Primary & Secondary News
21 August 2020
From Heads of Primary & Secondary
The start of the 2020-2021 academic year at Nexus has been unusual yet wonderful. It has been lovely to say hello to returning learners and to warmly welcome over 150 new learners and families.
The current regulations do not allow us to invite families into school. Therefore, we have taken our very popular 'Welcome Evening' online and over the next few editions of our Newsletter, we will introduce our fantastic teaching teams. This week, our focus is on meeting the Primary Year Groups and the Secondary Phases. We hope you enjoy these introductions to life at Nexus. Click on the 'Meet our Teams' in the menu to find out more.
During these last couple of weeks we know that you, as parents have worked hard to set your children up for success in a new academic year and for some, a new school and maybe a new country. Now it's time to set yourselves up for a successful year! There are some key communication tools we use in school to share what is happening in our Nexus community. Please make sure you've connected to these...
Facebook Page (click here) - a space where we celebrate all that is happening in the Nexus community.
Parent Zone (click here) - a one-stop place to find all the key information you need about life at Nexus. Whether it is viewing the school events calendar; finding out about our CCA, Music and Sport programmes; viewing details of our school residential trips and more... This is the place to get all the practical information you will need about school life.
Primary School: SeeSaw - we offer a ‘window into the classroom’ via the SeeSaw App. This is the regular ongoing communication method we will use to share news and home learning from Primary School. If you need some help to set up the app, please email our IT team.
Secondary School: The Nexus Hub - for home learning and information regarding latest learning. If you need some help to set this up, please see our IT team.
And of course, our fortnightly Newsletters will also be full of exciting news. As well as this front page that has our 'live' calendar displayed below, we have a range of other sections to look out for. These sections can be accessed from the menu across the top of the screen (on large screens such as laptops and iPads) or the 'triple bar' icon on the top left (on small screens, eg: phones). In the future, the Newsletter sections will include:
- Important Announcements
- Upcoming and Recent Events
- Arts and Sports & CCA News
As we start the academic year, it is always a time when the school comes together to celebrate learners in our Secondary School who have completed their IB Diploma and IGCSE examinations. We were delighted to receive another set of strong results at both IB Diploma (Year 13) and IGCSE (Year 11). The learners worked so hard to achieve some outstanding outcomes in difficult circumstances and we are proud of them all and wish them well for their future studies and careers. A big shout out goes to Udit Srivathsan who attained a perfect IB Diploma score of 45. To put his achievement in context, over 160,000 learners study the diploma and less than 0.2% achieve full marks. We are so proud of all of these learners who had to cope with so many uncertainties. We appreciate the hard work of the teachers across the whole school in supporting these learners on their journeys through Nexus.
Paul Beach, Head of Primary School
Heather Millington, Head of Secondary School
Update on the Awesome Action taken by our Learners - Climbathon & Nexus Neighbours
2019-2020 was such a wonderful and unexpected year! Despite the various challenges this year has presented, it has been unbelievable how our Nexus families still came together to take action to support charities, at home and overseas.
We had the recent Climbathon on the last day of the academic year to raise funds for Chora Chori and through matched-funding, we managed to raised $6,400! All proceeds go to the children at Chora Chori, a refuge in Nepal who has been heavily affected by the Covid-19, with many children being unable to stay in school as they had to find ways to help provide for their families.
We also had a team consisting of our learners, parents and teachers, personally delivering a very special package across Singapore to our old campus at Ulu Pandan over the school holiday. The delivery was for the foreign workers who have moved into our old campus, in partnership with Ulu Pandan Community Club & Christopher de Souza's office. With the funds raised from our #NexusNeighbours campaign (amounting to exactly $6,254.75), we used the proceeds to purchase basic necessities for our new friends. They were so grateful for the love shown from our community! Not only that, our children's artwork has been displayed across the campus to brighten up the workers' new home.
To everyone who contributed to these learner-led actions, a big THANK YOU for being so generous and giving. Thank you, too, to our Nexus community, who went into school despite it being your holidays to deliver the goods! It is so heartwarming to see how giving, generous and caring our community is and we are just extremely thankful.
