The Tiger, 1st October, 2021
Head of School Message
Warm October greetings to our Stonehill community!
I’d like to thank all the participants who took part in the Stonehill Founder’s Day Run.
It was a great opportunity for us to come together and celebrate the day. Stonehill will match the total funds raised through registrations and donate it to the Morning Star Ashram, a home for underprivileged children with physical and mental illnesses.
The Stonehill Science Bowl was a huge success. Congratulations to the entire team of students and teachers! This year, the competition received an overwhelming response from STEM students around the world. There was widespread participation from 50 teams representing 25 schools, from a total of 10 countries! Through such events students at Stonehill are provided with opportunities to maximise their learning, creatively express themselves, and prepare for success beyond Stonehill.
A reminder to our Stonehill community that the Dussehra holidays are from the 15th of October until the 19th of October. I want to wish everyone a safe and enjoyable holiday season in the weeks to come.
Lastly, we have yet to get definite word on the reopening of our Primary from the government. We are not certain of reopening dates but remain hopeful that a reopening of our Primary can occur soon after the Dussehra holiday. Once we receive confirmation from the government, an announcement will be made to our community at the earliest.
Dr. Brian Brumsickle
Head of School
Primary School
Meeting protocols
If you wish to clarify an issue with us, please follow this protocol to ensure everyone is comfortable with the process and the outcome.
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Meet your child’s Homeroom teacher
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If you still have concerns, meet with Karen Crooke, Primary School Principal
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Should you still not feel comfortable, please then meet with Dr. Brian Brumsickle, Head of School
In addition, please make sure you are speaking about your child, not others. We cannot discuss another child’s work or progress with you.
Student Voice, Choice and Ownership
Human kind is a very social being. We are all made overtly aware of this when our children are young and they are striving to communicate with us - initially through cries and sounds, and then through actions and words.
One tenet of the PYP is giving credence to young people’s views and needs. We do this by responding positively to their interactions. We include them in goal setting and we ask them what they need as learners. This is why we have a student leadership group who can be a part of decision-making in the Primary School. They are the group who set-up “Getting Together”. It is just 30 minutes a day where our learners can communicate with others from within our community without the constraints of adults. It’s a bit like the playground, if you like - monitored by adults but strictly led by little people.
By giving our learners voice in decision-making and learning we are providing them with the tools they will need to be agentic learners - tools for the future.
Artsfest
We had a wonderful week of learning about, through and of the Arts. Nine visiting artists contributed to our understanding of learning artistically. These artists came from India, Malaysia and New Zealand. This week, we really did embed intercultural learning and global citizenship objectives.
I personally loved the body percussion session with Kevin Wilson - it was a BIG giggle. I took photos using perspective as a concept with Monica. I was amazed by the Mallakhamb video that Chaitanya played. I have never seen anything like it! These people were amazingly strong.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to making our week unique, inspiring and educational!
Have a great fortnight
Karen Crooke
Primary School Principal
PYP Coordinator
International Mindedness, Intercultural Learning and Global Citizenship
Stonehill is committed to intercultural learning and developing internationally minded global citizens.
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What does this really mean and what does it look like in everyday life?
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How do we dive deeper and go beyond appreciating what is visible about each culture?
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How do we learn to relate and interact with other people from different cultures with empathy and respect?
Throughout the year, all learners across the Primary School inquire into "HOW WE EXPRESS OURSELVES":
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The ways in which we discover and express our ideas, feelings, nature, culture, beliefs and values;
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The ways in which we reflect on, extend and enjoy our creativity;
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Our appreciation of the aesthetic.
Our aim is that all our Primary School children understand, apply and live the same central idea: Diverse interactions foster connection and action. All Primary children dig deep into two interrelated concepts, what it means to:
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“reach out” → to consider how we interact with others
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“reach in” → to understand ourselves in relation to others
The learning and inquiry across the Primary grade levels might have the same central idea but the inquiry process looks different for different grade levels.
Here are their lines of inquiry:
Primary Focus
The P4 learners started the year with the Who We Are Unit of Inquiry into how ‘Understanding self helps build relationships’.
We used the book, ‘It’s Okay to be Different’ by Todd Parr to help us understand that we all very different and special in our own ways. We made videos about the things that make us unique and we enjoyed finding out what makes our teachers unique and special too!
Our emotions and how we regulate them is a big part of who we are. We first identified different emotions through songs, music, art, P.E., dance and drama. Then, using life size outlines of ourselves, we identified where in the body we feel different emotions. We represented these emotions using colours, shapes, patterns and words. We talked about how we respond to different emotions.
Our learners are in the process of making a ‘Wheel of Emotions’. Using the wheel they have already identified and grouped different emotions. The next step will be to find a range of strategies to help us deal with feelings such as anger, confusion, frustration, fear, feeling hurt, etc. The Wheel of Emotions will become a visual reminder of the strategies we can use.
Alongside this, we have been telling stories about things that have happened to us that make us who we are. We have been recording these stories through drawings and writings in our Writer’s Workshop. The process begins with ‘visualising’ past experiences and drawing pictures showing the sequence of events. We add speech bubbles and sentences to our pictures.
The P4 Team
中秋节快乐(zhōng qiū jié kuài lè)！Happy Mid-Autumn Festival
Ni Hao!
The Mid-Autumn Festival in China is on the 21st of September 2021. It is the second biggest festival in the Chinese community. On that day, the moon is at its fullest and brightest. The festival takes place after the harvest season in China. It can be compared to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Our PYP Chinese classes celebrated the festival online for the second consecutive year. The P4 students learned how Chinese people celebrate the festival. They learnt the story about Cháng é and Hòu Yì and played an online matching game.
The P5 and P6 classes learnt about the customs and traditions of the Mid-Autumn festival.
The P7 and P8 classes studied the traditional story of the festival. They then made a video as the learning outcome.
Seah (P7)
Edmund Ko
Primary Chinese Teacher
PYP Counsellor
Helpful Hints for Spending Quality Time With Your Child
Life is busy and with the pandemic, the lines between work and home now stand blurred. This is probably the first time since your child was a toddler that you’re getting to be around them this much. But is the time you’re spending with them “quality” time?
Here are 5 ways to improve the time spent with your child:
Be present mentally, not just physically
Your child deserves to be heard and seen without you being interrupted by calls, the TV, or social media. This downtime with your child needs to happen everyday and could be at the start or end of their day (or both), when you are likely to be less distracted by work or household chores.
Create a special ritual exclusively for you and your child
This is something special that could be part of your child’s daily routine. Maybe you could read a book together each night or it could simply be a special hug or handshake at the start of the day, code words for things, or even a special wink when you say bye to them.
Play with your child
Indoors or outdoors, structured play or unstructured play, everyday for twenty minutes or weekly for two hours, have them pick a game they would like to play with you or invent a game together, the possibilities are endless.
Cook and eat meals together
This may not be feasible all the time but you could eat a bowl of fruit together and chat about how school was that day. If you can eat dinner beside them, do that! Try to not have dinner in front of the TV. Make conversation instead.
Laugh and be silly together!
Parenting is serious business but who says you can’t have fun? How about a dance party every now and then, pizza and a movie on a Friday night, or simply spend some time sharing jokes and laughing together?
Secondary School
Last Friday, I thoroughly enjoyed watching our Science Bowl organisers (D2 students mainly) trying to run the final buzzer round to end the online competition.
Our polite, gentle students suddenly found themselves transformed into the most disciplinarian law-enforcers.
They tried to stop the competitors on the zoom call from cheating, “We need to see your hands!”, “You need to answer within 10 seconds of buzzing!”, “Stop guessing!”, “Please do NOT engage in academic dishonesty!” Yes, students, it’s fun, isn’t it? Trying to run assessments online.
Stonehill Science Bowl 2021
You can only really develop an understanding of the complications of leadership and organisation by giving things a try, and I’m sure running the competition was a great learning experience for everybody involved.
And now it’s time for another two groups to take centre stage.
Our Girl Up Stonehill will be running various events over the coming weeks. The group’s communication skills (particularly with social media) are so original and creative that I get some good ideas every time I see them push the communication boundaries a little more. Follow them on Instagram if you haven’t already, it’s all so professionally done.
Last week, our new Student Council was elected (93% turnout at the polls - better than any parliamentary election!). Jill will serve as our STUCO President and will be joined by Kshama (Co-Chair), Ayaan (Vice-Chair), Aliya and Lila (Events Coordinators), Shivani (Secretary), Samitha (Publisher), and Hyunseok (Treasurer). This group’s challenge is to recreate the vibrant atmosphere that we had at Stonehill before the pandemic hit, and to engage with teachers and the leadership team to make improvements to the lives of the students in our community. Not an easy task by any means, but we’ll give them all the support we can.
I hope to see more and more of our students taking on such roles in the future. You don’t learn about leadership from reading a book about it, you learn by getting involved.
Joe Lumsden
Secondary School Principal
MYP Coordinator
What Are You Good At?
I would like to stress the importance of this reflective question: “What are you good at?” Each and every one of us has a niche area of expertise. The teenage years are crucial to explore and discover one’s strength and I am very proud that the learning environment at Stonehill gives this opportunity to our students.
As we grow, we tend to forget what we learnt in class but we always remember what we did in our classrooms. Approaches to Learning in the Middle Years Programme gives our students the skills to reflect and build on the process of learning. For e.g. Glossophobia, the fear of public speaking, is the number one fear in the world. But not for students at Stonehill as they practice this skill in almost every single subject.
I am proud to say that as part of our curriculum, we consciously help our students discover themselves. It could be their core values or talents. Learning is not always about the coveted 7s but it is also about self discovery.
The learning environment at Stonehill helps students discover their talents whether it is in sports, arts or technology.
I am happy to report two such proud achievements of our MYP students. Aditya, M5 won a silver medal in the Bangalore district mountain bike competition. Geethika,M4 will be competing at the national level in the Equestrian show jumping and dressage rounds.
Aditya
Geethika
At the end of the day what remains with us are the skills and not a whole lot of content. ‘Learning to learn’ is far more important than achieving a big score. So the next time when you are looking for a conversation with someone at a party or with your child, ask them what they are good at and you will be surprised by what comes out of this conversation.
Jitendra Pandey
MYP Coordinator
Secondary Focus
This year, we have one new teacher, Ms Sanjukta Ghosh, who will be teaching ESS to our DP students and MYP Biology.
After the huge success of the Stonehill Science Bowl 2021 organized by the ‘Fun with Physics’ club, for this issue of The Tiger, I would like to highlight Physics, which is getting all the attention now.
Since the school campus has reopened for the students, the physics lab is buzzing with activities. The M5 students are currently learning about ‘Electricity’. This unit provides a lot of opportunities for the students to explore concepts through experimentation. The students are learning to make circuits individually and in groups.
The M4 students are observing and measuring ‘Motion’. They are experimenting and recording ‘accelerated motion’.
The D1 students have started with their first practice IA. In this investigation they are looking at two major criteria: 'Analysis’ and ‘Evaluation’.
The D2 students started working on their final IA. Students have started performing experiments and recording data.
The Secondary Science Department
Boarding
It is lovely to see our boarding houses fully operational again. A warm welcome to our new and returning M2-M3 boarders. It is nice to see the big smiles as they begin their journey at Stonehill. All have settled in well. Our boarding programme continues to grow. We now have 54 of our M1-D2 boarders back on campus.
We have been incredibly lucky within boarding, being able to run the vast majority of our activities within our bubble. The students are using the fitness room, and they have been able to use the facilities to play football, basketball and dodgeball.
It was brilliant to see so many boarders participate in the Founder’s Day Run on the 26th of September. A big thank you to all the participants.
This week, I was privileged to hold my first meeting with our two newly appointed Boarding Reps-Chimme and Anshul. They are brimming with ideas and positive energy.
Considering Weekly Boarding?
As a parent, the decision to send your child to Boarding School can be a difficult one. However, Boarding can greatly benefit students. The rise in popularity of weekly boarding is growing. Families in big cities, who spend a lot of time in traffic, find that enrolling their child in weekly boarding provides better management of time for both the student and the parent.
Boarding is an incredible adventure that challenges the student in ways you cannot imagine. From academic support to pastoral and residential care, experiencing new social situations, and living with others from a range of cultural backgrounds opens up a whole new world.
Living on campus as a weekly residential student provides students with the best of two worlds:
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School - a “home away from home”,being with your peers/friends and plenty of recreation and sports.
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Home – quality family time on weekends.
If parents are interested to find out more about Weekly Boarding, please feel free to contact me at any time:
Up-to-date contact information
If we need to contact you urgently, it is vital that we have up-to-date information. If you have changed your address, phone number or email address and haven’t updated us, please email admissions@stonehill.in as soon as possible.
Wishing everyone a lovely weekend, keep safe.
Glen Johnson
Head of Boarding
Boarding Menu
Whole School News
LET'S DO MORE (LDM)
All students are encouraged to share their passions and interests by creating a club or activity. Some options are Ultimate Frisbee, Chess, Debate, Girls STEM, Ukulele,etc. Let your voice be heard and create a club that would be fun for the community.
Fill out the Stonehill Activity Proposal Form today!
You can find out more about clubs and other exciting activities happening within our community on the Let’s Do More Website
Sports
We are hoping to begin competing in-person again in November. Tha Bangalore Activities and Athletics Schools Conference (BAASC) have adjusted the sports seasons for this year in order to gradually get back into team competitions. If approved by the BAASC Heads of Schools, the next season would be from November 15th to February 12th. The competitions will include Track and Field, Tennis and Badminton, for both Middle School and High School students. The following season would be from February 14th through April 7th and will include 3v3 Basketball and 5v5 Football.
Congratulations to Aditya, M5 for winning the silver medal at the Bangalore District Mountain Bike Championship 2021.
Congratulations to Geethika, M4 for qualifying to compete at the Equestrian national level championships in December!
Finally, Congratulations to Aryan, M4 who earned the "Man of the Match" award in the Excellence Football League, with two goals and one assist as a player for BOCA against Stadium FC.
John Bertken
Whole School Sports & Activities Coordinator
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