Putting together the newsletter the last 2 days and reading through what I see here and reflecting on what I have seen on campus reminded me of our values and one value in particular.
A holistic and diverse portfolio of learning experiences.
It is very fashionable to talk about holistic education, but the implementation can be more challenging while also thinking about curriculum and student academic achievement. The balance is not easy and from week to week may not always be apparent. However, in addition to what you can see below, I also heard about preparations for Week without Walls, Project Week, theater productions, collaborative math competitions, cooking, mental health, conservation, first aid, and philanthropy as just an example. These involved students from PYP up through D2.
While this is intrinsically important to us as a school, on Friday we had three visiting UWC Davis Scholar university partners talk to students. In this they also highlighted that they were not only looking for academic achievement, but what else a student may bring to the university in terms of a diverse set of experiences.
As this newsletter is already long, let me pause there and make a few quick notes before you read on. Please note you may need to open this in a browser to see the full email.
Thank you to the parents that joined us on Tuesday in person and Wednesday online for our first Coffee Mornings of the year. We had over 70 families join us in these two meetings. I would also like to thank you for your suggestions and questions as we always look to improve.
A quick reminder that I am away from school acting as a CIS evaluator for another school and so we will not have a full newsletter next weekend.
Bob Cofer – Head of Campus
Upcoming Events
Dear UWCEA Moshi,
As we begin to settle into the school year, the Culture and Campus Committee would like to warmly invite you to our FIRST Cultural Night of the 2026/2027 year!
If you haven’t already heard, Cultural Nights are evenings where members from our school community represent and share their culture and traditions with other students and staff members on campus to come together to celebrate and learn about our surrounding diversity. At each Cultural Night, a few members from a region or country share their traditions, food, music, games, and stories.
Blood Drive
Our next blood drive is happening on 23rd October, and we are hoping to make it even bigger than the last one! If you are eligible to donate, please consider taking part. One donation can make a real difference to someone else’s life, and the process itself is a small commitment with a potentially massive impact.
So, if you’ve ever thought, “I want to help, but I don’t really know how,” this is your chance. Come through, donate if you’re eligible, encourage your friends to join you, and let’s see if we can beat our previous 87 donations. Every single one counts.
Diploma News
Our D2 students took part in an EE Lockdown last weekend — a dedicated block of quiet time, snacks and focused writing to help them get their Extended Essay drafts over the line. And before anyone worries about the photograph accompanying this newsletter… we promise we didn’t lock them in the cupboard! The lockdown gave students the opportunity to put distractions aside and take responsibility for making progress with their own work. They have now submitted their drafts and are waiting for feedback from their supervisors — an important part of the process of developing their ideas, refining their arguments and improving their work.
This week I’ve been thinking about one of our UWCEA values: demonstrating initiative and leadership. Our D1 students are really putting initiative and leadership into practice as they prepare for Project Week. The projects are wonderfully varied, with students planning experiences such as visiting an animal shelter in Dar es Salaam, working at our local hospital, visiting a national park, and exploring tourism and hospitality at BruBru Lodge in Moshi, amongst others. Project Week is much more than the trip itself. It is an opportunity for students to develop the independence, organisation and problem-solving skills needed to plan and manage a project from beginning to end. They have to make decisions, communicate with others, organise logistics, anticipate challenges and take responsibility for making their project happen. It is their project, and that means taking ownership of the process from the initial idea through to the final experience.
A letter with more information about Project Week was sent to all D1 parents this week. Please ask your children about their project and what they have planned! Some projects will involve costs, while others are free, so the experience will look slightly different for each group.
In TOK, students explored the question “What makes something art?” by creating their own artworks using only coloured paper, scissors and glue. They titled their pieces and developed an intention before putting their ideas to the test through debates, questioning whether their creations were truly art, whether they communicated a message, and who gets to decide what counts as art.
Across the DP, we want students to become increasingly confident in taking ownership of their learning. Initiative and leadership are not only about leading others; they are also about having the confidence to take the first step, develop an idea, make decisions, ask questions and take responsibility for the outcome. From completing an Extended Essay draft, to planning an independent Project Week experience to defending an idea in a TOK debate, our students are being encouraged to take the lead in their own learning.
Catherine Dowie – Head of Diploma
Residential Life
Dear UWCEA,
We are almost halfway through the quarter. Time flies! This means it’s time to start planning for October break. Please take a look at the travel survey and fill it in by October 1, 2026:
MYP students will need to leave the campus. DP students will have the option of staying on campus.
Asante sana! Adnan Mackovic – Head of Student Life
MYP News
Another week has somehow flown by, and there has been plenty happening across the MYP classrooms! This week’s newsletter has a little more student voice than usual, which I absolutely love. A number of the updates below have come directly from our students, sharing what they have been learning, what they have enjoyed and even what they have found challenging along the way. These entries somehow become so much more meaningful when they come from the students themselves. As I read them, I get a small glimpse into what is actually sticking with them: the activities they remember, the ideas that made something click, the moments they enjoyed and the things they are still figuring out. And that is really what learning should look like. Not simply what was taught this week, but what our students noticed, understood, questioned and took away from it. So, this week, I will let them do a little more of the talking!
MYP Design MYP 3 Design is exploring the world of branding, typeface and typography. The students have taken a deep dive, inquiring into communication, messaging and text development both digital and traditional “analogue” techniques. We are asking questions like “How do corporations communicate a message to a particular audience? And for what purpose?” This week we walked around campus and explored the different quote-murals around campus and wondered how the designer and stakeholders collaborated towards achieving the goal for the murals and signage around campus.
M4 Visual Arts This week in M4 Visual Arts, we explored the work and style of famous Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. We used some of his techniques, such as bold outlines, bright colours, comic-style images and speech bubbles, to create our own artworks around the theme “School Mornings Are Impossible!” It was fun to take an everyday experience that we can all relate to and turn it into something dramatic and creative. We also had to think about how our choices of colour, expression and composition could communicate a message to the viewer. Grace – M4
M3 Mathematics In Maths, we have been learning about the laws of exponents and how to simplify indices and powers. At first, remembering which rule to use can be a little challenging, especially when there are lots of powers in one question. But once you understand the patterns, it starts to make more sense! I like seeing how a complicated expression can become much simpler in just a few steps. Ambreen – M3
M1 Individuals and Societies In our I&S class, we have been learning about maps. We learned about longitude, latitude, how to find the coordinates of a specific place, and to be able to spot different features and their meanings on a map. One of the things that we have done to boost our knowledge on maps, is a scavenger hunt. First, we were given partners, then we were given clues of where to go, for example, “My Friends’ Hall” which is Rafiki Hall. Once you get to the correct destination, you will find a piece of paper that has a place, its coordinates, the definition, the feature that best describes that place, and an image of the place. At the end of the lesson, Mr. Riley asked us about any new features that we learned. I think that a lot of people learned new things from this exercise and gained more knowledge about maps. Alyssa – M1
M5 Individuals and Societies M5 students have recently started a new unit on Civil Rights, where they will be exploring the American Civil Rights movement as well as the Apartheid movement in South Africa.
As an introduction to the unit, students explored the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and, in class this week, had a guest talk from Mr Racim Draou entitled ‘Introduction to International Human Rights Law’. Mr Draou is an international migration and displacement specialist who has been active in the humanitarian field since 2018, working with various international organisations and entities. He specialises in international refugee law, international humanitarian law and human rights. He has worked with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Tunisia and the International Institute of Humanitarian Law (San Remo, Italy), focusing on international protection for refugees and other displaced populations.
The talk provided an insightful look into the history of the Declaration, its uniqueness, and a reminder that rights are inherent to all human beings. Mr Draou spoke about his current work, including both the positives and frustrations of working in the humanitarian field, and students had the opportunity to ask a range of questions.
Questions included: ‘What are the challenges refugees face when they arrive in a country?’ and ‘Based on state sovereignty, when and how does the UN decide when to intervene when human rights are clearly being violated?’
Thank you to Mr Riley for setting up this fantastic opportunity for our students!
Mr Andy
MYP Dates to Remember
September 28th to October 2nd – MYP Week Without Walls
October 7th – Last Day of Q1 After School
October 8th to 18th – October Break (Inclusive)
October 19th – First Day of Q2
Have a beautiful week ahead! Farah Fawaz – Head of MYP
Sports Update
Ultimate Frisbee club is off to a great start, as the 2025 Sports Weekend, u19 Frisbee Champions, UWCEA will be looking to defend their title this year. This year our ultimate frisbee team will be building a new team with our existing u16 squad. Despite having lost many graduating Diploma 2’s in June, our UWCEA Ultimate team will need to refocus and rebuild with our returning-experienced players, our new players that have joined the ultimate frisbee club for the first time and with Coaches Mr Matt and Mr Ingram. We look forward to a super well-spirited athletic season ahead. This weekend our team will play some warm-up matches in Arusha. Good luck to the players.
Mr Dowie Frisbee Coach
Contact Rugby at UWCEA is always focused on development and exposing new players to the joy of contact rugby. Our school has developed a relationship with the Tanzanian Rugby Federation and continues to build skills, knowledge and toughness as we compete in a local league against two local Moshi Rugby teams, The Bulls and Team Kilimanjaro. We look forward to the upcoming season.
PYP News
Thank you to everyone who came to the P5 Primary Gathering. The children really enjoyed sharing their learning about forces with you. Next Friday, 11th September, it will be the turn of our P6 children to present at the Primary Gathering.
At each Primary Gathering, children who have demonstrated one of the IB Learner Profile attributes may be awarded a leaf. Their leaf is then added to our Learner Profile Tree on the breezeway. We currently have posters in English and Kiswahili explaining the ten Learner Profile attributes: Reflective, Inquirer, Caring, Open-minded, Knowledgeable, Thinker, Risk-taker, Principled, Communicator and Balanced.
Many of our children speak a language at home that is different from the languages they use in the classroom, and we want the linguistic diversity of our school community to be visible and celebrated. As part of our ongoing commitment to this, we are in the process of creating and displaying Learner Profile posters in the different mother tongues spoken by our families. A big thank you to the adults who have helped translate the posters into French, German, Spanish, Tamil, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin and Mauritian Creole. These will begin appearing around the Primary School in the coming weeks, and we hope to add more languages soon.
There is an athletics meet on Tuesday, 15th September at Kennedy House. Invitations will be issued through Life this weekend. Please approve your child’s participation or remove him/her from the trip by Monday so that the place can be offered to someone else.
Deborah Mills – Head of PYP
EC Class
This week, our little explorers began their exciting learning journey into our new Who We Are unit of inquiry, exploring the central idea: “Our choices can keep us safe and healthy.”
We started with a gallery walk around the classroom, where the children observed, explored, and interacted with different learning experiences alongside their friends. They shared their observations and discussed what they noticed.
Later, we gathered together on the carpet to reflect on our discoveries using the Visible Thinking Routine (VTR): See, Think, Wonder. The children were encouraged to carefully observe, share their thoughts, and ask questions, developing their curiosity, communication, and thinking skills.
To end our wonderful week, we extended our learning beyond the classroom by exploring the school premises and enjoying a lovely picnic on the big pitch. It was a wonderful opportunity for our little explorers to connect with nature, enjoy being active, and learn together through meaningful experiences and play!
Manal El Dahwish
P1/2 Class
The children have been diligently learning how to complete their math fluency (or mental math) activities. We begin math lessons with these 5-minute activities, and their intense focus has amazed us. Most have moved smoothly from adding 0, 1, and 2 to one-digit numbers below 10. They will continue progressing until they reach the addition of 5, after which we will switch to adding to 2-digit numbers. Thank you to everyone who has been helping with the math fluency homework as well. The practice at home is really helping.
Well done, Sam, William and Ella, for earning your leaves this week. Well done, Rowan and Yara, for earning the ‘Golden Trophy’ student of the week award the past two weeks. This week, the award went to Zavier.
We had a team challenge activity this week where we looked for the team with the tallest tower. The picture shared is of one team trying to create support for their tower. All team members concluded that it was sometimes ‘fun’ and sometimes ‘hard’ to work in a team because you couldn’t always get other team members to do what you want.
Mboka Mwasongwe
P3/4 Class
Over the past few weeks, our class has been busy exploring what life was like for people in the past. We have been learning about prehistoric tools and investigating how different tools helped people to survive and meet their needs during different time periods. The students have enjoyed thinking about how tools changed over time and how these developments made everyday life easier.
We have also started exploring homes and shelters from different eras, looking at how and why the places people lived changed over time. We have been thinking about the materials that were available, the environment people lived in, and what their homes can tell us about their way of life.
A big thank you to all our families who sent in photographs and information for the children’s personal timelines. The students have really enjoyed sharing these with the class and making connections between their own lives and our learning about the past.
Sarah Vrontamitis
P5 Class
We did a lot of work this week on fair testing. The children designed their own investigations to test which surface created the most friction when they dragged a brick across it. They considered all of the different variables and decided which ones to change and which ones to keep the same. We also worked with different measurement tools this week. As part of their investigations the children used rulers, stopwatches and force meters. Next week we will move onto learning about simple machines and how we use them to make our lives easier. In maths next week we will look at how we use negative numbers and will learn strategies for doubling and halving numbers.
Deborah Mills
P6 Class
This week, P6 continued exploring volume, area, and perimeter in maths. In Language, we investigated different forms of punctuation and how they help make our writing clearer.
As part of our Unit of Inquiry, students examined images of the Chagga caves in Marangu and developed theories about how and why they may have been used. We were also fortunate to welcome Mr Joseph Mselle, who taught us more about the history and culture of the Chagga people. Thank you to Mr Mselle for sharing his knowledge, and an even bigger thank you to Ms Mkunde Marealle for arranging his visit!
A reminder that P6 will host next Friday’s Primary Gathering. We look forward to seeing you there!
Elisha Jaffer
Service in Action
Service is an integral part of the UWCEA community. This year we have an impressive 25 service programs across our campus. UWCEA has committed student service teams collaborating to fill a need within our community inside the school gates and outside the school gates. Our service programs cover a range of service categories such as environmental, community care and sustainable maintenance of the relationships forged with our partners. Having these various categories helps students to explore their personal interests with regards to serving. Every Wednesday students help build within themselves, to be well rounded individuals that recognises their own unique position at UWCEA and endevours to support others, reflecting on their own privileged positions as UWCEA Students and how they can use their position to support others.
Baden Dowie – Service Coordinator
Service Workshop This week the students helped re-organise the Design Workshop to prepare for the upcoming projects. Our Workshop Service positions its student service teams as technical support to the school community and to other services, if you have a fabrication need that our workshop service can support, please reach out to the Workshop Service team.
KCMC Service Group
Our KCMC Service is all about turning the time and energy we have as students into something that can genuinely help our community. Working alongside Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, we support patients, families and staff through a range of activities that go beyond simply showing up at the hospital. From organising blood drives and delivering food to patients and families, to running dance clinics within the oncology ward, donating supplies and helping with practical projects around the hospital, every activity gives us a chance to contribute in a different way.
What makes KCMC Service especially meaningful is the opportunity to see the impact of our work first-hand. Whether it is seeing a child smile during a dance clinic, knowing a family received a meal when they needed it, or watching people line up to donate blood, these moments remind us that small actions can have a much bigger impact than we sometimes realise. Last year, our blood drive collected 87 donations, and this year we are hoping to build on that momentum while continuing to find new ways to support the KCMC community.
– Ethan, Cara and Martyna
Kilimanjaro Hash
This last Sunday a group of students led the Hash on a historical tour of Moshi looking at the different aspects of the city through the last 100 years. Thank you to all those that attended and to those that planned and researched the walk.
Outdoor Pursuits
Last weekend, we had another two trips off campus: our Peaks Discovery to North Pare and our Plains Discovery to Makuyuni. Both trips were a great success, and students had a brilliant time. Please read Freja’s review of the North Pare trip below. Next week, we will have a write-up of the Plains trip.
That makes three weekends in a row for the OP team, and we have been kept very busy cleaning and maintaining all our kit. Mr Isaac, Mr Salimu and our intern, Ms Mercy, are certainly being kept on their toes!
As we continue through the quarter, there are many more trips to look forward to. Coming up soon is a Rides day trip to Kahe Pump Track, which will take us along a new route to a new destination. We also have our Reefs Exploration trip to Fish Eagle Point, which is proving very popular. Training has already begun, and Friday afternoons on campus are well and truly OP time!
Hello there, it’s Freja (D2) signing on for another OP review!
Last weekend a large group of DP and MYP students came together from Moshi and Arusha campuses to venture into the Northern Pare mountains. This trip consisted of one day up, one day down, and the night spent atop the summit of Kindoroko peak.
We began the first day with a stroll into the surrounding area, carrying most supplies on our back (although thank you to the porters who carried necessities like water). This was a great opportunity to learn about rural communities while also getting to take in the forested surroundings. As the hike progressed, so did the steepness, and we soon found ourselves slowly, but steadily, scrambling up the mountain.
Upon reaching the summit, I felt a brisk wind nip my ears and couldn’t see my surroundings much further than 100 m away. We were in a cloud! After setting up the camp, the clouds cleared in a majestic way so that the rays beamed heat onto our shoulders. This may have been my favourite part of the trip because we were all chatting, building cross-campus connections, while the smell of dinner wafted our way and the sun sank onto the horizon. The rest of the night included a free-style rap circle, laughs, and maybe one too many photoshoots 😉
On descent day we took a slightly different hike, stretching our previous 6 km route to 8 km as we braved the steep rainforest. The view was ethereal with fog sweeping the ground, and birds chirping all around – the perfect opportunity to fall into deep conversation with your hiking buddies.
North Pare was the perfect trip to kick off the OP year ahead, and I certainly hope to carry this positive energy into the rest of the semester. Thank you to everyone who made our expedition possible. See you on the next mountain!
Over and out – Freja
Sustainability
Saturday the 22nd of August the committee was lucky enough to visit Simon Farm in Mweka. Three of the committee members went for the whole day, and although some of us got quite a sunburn, it was totally worth it!
The drive was an hour on bumpy roads up towards Kilimanjaro, but seeing the view of Moshi when arriving it was already worth it. Simon and his dogs welcomed us and gave us a tour of the farm. We saw a lot of animals and did practical work such as planting and trimming. We also learnt about sustainable ways to do farming without chemicals such as using compost to fertilise the soil, this is also something we got to be involved in when planting kale.
The trip was great and was just the very start of our collaboration with the farm. We are already looking forward to everything we will learn and experience there on future trips. Thank you to Simon Farm for welcoming us!
Ingrid, with Seb and Lamine
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