New families

Time of year when we have many families visit us looking for admissions for their children.

Great to see new faces and meet new families! Some of the students seeking admission have siblings here and it is lovely to see families enrol their next child with us.

The Habits of Mind Fostered by Arts Education

While we certainly hope that each student performs as well as he/she can on their final examinations,
we need to remember some children may not get the grades which parents may be hoping for. Few children will excel in every subject in high-stakes, academically focused exams. We need to support individual needs and abilities but encourage all children to have a wide variety of experiences in these formative years.

Through Drama, Music and Visual Art, students learn essential social-emotional skills

Parent coffees

A big thank you to all the parents who came for our coffee mornings this week. The goal of the coffee mornings was to get unstructured feedback from parents in the form of questions or concerns about this year and suggestions for next year. The feedback was mostly positive, with some good suggestions also. This kind of insight from parents is helpful to us as we reflect on the year and plan for the future. Please see below for the feedback from parents and leave a comment if you think of anything else.

Your school needs you!

A responsible and constructive board is essential to progress at our school, which is where you come in. We have a number of vacancies on the board for next year; please consider running for the board if:

• You care about the school and the students in it.
• You have a vision of how you would like to see our school improve.
• You have the skills and motivation to make a contribution.

The board meets typically once a month. If you are interested in running for the board, please click here to get a nomination form.

ISL Hiring completed

With the acceptance of Gift Munsanje, our hiring for next year is now complete. We have a strong slate of incoming teachers joining us in August. For an account of who is arriving and who is leaving please see my blog post here.

G-Suite for Education

At International School of Lusaka(ISL), we use G Suite for Education as a basis for provision of technology to both staff and students.

G Suite for Education is a set of secure, cloud-native collaboration education productivity tools from Google which includes Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Classroom and more used by tens of millions of Students and Teachers around the world. ISL students use their G Suite accounts to complete assignments, collaborate with peers, communicate with their teachers, sign into their Chromebooks, and learn 21st century digital citizenship skills.

Supporting Learning at Home

Sometimes as parents we can think that we are ill-equipped to support our children in their academic studies at home, either because we do not have the required background knowledge in a specific subject or perhaps that its just been too long ago and we've forgotten the material.

Here are a few important learning-to-learn skills...

Planned Renovations

Renovations are planned for this June and July. This will be funded from school funds rather than receipts from the redevelopment deals which, as of date, are yet to be concluded. The board voted to release additional funding over and above budgeted renovations and maintenance to allow significant work to be carried out before August.

2019-20 Budget

The 2019-20 International School of Lusaka budget

Open House

Recently ISL had an Open House in Primary school.

Student Evaluation

An ongoing process...

Education Tax Relief

One of the things I have been working on recently is tax relief for the education sector. In conjunction with the Independent Schools' Association of Zambia, we are developing a submission to the Ministry of Finance making the case for sectoral tax relief.

New Human Resource Officer

Hello, my name is Ivy Chipasha, you probably know me as Mark's PA.

Reading at Home

If there is one thing I would ask parents of primary-age children to prioritize, it is reading at home. When they are small, read to them; when they are big, have them read to you.

Technology Distraction

With the internal exams coming up, I admit that there’s a tendency

Reflection

Reflection- A great skill/ attribute/ attitude to possess. 

Lease Agreement

For many months now our board of governors and the trustees have been working on our lease agreement with The Urban Hotel Group (TUHG). Following the failure of the initiative with FUTSAL and Sports Complex, the board redoubled its efforts to bring our negotiations with TUHG to a successful conclusion. Many months and many drafts later, we seem to be nearing the end. The lease itself is a complex legal document of 26 pages representing decades of time and millions of dollars. I would like to express my gratitude to the board members involved and to the trustees for their conscientious efforts on behalf of the association. I do believe that these negotiations with TUHG are approaching their apotheosis. I will use this blog to keep you updated as things develop.

IB Learner Profile

I have been learning more about the IB Primary Years Programme recently and wanted to share with you the IB Learner Profile. The learner profile is a set of desired dispositional traits which describes the kind of behaviour we aim to promote at the International School of Lusaka.

Hello and Goodbye

We look forward to welcoming the following faculty who will be joining us in August:

Martin McCutcheon joins us as a mathematics teacher in secondary. Martin is from the United Kingdom and comes with six years of teaching experience.

ask@islzambia.org

In an effort to improve communication we have created the ask@islzambia.org email address. The purpose of this is that any association member can email a question to ask@islzambia.org.