And what a week it was! Especially for our new students it must have felt like jumping on a rollercoaster and trying to hold on. There are so many new impressions, suddenly being a boarder, having to share a room, all the people at TIS who you need to get to know, and probably just too much information you need to process within a week.

As always, it is a learning curve and it will take some time to adjust. All of us working at TIS will try to make this process as smooth as possible. After all, we are here for the wellbeing of our students and this goes way beyond academics only.

Grades 7 and 8 started with an introduction to the MYP at the start of the week. First by pairing up “old” Grade 8 students with new students, where they had to explain what is so different about the MYP. A bit of Think, Pair, Share. After that the Grade 7 students had a session with me for a further introduction to the MYP, as well as getting to know each other a bit more. The sticky notes on their forehead are good and bad memories from previous education. Quite interesting at times I must say. I was impressed by the level of input from our newbies with lots of splendid answers and contributions. For those of you who want to read more about the MYP, we have the downloadable MYP Guide for Parents on our website. As well you can visit www.ibo.org

New this year is the Student Planner we have purchased from ProninIB a publisher of IB materials who have based a student planner on wellbeing. Not only does the planner help the student to plan their studies but also gives our Guidance/ATL team a lot to work with, regarding wellbeing and developing the different Approaches To Learning skills. The following link will give you a look into a sample of the planner. http://www.proninib.com/viewcomments.asp?productid=154185&isbn=SDMYPC16

Ate Hemmes

MYP Coordinato