It seems that almost every week I am introduced to something new. Most of the time it is a new fact or a new way of doing things but this week it was a phenomena that is apparently sweeping the world - the "Hate Page". This is a really cruel social media craze in which a student sets up this page and asks others to write mean and quite horrible things about another person. One or two of our students have been victims of "Hate Pages" and have been quite traumatized by them. From the evidence that parents have shown all of this is being done at home even by children as young as 10. I would ask all parents to monitor the children's social media usage and if you find things that you are not happy with then they should be deleted from the device. Most social media platforms have an age restriction and the chart below gives you the ages for many of the common platforms. One increasingly popular app is Tik Tok and this requires that users be at least 13 years old. Anyone under the age of 18 must have approval of a parent or guardian.

Although it is not illegal to use social media if you are under age it's worth noting that if, 5yrs ago you signed an 8yr old up to a social media site that requires them to be 13 years old they will now appear to be 18 in that site. Therefore if an adult tries to groom them they can argue that they thought they were conversing with another adult.

Always monitor your child's accounts and online activity, update their details, and ensure they are aware of the risks of social media. Also talk to them about the pictures that they use on their profiles; their safety is imperative.

With a small number of cases of COVID 19 at other International schools in Kampala, we have to ensure that all our SOPs are fully adhered to. If any child exhibits any symptoms please keep them at home and have them tested. If any family member or close acquaintance tests positive, please keep children at home for 14 days and only allow them to return to school with a negative test. Full and open communication with school is vital. Please don't let your desire for your child to sit their end of year exams put your child and everybody else at KISU's health at risk. We have safely navigated the last 8 months and we only have 4 weeks to go.

Thank you to all staff, parents and children for helping to make the end of each day easier and much more organized! The new routines have made a massive difference in terms of behaviour and safety and I have had lots of positive feedback. Please remember to sign your children out and phone ahead to inform school if you are going to be late to pick up your child. Thank you.

Incredibly, Year 6 children are still leading the World Groups League Board and are once again the highest scoring class in the world this week. There has been a lot of movement in the top ten positions and a lot of different schools and groups. Our Year 5 group has crept into the top 100 and are currently sitting at position 79. I wonder if we can get all 6 year groups into the top 100?This week, Joshua Wekesa in Year 6 is our highest scoring student. Joshua has been determined to succeed as the highest scorer for some weeks now and has been in the top ten consistently. Well done Joshua.

Being principled is the theme of this week and we have been working hard to remind ourselves of the values, principles and behaviours expected. At KISU, we are committed to supporting everyone to think and act honestly, fairly, respectfully and thoughtfully and be sensitive to the thoughts and feelings, rights and dignity of others. We take responsibility for what we do and say and try to make the right choices every day.

Let’s see who our ‘Primary Super Learners of the Week’ are for being principled:

KG1 & 2: Zoe Bamugye and Hannah Nono

KG3: Ariella Nakasango and Jonathan Olowo

Reception: Rebecca Peters and Yonathan Yonas

Year 1: Cynthia Atugonza and Kate Gutmann

Year 2: Trinity Frances and Chloe Wood

Year 3: Alvin Ssuubi and Goncalo Ventura

Year 4: Gideon Katua and Amelia Masson

Year 5: Chaahat Goyal and Hlalanathi.Gangi

Year 6: Everyone! What an excellent few days we have had camping!

Well done to all children for being such fantastic role models.

Next week is our final assessment week of the year. All Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 children will be tested on Term 3 learning so that Class Teachers can use this information to inform their planning. This data will be shared with you as part of your child’s Term 3 written report that is due to be sent home week beginning 14th June.

The Year 3 students did a fantastic job sharing their knowledge about the vanishing rainforests during Friday’s KS2 assembly. The young inquirers shared many interesting facts and brought awareness about palm oil plantations and deforestation. Remember, we all have a part to play in keeping our rainforests thriving for generations to come. With the current level of deforestation, the rainforests will vanish by 2100! So what can you do? Here are some tips from the Year 3 students.

1. Tell friends and family about the importance of rainforests.

2. Use less paper- re-use paper instead of throwing it out.

3. Use fewer products in your home containing palm oil.

4. Plant a tree!

We are all in this together!

Plants need light, water, soil and warmth to grow. We used our Bean in a Bag garden to investigate the different parts of a plant each with a special purpose. We found out that plants have seeds, roots, stems and leaves. We looked for examples of deciduous and evergreen plants on our environment and compared their leaves.

A lot of the food we eat is from plants, so we created our own garden and planted some corn, carrots, peas, potatoes, chocolate mint, celery, and spinach.

We discovered that lots of other creatures live in the garden and this inspired our writing in Literacy.

It was great fun investigating the seed potato “chitting” process!

Monitoring the growth process has helped us develop our skills in measuring height.

We take turns watering and weeding in the garden and are really looking forward to a plentiful harvest!

As we move towards our internal examinations students in Learning to Learn classes have been looking at the most effective ways of revising. We have looked at scientific research into the best ways to revise and some of the findings are quite surprising! Rereading - not effective, writing summaries - limited effect and highlighting can actually inhibit learning if inference is required. That begs the question, how should students revise? The answer is active recall.

We often think that learning is a process whereby you test yourself after having learnt all the information. Surely it’s counterintuitive to do anything else? In fact, this can't be further from the truth!

Active recall involves retrieving information from memory through, essentially, testing yourself at every stage of the revision process. The very act of retrieving information and data from our brains not only strengthens our ability to retain information but also improves connections in our brains between different concepts.

Research from 2013 which analysed hundreds of separate studies about effective revision techniques, concluded that testing, or active recall, is a technique that has ‘high utility’ and can be implemented effectively with minimal training.

“On the basis of the evidence…we rate practice testing as having high utility. Testing effects have been demonstrated across an impressive range of practice-test formats, kinds of material, learner ages, outcome measures, and retention intervals. Thus, practice testing has broad applicability”.

These studies from 1939 and 2010 provide valuable verification of the effectiveness of active recall but it was a study from 2011 that I found particularly convincing.

In that study, the researchers split students into 4 groups with each student tasked with learning the same material before being tested on what they learnt. However, each group was given different instructions and parameters for learning the content.

- The first group would read the material only once.

- The second group would read the material four times.

- The third group would read the material then were told to make a mind map.

- The fourth group would read the material once, then recall as much as possible.

In both the verbatim test – when asked to recall facts – as well as the inference test – when asked to recall concepts – the active recall group significantly outperformed the other groups.

This study shows that testing yourself just once is more effective than rereading a chapter four times. I'm sure we’ve all used rereading at some point but simply through testing yourself once you could drastically improve the efficacy and efficiency of your studies. This is such a simple technique but has such substantial, obvious benefits that we would be foolish to not use it!

Perhaps the reason we don't like to use active recall is that it's more difficult and mentally taxing than rereading. But the key point is revision should be cognitively demanding! It’s useful to think about this in terms of going to the gym – if you’re lifting weights that are light, you’re not going to make much progress but if you’re lifting weights that test your strength, you’re more likely to develop muscle faster. It’s the same with developing the ‘muscle’ of your brain - the harder we have to work to retrieve information, the more effective our brains will become in storing and recalling that information in the future.