Dear Parents and Caregivers,

Celebration of Learning and Three-Way Conferences on Friday, March 24

We’re looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.

The Purpose of the day:

• For parents to engage with their children in their school life and get a window into learning.

• For students, in collaboration with their teacher, to take ownership of their learning by sharing their strengths and stretches.

• For teachers to inform parents of progress and achievement.

• To strengthen the partnership between home and school, to work as a team to support learning, growth and well-being.

Important reminders:

• Children can wear casual, comfortable clothes.

• The school will be open from 8.10 am to begin at 8.15 am for families with the early timeslots

• Teachers will be taking a snack break from 10.45-11.15 am and lunch from 1.45-2.15 pm. Classrooms and areas around the school will still be open at this time and supervised by EAs so you are still welcome to do the activities at this time with your child also.

• If you have one of the later appointments in the day, please arrive 50 minutes before your appointment time so you can see all of the other activities in the school and classroom before your 3-way conference.

• All classrooms and learning areas around the school will close at 4 pm.

We will send a parent feedback Google form to you early next week to get your feedback on the experience. This will help us tweak the process in the following years to ensure continuous improvement.

Staff-Run Extracurricular Activities

There are NO Staff Run After School Activities next week, so please remind your child to take their usual transport home.

Registration for Term 3 After School Clubs will commence on Monday 27 March at 12 noon. Please log in to Gateway to sign up for these clubs. (instructions and details below)

Enotice

Note that you will receive an enotice tomorrow for additional educational visits and swimming lessons in Term 3. Please look out for it.

Information Webinar and Open Day

There is still time to sign up for our Information Webinars and Open Day for prospective parents. Please share these posters with your friends and family.

Final Day of Term 2

As a reminder, the last day of term will be Friday 31 March. The school will close at midday. Timings are as follows:

Please ensure you have someone waiting for your child at their stop at the earlier timeframe and walkers are collected from school.

If you would like to contact any members of the leadership team, you will find us in the playground or you can locate our emails on the ESF APP. You can email me at bcook@kennedy.edu.hk.

Kind regards,

Brenda

顧仁達

Principal

Yearband Led Dress Up Day

Thank you for supporting the Year 3 led whole school dress up day last Friday. Here are a few photos of the green scenes around school!

PHOTO ALBUM

Year 3 raised $12,320 which was used to subsidise a workshop for each class on the topic of Robotics/Art. The children very much enjoyed the new experiences - “It was exciting because the battery made the straw go up and down” and “it was very fun to do because of all the science bits and putting the little pieces together…..” were some of the feedback received.

The next whole school Yearband led dress up day will be Friday 19th May - when Year 2 will be in charge!

PTA Wellness Talks

Kennedy Community Cares - Webinars for Parents & Staff

We have two additional support webinars that will take place after the Easter holidays.

• 20 April, Thursday, 6 to 7 pm: Social Skills led by Carrie Spaeth-Raine, Speech Therapist, SPOT Therapy.

• 4 May, Thursday, 6 to 7 pm: Self Regulation & Emotions - led by Brownyn Timson, Speech Therapist, SPOT Therapy.

Please sign up HERE.

If you missed last week’s PTA webinar led by Brenda Cook and Dr Scarlett Mattoli on the topic “The Anxiety of Anxiety”, the recording and slideshow may be accessed via this link:

ANXIETY - WEBINAR

PTA AGM - Reminder

A reminder that the PTA hold their Annual General Meeting on 28th March, Tuesday at 5 pm. Every family automatically become members of the PTA and you are all cordially invited to attend this important meeting.

Registration to attend here

PTA Parent Coffee Morning - “Technology at Kennedy School”

Friday 5th May, 8:20 am - 9:30 am

Join us for an informative talk by our office and IT team to learn how to use the following technology tools - ESF App, VLE, Gateway and Seesaw - to learn, organise and inform all stakeholders about your child. This is thoroughly recommended to parents who are relatively new to ESF. Also hear from our Senior Leadership Team with updates.

Register to attend here

This week, we have seen a significant increase in respiratory illness in the school, particularly in Yearbands 2 and 4.

To prevent the spread of infectious conditions in school, we recommend that your child stay home from school if he/she experiences flu or cold symptoms. Please refer to these guidelines.

School Health Guidelines - When to keep your child at home

We continue to monitor illness in our school on a regular basis, including symptoms and absences of students and staff as a standard practice to ensure the health and safety of our community.

Thank you to all parents and caregivers for your ongoing efforts to help reduce the impact of these viruses on our children and the school.

Term 3 Staff Run After School Clubs

Staff Run After School Clubs will begin the week starting 17 April 2023. Please check the start and end dates for each club on Gateway as these vary from activity to activity.

Club sign ups and details for Staff Run After School Clubs will be available on Gateway on Monday at 12 noon, 27 March 2023.

To learn how to sign up for an after school staff run Club, please refer to this document:

How to Register for After School Staff Run Club

Registration for a club is complete when payment is made on the epayment system.

Eastern Bus Route Survey

We are now in the planning stages for our school bus routes for the next academic year 2023-24. To help us understand the needs of our bus users, we are exploring the option of running a school bus service from the Eastern district of Hong Kong.

If this is of interest to you, please complete the survey on this Google form.

Eastern Bus Route Survey

Sports Tournaments Update

This term, we continue to offer fabulous sporting opportunities to the children at Kennedy School.

Tag Rugby - Last Friday, Kennedy School hosted the HKPSSA Tag Rugby Tournament at HKU Sandy Bay. 16 international schools from across Hong Kong performed to a fabulous standard and excelled on such a sweltering day. Our mixed boys and girls won the group stages to be placed into the highest group for the latter stages. After thrilling matches against Harrow, Kellett and Discovery College, our Kennedy team topped the group on most tries scored! Well done to our fantastic students for playing with such passion and energy and congratulations to Mr Sweet and Mr Bogaerde as Kennedy Tag rugby coaches.

Watch the highlights here: Tag Rugby highlights

Cross Country - On Saturday, the Kennedy School running team performed brilliantly at the HKPSSA Cross country running championships at Discovery College. Our boys and girls from Year 3 to Year 6 ran with such determination in difficult conditions and were duly rewarded. Congratulations to all runners and thank you to the parents for their support. We had six top 10 finishers across the ages.

Well done to Isabel Spensley (4C) for second place at the U9 girls race and Olivia Schuette (6S) for 3rd place at the U11 girls race. Congratulations to Sofia Huang U10 girls (5D) and Raef Caldwell U11 boys (6S) taking first place in their respective races. A full list of running times can be found here. Special thank you to Ms Simpson and Ms James for their commitment to the morning running club this term.

Hockey - Good luck to our hockey players in the HKPSSA Hockey Tournament at HKFC this Friday.

Check our social media pages on Facebook and Instagram for more photos and videos!

Eco Update

The team from Vitasoy came to Kennedy School last week to deliver the Gold Collection Weight Award to our environment ambassadors and eco monitors. This was a small acknowledgement to celebrate being the school that saved the most beverage cartons (663 kg) from the landfill in 2022. Well done to the Kennedy School community for making this happen!

• Draft ESF School Calendar 2023-34- Updated 8 March 2023
• Kennedy School Health Guidelines - When to keep your child at home
• Chinese learning links this week:

Year 1 Weekly Learning Notice

Year 2 Weekly Learning Notice

Year 3 Weekly Learning Notice

Year 4 Weekly Learning Notice

Year 5 Weekly Learning Notice

Year 6 Weekly Learning Notice