Dear SAIS Community,

Preparation for SAIS’s Re-Opening,
We are so excited that our primary and middle school students can return to school soon on April 27. We are working hard to make sure that our campus is ready for all faculty and students, all precautions and procedures are followed, such as monitoring staff and students’ health and quarantine history, purchasing protective materials and equipment, thorough cleaning and disinfecting the whole campus, practice drills of procedures and protocols in different scenarios, providing online videos about the knowledge of COVID-19, which also are resources for Chinese class projects, and developing new schedules, etc. Last Friday, our leadership, administration, admissions and logistics team had a school reopening preparation meeting to review our checklist and walk through the campus to avoid missing any parts. The Education Bureau will also pay a visit to us before and after the school starts. We will continue working hard and also need your support to get your child ready to return to school by completing the following:
1. All parents and guardians need to complete and sign the health information declaration before students’ returns to school.
2. If your child is returning from outside of Shenzhen, please update the student health and location report and make sure they observe the 14 day quarantine before returning to school for everyone’s safety. Your child would be refused to come in if you fail to provide the true information to school.
3. If your child is back from risk-control areas or in high-risk regions (China and abroad), it’s required to have a nucleic acid testing too.
4. Wearing the mask is required during school days. Please prepare some first but according to the Bureau, they will also provide some masks for staff and students soon.
5. Parents are not allowed to enter the campus during school hours. Please drop off your child in front of school and have your child line up to enter the campus after temperature taken.
6. Afternoon dismissal: parents should keep away from crowds with some social distance among parents while picking up the child. In order to avoid the crowds, 1st and 2nd grade students on the second floor will exit from side door Exit C, and 3rd-9th grade students exit from the front door.
7. As we work closely with our teachers, staff and the Education Bureau this week, we will send out another more detailed letter to our parents.

To Parents of Students in Grades 1 and up,
For our education plan, we have continually met during the last two months and as we have been given a solid date have met multiple times this last week about what the schedule would look like. Some of the details are as follows:
1. 1st to 9th grade students start the class on April 27; May 1 is no school to celebrate May Day, Chinese public holiday.
2. SAIS will be providing one extra hour of school on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from 3:30-4:30pm for the rest of school year. School will finish at 4:30pm on those four days, except for teacher PD on Wednesdays, when students will be dismissed at 3:30pm.
3. The ASA program that we had previously planned that would have taken place between 3:30 and 4:30 will be cancelled for the rest of the originally scheduled school year so that we can focus on the extra four hours of SAIS programming. We are hoping to reopen the ASA program during the summer extension. We will have more information on this later.
4. The extra instructional hour each day will be run as elective courses for students to choose to develop their interests and language skills. Your teacher will send out your child’s class weekly schedule to help you understand the course arrangement before school starts. There will be a heavy focus on literacy and language development.
5. While most of our teachers are in China and onsite, 2nd grade teacher Ms. Kara and 4th grade teacher Ms. Mary will be doing live streaming into their classrooms, supported by onsite teaching staff. Daytime schedules will be shared with those classes specifically.
6. For those students who are unable to return to Shenzhen, your teachers will reach out to you in order to provide a detailed individual plan.
7. On the original school calendar, the last day of school was on June 11th. We will now provide an additional half day on June 12th.
8. SAIS will offer free summer extension courses which will start on June 15th and extend through July 10 from 8:30am-3:30pm. June 25 is off as a Chinese public holiday. The program’s instruction will continue to be based on project-based learning.

To ELE/Kindergarten parents,
We would like to make equally detailed and practical plans for our younger students, but unfortunately, we still don’t have a date for when we will be allowed to resume these classes. We would like to express that we sincerely care about your children, we miss them all terribly, and we will continue to try our best to provide them with a high-quality education.

While it is a great sign that we can open the school for older students at last, the longer the school reopening date is delayed for our youngest children, the harder it becomes to address the gaps that the school closures have created. We know how hard it is to be both parents and teachers for your children, while also trying to do your regular jobs, and we know that this situation has been challenging. All of the options for the other grades will be available as soon as your students are back on site. In addition, because of the extra days that the older students will now have, once we know when the younger students can return, we will try to accommodate this difference and come up with a fair and thorough plan that will best address your needs and the needs of your children. Thank you for your patience and we hope to have some additional news for you soon and be able to resume in-class instruction for all of our students in the near future.

SAIS Leadership Team
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SAIS Spotlight
Today is the final part of our look at Grade 4’s work during the online period of school. This is how the project was to move forward.

Project description: This project is designed to move from the children’s understanding of their own culture to the broader culture of a country they have decided to research. They will then work in rotating small groups to compare their own culture and the culture they are researching with the cultures other students are studying. The goal will be to find similarities and differences between cultures as well as how cultural trends have migrated between countries.

So after discussing their own cultures through legends and stories the students are now researching the similarities between cultures.

 

 

 

Here Saanvi is studying the Bhagavad Gita from India and how it influenced Gandhi in his successful campaign for independence from India from the British. Are the Gita’s concept of Dharma or duty, social norms and belief in law similar to Confucianism in China?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Korean flag in this screenshot of a student’s ppt presentation represents the concept of Taeguekgi. Does Taeguekgi share elements of Dharma and Confucianism?

 

 

 

Students have created a PowerPoint with all of the information they have gathered about the country they are researching. Each child will provide feedback to fellow classmates with a detailed list of criteria. Students will edit their own PowerPoints based on this feedback.

Here are some examples of the power points the students are creating about their countries. They include different food types, information about national parks in India and a diorama about a lake area of Canada.

The students are well on the way to completing their project and we will have a new group of young people with a clear understanding of our commonality and how we can both understand and celebrate our differences.