending the ESF’s Got Musical Talent on 21st January at Grappa’s Cellar.
Just in case any of you are doing planning for the 2017/18 school year (time flies!) here are our proposed days for the start of year and staff CPD (no school for students).
Friday 11 August – All staff at school
Monday 14 August – new students only (CPD for staff)
Tuesday 15 August – All students
CPD days – Friday 20 October (ESF), Monday 6 November, Monday 26 February and Monday 30 April (no school for students).
We will add a calendar to the website later in the year.
Special Olympics Track and Field
Showcase – Therapy at JCSRS
Five students from secondary have been participating in vocational training at the Sai Kung Community centre. Every Friday students arrive at the centre and help with a range of administrative tasks such as repackaging, envelope and flag making. Students spend the rest of their time making necklaces and bracelets that will be sold at the Sai Kung pier during term 3 to raise funds for the community. During the Christmas Show the students were able to showcase their hard work. The “Sparklets” were a huge hit and more than half of their inventory was sold! We look forward to selling more of our students creations and we are accepting pre-orders.
The Speech Therapists have introduced large core vocabulary charts to the school to do more targeted vocabulary building activities with students. New iPads have been purchased for each classroom using Jazz Fest 2016 funding to be used primarily for students’ communication development. These will be rolled out in the coming weeks.
There has been a school wide focus on fitness during term one and students have been participating in weekly fitness sessions. They have been using a variety of equipment such as treadmills, cross trainers, rowers and static bikes. Students have also participated in weekly “Smart Fitness” exercise sessions following the actions and movements of the “Smart Fitness Programme”. Term two will continue with this school wide focus with more objective data recorded such as body weight, body mass index, body fat percentage and exercise tolerance. We will track and report individual progress using this data.
ESF 50th Anniversary Secondary Concert @ 22 February 2017
ESF’s Got Musical Talent
Our thanks – from Crossroads
How lovely of you to organise the donation drive for Crossroads! The items are just wonderful and will help fill many of the orders we receive from charities across Hong Kong and the world. A particular thank you to you both, too, for all your hard work to organise the drive. We are grateful indeed.
We received some feedback recently from a community school in Central Uganda, who received a container from Crossroads filled with goods kindly donated by the Hong Kong community: classroom furniture, educational toys, stationery supplies, textbooks, medical equipment, wheelchairs, clothing, shoes, office equipment etc. Their feedback was of great encouragement to us and we wanted to share it with you, as well, to help illustrate just how great an impact these donations can make.
“The staff and all well-wishers of the school and the community at large would like to humbly thank all the staff of Crossroads Foundation and the sponsors for being so generous to us.
Who are we to receive such amount of goods, a full container of 40ft of nice, beautiful, modern items from people who have never seen us? Some of our members have even dropped tears of joy when receiving these goods as they cannot believe that the goods were given to us free of charge by people who don’t know us but care so much about the needy.
This shipment has changed us for the better and you have helped us jump and move forward so fast because the things which we would have done in five to ten years, we are now going to achieve them within two years.
We also know that we are going to save over USh100,000,000 (US$27,000). This money will help us build more classrooms, pay our staff, treat the sick children as well as buy more land for our future projects.
From all the people here, please allow me to say a BIG THANK YOU TO CROSSROADS FOUNDATION.”
As you can see, items which are no longer needed in Hong Kong are making a world of difference in the lives of people who struggle daily with poverty. Thank you for being a part of stories like this one!
May we also take this moment to wish you the best for the new year.
With our gratitude,
CROSSROADS FOUNDATION
Liz Begbie
Dates for your Diary
ESF’s Got Musical Talent – 2.30 – 5.30 Saturday 21 January
ESF Secondary Concert – 7.15 Wednesday 22 February
IEP and mid year reports sent home – Friday 17 February
Optional parent meetings – Tuesday 21 February
