Hillside Newsletter 17 May 2019
Hillside Kindergarten’s latest newsletter is available to read now. Find out the latest news from around the school and upcoming events.
Important Dates
Click HERE for the Full Hillside Calendar and instructions to subscribe.
| 29 May | Parent Workshop (Well-being for Early Years) |
| 30 May | Zero Plastic Snack Day |
| 24 May – 2 June | ESF Art Exhibition at K11 |
| 11-13 June | K2 Celebrations (Graduation) SAVE THE DATE!! |
Principal’s Message
Dear Parents
We are pleased to welcome our parents into Hillside for our Term 3 Parent-Teacher Conferences (PTC’s) these two weeks. Sound communication and ongoing honest dialogue between school and home enable productive home-school partnerships with the benefit of our children at the heart of the matter. The PTC’s are a time for teachers to share the many aspects of learning that your child has been involved in during this academic year. It is also the ideal time for parents to ask questions about your child’s progress and find out how you can best further support your child.
As we approach the end of the school year, we are putting several initiatives in place to help support the children with their transition into the new school year. Whether it’s from K1 into K2 or K2 into Y1, we have plans in place to help foster resilience, confidence and independence.
Something we introduced after the Easter break is a “K2 Helper Programme.” Four K2 children will join the K1 Open-Play during each session to help the K1 children. These K2 children will be assigned to a learning station to assist the grown-up in facilitating the activity and be a positive role model for their younger peers.
During each Open-Play, a small group of K1 children will also join a K1 Educational Assistant to participate in a K2 learning engagement. We will also arrange a visit for all K1 children to meet their new K2 teacher before the summer. We hope these visits will help the K1 children be familiarised with the K2 environment in preparation for their transition in the new school year.
Our Y1 primary colleagues will also be coming to visit the K2 children this month and getting to know the children better. The primary colleagues visiting will consist of the Y1 teachers and Vice Principals so the children will be able to identify with a few familiar faces before the start of ‘big school.’ Please also look out for communication from your child’s primary school regarding your Primary Induction Day in late May or early June.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Kind Regards
Audrey
Acting Head of School
Upcoming Parent Workshop
With these new changes ahead, it is essential to maintain the overall well-being of our children. We cordially invite parents to join us in this upcoming workshop. We will share a link to presentation later with parents after the workshop for those who are unable to attend.
Well-being for Early Years: (Friendships, Resilience and Transitions)
Workshop date: Wednesday 29 May 2019 TIME: 1.00-2.00 pm
The social, emotional and well-being of young children is integral to their learning and development, but what does it mean? How do children establish and maintain friendships? How to deal with change and setbacks? How to face new challenges? As important grown-ups in their lives, what can we do to help? In this workshop, we hope to provide parents with some strategies for fostering well-being in young children, along with a few tips on preparing for the transition. The workshops will take place at Hillside International Kindergarten. To assist in facilitating our planning, we require participants to please register for a place. To do this please call Hillside on 25400066 and our reception staff will be happy to book a place for you.
Hillside K2 Celebration of Learning – SAVE THE DATE!!!
One of the highlights of Term 3 is always our K2 Graduation Ceremony. With ESF moving toward a “Through-Train Education System”, we would like to see this move from K2 to Y1 as part of the transition process. As such, our end of year event will be a Celebration of Learning to commemorate the children’s time at Hillside.
Celebration of Learning Ceremony
| Wed 12th June 2019 | Thurs 13th June 2019 |
| Dragon AM + Tiger AM 9:30-10:30am |
Gecko AM + Turtle AM 9:30-10:30am |
| Dragon PM + Tiger PM 1:15-2:15pm |
Gecko PM + Turtle PM 1:15-2:15pm |
K2 End of Year Outing (Children ONLY)
We have also arranged a special outing for our K2 children to send them off with joyful memories of their Hillside friends and teachers, at ‘Maggie and Rose’ – The Family Members Club in Repulse Bay. ‘Maggie and Rose’ is a private members club, and we are delighted that they agreed to make this exception to provide us with a play-date experience for our K2 children on this special occasion.
We will be taking a private bus to and from Repulse Bay within school hours during your child’s class time, so the children can arrive and depart from school as normal. Seats on the bus are limited and there will be a number of additional staff joining our trip, as such, no additional parental support is required for this particular trip. Further details will be shared in due course.
Zero Plastic Snack Day
As Hillside continues to take steps in becoming an ‘eco-friendly school’, we will be supporting the environmental awareness campaign, Enough Plastic (No Single Use Plastic Awareness Day), organized by The Hong Kong New Youth Energy Think Tank, a local charity that fosters youth development in Hong Kong, along with EcoDrive a local non-profit organization. Enough Plastic is a mass awareness campaign supported by the Environment Bureau of HKSAR, which aims to educate and reduce single-use plastic consumption.
We are facing a severe plastic problem in Hong Kong. The recycling rate of plastic continues to drop with 5 – 6 million plastic bottles that are thrown away daily. When stacked together they equal 2200x the height of the ICC! The majority of plastic waste is single-use and can be reduced or removed. The mission of this campaign is to raise awareness and drive change in the reduction of single-use plastics in Hong Kong. It is crucial to educate our children to be responsible global citizens and our actions today will impact our environment tomorrow.
As part of Hillside’s commitment to promoting sustainability, we will be taking part in the No Single Use Plastic Awareness Day on 30 May 2019 through our very own Zero Plastic Snack Day! Please support us by sending in a snack on this day that has been packaged with no ‘single use’ type of plastic.
Learner Agency (children taking some form of personal action in response to what they have been learning) is a key component of the Primary Years Programme (PYP). Therefore, we would also like to encourage all Hillside children to make a pledge with their parents to commit to an effort to reduce/reuse/recycle and to make more sustainable choices.
Please record (through photographs/drawings) any action that your child may have taken to help promote sustainability at home.
Children at Hillside will be taught about our responsibility towards the environment. Respect for the environment, promoting sustainable development and our roles as a global citizen. Please support us by talking to your children at home about the importance of reducing single-use plastic, encourage them to take action to minimize their plastic waste and sustain it in the future.
Click HERE for a recent SCMP article on recycling service in Hong Kong, and other initiatives on recycling choices.
Upcycle Your Crayons!
Another initiative that we would like to introduce in our efforts to become more sustainable is our “Upcycle Your Crayons!” programme. Each year (or even month) we have tons of half-used and broken crayons laying around. We found a way to upcycle these crayons into something new and way more appealing to use.
As part of our current K1 unit, we have been looking at the concept of “Change” and conducting various experiments. Our discussions were around how materials change, and in one experiment, we looked at candles and wax (we watched a birthday candle melt) which led us to us showing the children a huge bag of old broken crayons. This led to a discussion about ways to reuse them. Some children suggested to glueing them back together, and some said taping them or just throwing them away.
Then we introduced cake tins and the oven after may ideas and discussions the children connected the ideas and reflected on the birthday candle and suggested the crayons might also melt. The result was brilliant, and the children will be using the crayons they “upcycled” in class.
We want to extend this initiative to our community, and invite our families to participate. If you have any unwanted old or broken crayons at home, please donate it us to upcycle and reuse. If it is well received, we will be able to ‘take action’ and donate the upcycled crayons to children charities in HK. As always, thank you for all your support!
ESF The Journey: An Exploration of Art 2019 Exhibit
There will be an art exhibition at K11, a well-known, art mall in T.S.T. Hong Kong, showcasing numbers of ESF students’ artwork around the city: ‘’The Journey: An exploration of Art’’. This is a 10-day art exhibition, and the artworks cover a wide range of media.
This is the first time we will have organised an exhibition showcasing the effort and many artistic talents of our students across the ESF Schools, from kindergarten through secondary school, PIS and special school. The art exhibition is not just a journey through the years of our schools, it represents the way in which our students grow and develop as young adults.
All ESF schools were invited to submit student artwork for selection. The venue managers and organisers (both K11 and ESFC event team) reviewed each submission before it came to the final stage of the art exhibition. Hillside has been fortunate enough to have some of our children’s artwork selected for display at the exhibit.
The information of the exhibition are as below:
Theme: The Journey: An Exploration of Art
Exhibition date: 24 May – 2 June 2019
Exhibition hall: chi K11 art space, B2/F, K11, 18 Hanoi Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
Time: 12 pm – 10 pm
Admission: FREE!
Class Blogs
Please click on the links below to visit our class blogs on the Hillside Learning Hub for your child’s latest class news and photo gallery. Please contact kinder@hillside.edu.hk if you cannot access the Learning Hub.
| Dolphin | Dragon |
| Frog | Gecko |
| Monkey | TigerAM TigerPM |
| Panda | Turtle |
| Chinese | |
Inspiring Futures
Data Privacy The information we collect from you is in accordance with the ESF Personal Data Handling Policy and its related Personal Information Collection Statements (“PICS”). Our PICS statement is available online. http://www.esf.edu.hk/privacy
