August 16, 2013

Welcome I would like to welcome all returning families back to school, and a special welcome to all our new families who are joining our ISR Rumbai family! At our gonging in ceremony the first day of school we officially welcomed two new families. James and Susan Nileshwar are coming to us from Australia, and bringing Charlie who is joining the second grade class, and Sophie who is joining the Kindergarten class.  The second family is Antonio and Julia Pedrett, who are coming most recently from Taiwan. Antonio is American, and will be teaching our students Spanish. Julia is Thai, and is looking forward to sharing her Thai culture with our community. We are looking forward to welcoming more new families as they arrive in Rumbai.  Following the morning assembly, I gave parents a tour of the progress on our renovations. We are very pleased with results so far, and are looking forward to the completion of the Main Office, the Library, and the two new classrooms. The Library will be up and running by mid September.  As we await the use of the two new classrooms, teachers are doing a beautiful job of sharing teaching spaces. Señor Antonio has been meeting with his students in their home room classrooms. I want to thank all of the teachers for being such troopers in maintaining high learning standards through this time of transition.  Thank You to Mike and Patsy Birchfield  On Saturday, August 10th Mike and Patsy hosted a camp wide Slip and Slide and Barbecue party to welcome all of us back to Rumbai. It was wonderful to meet with old friends and to meet new members of our community. Thanks to Lindsay Lavery and the Fire Department for setting up the fire hose, and to Andrew Dragonetti for providing the slide. The children loved the slippin’ and slidin’, as you will see in the photos in Part 2 of this edition. We are very grateful to you, Mike and Patsy, for a great party, and a wonderful start to the 2013-2014 year! Six Day Schedule This year we have moved to a six-day schedule. What this means is that your child’s daily schedule may vary from one day to the next for a maximum of six days. The six days rotate through the school calendar as per the example above.  For returning parents, this may seem like a strange practice since we were able to operate on a five-day schedule for the past several years. So why have we made this shift? The simple answer is that the six-day schedule allows us to deliver a stronger program for your children.  The main reason for the new schedule is that if we want to offer Spanish as a new course without eliminating any existing courses, therefore we have to expand our schedule to make room for Spanish. The six-day schedule allows us to offer the Spanish class every day.  Another benefit of the six-day schedule is to prevent lost class time due to vacation days. Mondays and Fridays are hardest hit by vacations and on a five-day schedule, classes on those days lose the most learning time. As you can see above, with a rotating schedule this problem is virtually eliminated.  For your convenience, we shall include the six-day schedule in our Up Coming Events.