SEK Qatar celebrates UN day. Our SPARK club students from grade 7 have initiated this fantastic event that will commemorate and inspire our unique worldwide student community. Our students from grades six to ten in the Middle Years Programme have opened their classroom doors today for other students wishing to learn more about their own cultures. Flamboyant decorations, typical tasty food and engagingly interesting facts and quizzes have kept our students exploring and learning more about their peers’ multicultural backgrounds.

United Nations day was an empowering day that has led our student community to travel across different cultures and countries in a day. The best way to learn is when you have fun. More days like these. This is what education is about. Explore, inquire and learn. We are SEK.

Day 1 & 2:

Arts Week kicked off on Sunday 13^th October with the wonderful Preschool 5 event. They celebrated their first Unit ‘Communities’ by performing a song and dance about the various jobs and roles of people in our community. The showcased their learning from Spanish class and Arabic class by presenting what they want to be when they grow up through the different languages. The parents then joined the students for a painting task, where they created watercolour paintings of themselves inspired by the title ‘When I grow up, I want to be….’.

On Monday 14^th October, Grade 1 began the day with an exciting presentation of what they learned throughout their unit ‘Let’s Stay Healthy’. They performed a song that they had prepared in music class with Ms. Jenny. This was followed by some interactive games and exercises that the students had invented in groups in P.E. class. In art class, the children had created clay sculptures of the healthy foods that can be found on a ‘balanced plate’. During their arts week celebration, they painted their clay sculptures together with their parents.

On Monday afternoon, Grade 2 took to the stage to present the learning and ideas they had developed during their unit ‘Patterns’. To begin, they performed some awesome gymnastic routines they had prepared in groups to various songs in P.E. class. This was followed by a musical performance inspired by the patterns the students had observed in the Star Wars theme song. Following their performances, the students brought their parents outside to participate in a colourful and creative ‘Tie-Dye’ workshop. They showed them the different ways Tie-Dye can be used to produce patterns on clothing and they each created their own Tie-Dye t-shirt to take home.

Day 3:

On Tuesday, Grade 3 began the day with an awesome performance of the song ‘One Day We’ll Be Together’. Their unit was ‘Our Place in the World’ and they had choreographed a routine made of traditional dance moves from their home countries. Following their performance, their parents joined them to take part in two stations. Their music station was a traditional stick game from New Zealand. This was followed by an art station where they created drawings inside maps of their home country celebrating its cultures and traditions, and then painted them with watercolours.

Day 4:

The Preschool 3 students had their arts week showcase on Wednesday morning.  The students celebrated the completion of their unit “Me and My Family” by participating in a visual art activity with their parents.  Students had an outline of their body which they were able to paint and get creative with feathers, googly eyes, and other decorations.  The end result was colourful and fun for parents and students alike.

For the Grade 5 Arts Week activities on Wednesday afternoon, Grade 5 had an amazing culmination to their “Literature Unit” that really highlighted their flair for drama.  After reading the novel, The Secret Garden, the students came up with their own skits which contained many connections to the novel.  They performed these for parents in the auditorium, working together with their classmates to create very engaging scenes that were at times funny, mysterious, or even spooky.  For their visual art activity, they painted Modroc masks they had designed and built in art class. The masks were characters they invented based on the theme “If you go down to the woods today…”

Day 5:

On Friday morning, Preschool 4 had their Arts Week presentation which showcased some of their learning from their unit ‘All About Me’. They sang and danced to a wonderful song about body language, celebrating all the things they learned about their body parts and the things they can do. For their art station, they created mosaic art with their parents. Each child and their parents made a drawing of one of their interests or something they like. Then they filled their shapes using brightly coloured pieces of paper.

For the Grade 4 Arts Week celebration, each performance and presentation was inspired by their unit ‘Conflict Resolution’.  The Grade 4 students entered the stage wearing some creative and colourful t-shirts they had designed themselves by painting symbols of peace with fabric paint. They sang a beautiful song they had prepared in music class entitled ‘Light a Candle for Peace’. The atmosphere was heartwarming, with the main hall lights turned off and each student holding a battery operated candle. After their performance, the students brought their parents around 4 art stations. They painted a brick to build into a peace wall, they made portraits of peacemakers they had researched, they created a ‘peace around us’ mural and they created chalk pastel backgrounds that they wrote inspiring quotes about peace onto.

Today we had the pleasure to have Lance King in school, a worldwide recognised writer and an expert in Approaches to Learning skills. Our grade 9-12 students had the opportunity to choose to attend one of two workshops: Future Proofing and Academic Success Skills.

In the first workshop, students learnt how to set their personal and academic goals, looking at the difference between making good and bad decisions and exploring career choices. Students were also reminded about the importance of creating an online identity focused on strengths, goals and exemplifying their virtues.

On the other hand, the second workshop was focused on learning about failing well, finding strategies to be successful academically and trying to find ways to deal with procrastination. Student also explored metacognition, looking at how their brain works in certain situations and investigating about ways of thinking and memory strategies.

It was a very interesting experience for our students and we are glad that we had the chance to have this special guest in school today.