Dear Parents,
Greetings to our XLIS community! I was very happy to be getting lots of smiles and high 5’s from students as they made their way into the school today! You can genuinely feel the joy when we are all together.
Today I would like to take the time to highlight two very important elements of the IB curriculum – AGENCY and ACTION. To this email I am attaching the PYP documents for both agency and action, so you may gain a deeper understanding of their importance to student learning, growth and development.
To summarize, agency is when students are empowered to have voice, choice and ownership in their learning and school life. It is essential that teachers and staff respect the opinions and voices of students and to place value on their contributions to the classroom and school community. Agency often will lead to action, which is an authentic and meaningful process through which students seek to resolve issues or improve some aspect of their lives or the lives of others. It is a key part of our students’ journeys to becoming internationally minded global citizens.
At XLIS, both our Primary and Secondary schools have a Student Council, where our students’ agency is put into action. In our Primary division, the P4 to P6 classes had students write an essay to describe why they would like to be a part of the Student Council. They all highlighted their own qualities that would suit them for a role such as a Student Council class representative and ways they believe they can help to make the school better.
Here are some of the reasons they listed:
We are proud that we have 15 students who make up this year’s XLIS Primary Student Council, representing each class from P4 to P6. They will listen to the ideas of their peers, think of ways to make the school a fun and inclusive place to learn and make friends, and seek ways to help in the community. They meet for one hour together every Wednesday, discuss a variety of ideas, bring up issues they would like to address, and build leadership skills. The students create their own meeting agenda, with Ms. Maria and Ms. Julia present as facilitators. I am excited to see what the 2022-2023 Student Council has for us this year!
A small amount of information about this week’s assembly: due to the online learning days, our P4A class was unable to perform their assembly last Friday. There has been a slight change to our schedule, with P4A having their assembly this Friday and P3A has moved to a time in March.
Thank you again, to our XLIS community, for all of your support. When we all work together, XLIS is a pretty special place to be. Please always feel free to reply to this email to let me know how things are going (if you are using a ‘QQ’ address you will have to copy my email address in manually).
Have a great week,
Marly Song
Primary Principal
