From the Director

​What I am excited about…
 
Zambia Day! One of the highlights of every year is our Zambia Day celebration. We use this day to celebrate our beautiful host country and its culture. Although we cannot host the large-scale events that we have done in the past, students will still have opportunities to celebrate Zambia through various activities tomorrow. Please encourage your children to wear Zambian colors. As a fun memory, you can click here to see a short video from last year’s Zambia Day assembly when His Excellency, Dr. Kenneth Kaunda, First President of the Republic of Zambia led the school in singing his signature song, Tiyende Pamodzi.  
 
Accreditation Survey! If you have not done so already, please take a few minutes to complete the AISL/CIS Community Survey that was sent to parents in the Leopard's Tale newsletter. Our reaccreditation agencies expect a high number of parent responses, so please contribute. We ask that you consider completing one survey per child since their experiences may differ. The survey will be available until 30 October, 2020. I am excited to use the results of this survey to inform our school improvement plans.
 
ASA’s Begin Tomorrow! We are excited to resume our after-school-activities (ASA) program tomorrow. Unfortunately, we had to reduce this session’s offerings in order to ensure that we followed the safe distancing and lower ratios that are required by our health and safety protocols. We are sorry that some children were not able to get into some of the activities they were hoping for. We are working hard to accommodate as many requests as we can. Because students will be unable to safely play actual games in most sports, this session’s ASA’s will be focused on building skills. Please be patient while we bring our ASA program back in a careful, measured way.
 
MAP Growth Testing! We will be holding another round of MAP Growth testing in Grades 3-10 across the next few weeks. These online measures of math and literacy skills are used around the world. The results help us to monitor each student’s growth over time and provide guidance to teachers on how they can differentiate their instruction to meet individual needs.  We normally hold these tests twice per year but, due to the pandemic, we did not hold the last session, which would have been in May.
 
Verbal Jam Website – Please Visit! We now have more than fifty users on our new Verbal Jam webpage. Verbal Jam is designed to be an exclusive AISL online environment where thoughts, opinions, news, and advice all come together. We invite all AISL students, parents, and staff to use this tool to share, motivate, and educate! Please take a few moments to explore the site and please post messages on the Thrive Message Board. The Verbal Jam password is the same as the one we use for the Parent Portal.