We are off and running here on campus. This weekend there is plenty going on and most of it student run. Friday we had the blood drive which managed to collect 106 units for KCMC. Thank you to all that organized this and donated. Also Friday we had the Farmers’ Market as well as visitors from some of our more local National UWC Committees.
Today the student events continue with a development conference and Sunday we have a cultural night and students working hard to make the Friday Haunted houses go well.
Parents of secondary students please remember that we have conferences Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning. You still have time to sign up. It does mean that we will not have classes after 1pm on Wednesday and before 11:20 on Thursday.
Please see more about these and other upcoming events in the rest of the newsletter.
Bob Cofer – Head of Campus
Upcoming Events
Secondary Halloween
The secondary students have Halloween events on both Friday and Saturday. On Friday we have groups of students running the annual haunted houses with festivities planned to start at 7pm. Sign up sheets will go up on Monday but please remember like always there are limited spaces. Students (including day students) have to be signed up onto a school bus to visit the haunted houses and that they will not be able to visit them by private car.
Due to the nature of the events please keep in mind these are best for students in M3 and above.
On Saturday the Student Government is running a Halloween Dance for students in M4 to D2 at Courage Cafe. More information about the dance will be coming to students from the student government directly.
Both these events are optional and outside of the normal schol day.
Ben’s Corner
Assessment…a word that can evoke pride and shame in equal measure! In the MYP, assessment falls into two categories, school-based and external. School-based assessments focus on tasks created and marked by teachers who are well-equipped to make judgements about student achievement. These tasks embrace a variety of assessment strategies. MYP teachers assess the prescribed subject group objectives using the assessment criteria for each group. External assessments become part of the equation in M5, where students must develop a Personal Project independently, which is externally validated by the IB. At the same time, students can register for optional external assessment (eAssessment) in other elements of the programme.
Different assessment tasks are used to help the teachers find the best tool to test a specific skill. For example, an essay can be used to assess writing skills, a multiple-choice question can be used to assess ability to recall information related to the course and a presentation can be used to assess communication skills. Having a variety of assessment tasks means achievement is properly tested against all of a subject’s objectives.
In the IB, marking and grading student work are two different actions. When work is marked, students are given credit for the work produced against a mark scheme or similar framework. Marks show how much of the assessment task they got “right.” The mark itself has no other meaning.
In deciding a grade, the teacher is making a judgement on the quality of the work against a defined standard. This takes into account the difficulty of the task as well as the achievement level. It is a “best-fit” approach. You might think of it like this: Achievement levels reflect how far you have walked but grades take into account how steep the path was!
Above all, assessment for and of learning play a crucial role in any school. Summative assessments provide accountability and demonstrate what students have learned, while formative assessments support ongoing learning and improvement. Effective educators often use a balanced combination of both to support the growth and development of their students.
Ben Morley – Deputy Head of Campus
Diploma News
It has been a short but intense week. For D2 there was the submission of the draft of the Extended Essay. Although not everyone was able to submit, those who didn’t had the maturity to discuss what their issues were and negotiate a new deadline. The self-management and reflection skills involved in this are important to develop.
We continued with service on Wednesday. The KCMC group went to KCMC and played games with the children in the cancer ward. The Neema group invited a few other students to help them and danced with the students.
On Thursday we introduced the D1 students to project week. This will take place in February and is a chance for students to demonstrate their learning outside the classroom. This is student led with support from a supervisor. Students have a couple of weeks to make a proposal, which will be reviewed by a committee of teachers and D2 students. All students will then be allowed to select which project they would like to do and then the groups will work on their detailed plans.
On Friday we had the first blood drive of the year. Over 100 donations were made with the majority coming from DP students. This was organized by the KCMC service group, and they should be congratulated for their hard work. At the same time, we had a Farmers’ Market again organized by students. We also had a visit from members of the National Committees from the region. Students were involved in showing them around the school and two helped me with a conversation about the IB diploma and challenges that students face.
Margaret Brunt – Diploma Coordinator
Service in motion
Wednesday was a pretty unique service day with the lovely Neema students. We shared the stage, learning new Afro-dance moves. At the start, everyone was tempted to try it but as time went on, everyone got the hang of it. It surely was challenging but the Neema students nailed it. In the end, the courageous Neema students started dancing with confidence and received a standing ovation. Johnson, the youngest of them, was the show-stopper. It was not merely a learning session, but a fascinating experience where everyone participated and had fun. We were also happy to have Albert, Hlelelwe and Derrick to choreograph dance moves for the kids.
National Committee Visit
Yesterday and today we are hosting the East African NCs for the first-ever East African National Committee Gathering happening on our campuses. This is an opportunity for us to strengthen our collaboration, share ideas, and for the National Committees to see students from their respective countries in their school environment. It has been a great opportunity for us all to learn from each other and understand the context of our region.
Residential Life
Dear UWCEA Community,
Welcome to Quarter 2!
With everyone back in school, we have hit the ground running this week right away. Students focused on submitting final drafts of their work in D2, or had summative assessments in D1 and MYP.
The weekend ends with a Blood Drive for KCMC with the goal of 100 donations of blood from the community, “Let’s Talk Development” Conference organized by students this Saturday and Sunday, Primary Years Baking and a Football Friendly Game, and last but not least, Culture Night with focus on Armenia.
Next week is looking fully packed with activities as well, with Halloween Haunted House and Halloween Dance as the culmination of the week.
Please be on the lookout for an email from me detailing the departure and arrival information for December and future breaks for the year.
Adnan Mackovic – Head of Residential Life
MYP News
Welcome back everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful and restful break, and I hope you are all as excited as we are for another quarter followed with exciting learning experiences. The MYP team’s main goal remains to be the support of all our students’ learning and providing interactive, hands-on and vigorous inquiry-based lessons, providing personalized feedback and guidance, fostering a supportive and inclusive classroom environment and lots more.
Why do we call them achievement levels and not grades?
This is a very interesting question that came my way from one of our M1 students. The simplest way to explain it was using the analogy of a video game (I used Super Mario and clearly realized the generation gap :)). Our aim of playing that game was to pass each level that led to the final stage of the game. In order to win each level, we needed to learn skills, use what we saw wisely and plan our moves. We may have needed to do that several times, but we did.
In a more technical way, what I was aiming for was that we use “achievement levels” instead of traditional “grades” because we:
Look at the whole picture, the whole student, not just their test scores. We consider many things, like how well they understand concepts and how they think and what they need to do to move up a level.
Consider skills… MYP is about how students think and learn, not just what they know. Using achievement levels helps us focus on developing important skills like problem-solving and critical thinking.
Understand that every student is different, and they learn in their own way. Achievement levels let us see what each student is good at and where they can improve.
So, when you see the words “achievement levels” on your child’s reassessments and reports, remember that it is a way to see the bigger picture of their learning journey, not just a simple grade. We’re focused on helping develop the skills and understanding.
M5 eAssessments/Personal Projects All M5 students have been registered for their personal projects, and students who have opted for the eAssessments option have been registered for the six onscreen exams and the Design ePortfolios on IBIS (IB Information System).
MYP Dates to Remember:
October 25th- PTCs from 1:00- 4:30 (no afternoon Service)
October 26th- PTCs from 7:30-11:20 (classes resume as usual after 11:20)
October 27th- Trunk-or-Treet and Haunted Houses
October 28th- Halloween Dance (M4/5)
October 30th- M5 Personal Project Criterion A Due
Farah Fawaz – MYP Coordinator
Sports Update
Leopards on the Move!
Welcome back, this week we have started out running! Everyone is getting excited and making a plan for sports weekend. But there is a lot more going on as well as that large event.
Oct. 27 is the NTSAA PYP Swim Gala
Oct. 28 is the NTSAA Secondary Swim Gala
Nov 4th is the NTSAA football and basketball tournament here at Moshi UWC.
Nov. 8 is the PYP Moshi athletics day
Nov. 10 is the NTSAA PYP athletic meet
Nov. 11 is the NTSAA Secondary athletic meet
Yesterday the Rugby teams had a friendly. It was action packed. They are doing these as a extended practice. Coach Baden is focusing on learning and growing rather than the score. It was a fun game filled with lots of action.
Coach Pickell – Sports & Activities Coordinator
PYP News
Welcome back to Quarter 2. It was lovely to see the children return to school, relaxed and happy after the break. As I write, we have mixed U7, U9 and U11 football teams participating in a friendly mini tournament against Hope. The sportsmanship has been wonderful – the final results of the tournament are not yet in!
Thank you to everyone who has signed up to decorate their car for Friday’s Trunk or Treat. At the moment, our plan is to use the green space across the road from the stables (where the horses used to graze). I will share more information early next week.
Wednesday is the last day for purchasing tickets for the Halloween supper. Tickets cost 6000 Tshillings and are available from your child’s teacher. Please consider donating wrapped candy for the event – there is a box in the front office. We have received very little so far. M1 students are invited to participate in the Trunk or Treat but will not join us for the costume parade, meal or dance party.
Timings for the optional PYP Halloween celebrations
3:50pm Meet on the playground
4:00pm EAs will escort children to the field behind the stables to go around the decorated cars collecting candy.
4:50pm Move to the breezeway
5:00pm Group photo
5:10pm Costume parade
5:20pm Halloween supper for those who have purchased tickets
5:45pm Dance party!
6:00pm Parents collect children from behind Room 4.
After school clubs will start on Monday. You can check on Life to see which clubs your child has been assigned to. If you have any questions please email me or Coach Pickell.
Upcoming dates – please keep checking the calendar on the website as dates may change.
3rd November EC/P1 Primary Gathering
8th November PYP Athletics Day
10th November Primary Athletics NTSAA in Arusha
17th November Singalong in Primary Gathering
24th November PYP Sharing Assembly
1st December Primary Gathering at the Daycare Centre
2nd December U9 and U11 Football at SCIS
13th December PYP Parent Teacher Conferences
15th December Last day of Semester and Primary Gathering
Deborah Mills – PYP Coordinator
EC/P1 Class
What a great week of getting back into school routines and shared friendships. Our highlight of the week was our Thursday swimming lesson. The children had lots of fun as they practiced drills and new skills in the water.
P1s and EC2s learned how to use the addition wheel this week. They surprised us with their understanding and love of numbers as we created a couple of them together. They will continue to explore these next week.
This coming week, we will be unpacking our unit of the quarter. Our central idea is that people change natural materials for different purposes.
These are our lines of inquiry:
Materials and where they come from
Characteristics and properties of materials
The use of different materials
If you wish to share your knowledge with the children, please let us know and we can set a time for it.
Wednesday is the final day to purchase a ticket for the Halloween meal on Friday. Tickets cost 6000 Tshillings. If you wish your child to participate in the meal please send the money in a named envelope to your child’s teacher.
Mboka Mwasongwe
P2/3 Class
It was a wonderful kick-off to Q2! We spent more time with observation skills and thinking about how important it is to notice details about the world around us. We did a smell investigation and broadened our vocabulary with words like pleasant, sharp, and disgusting. Students identified 7 mystery smells and then voted vanilla as the best.
We also worked on taking observations to the next level by making inferences. We infer when we combine what we observe with what we already know. We looked at pictures and made both observations and inferences. Students were really switched on during lessons on this next level of thinking!
Clubs will begin next week!
Wednesday is the final day to purchase a ticket for the Halloween meal on Friday. Tickets cost 6000 Tshillings. If you wish your child to participate in the meal please send the money in a named envelope to your child’s teacher.
Kacey Buckley
P4/5 Class
It was a short but busy week in P4/5. As part of our unit on storytelling, we have been reading many different versions of the Cinderella story with a focus on the Korean, Chinese and Persian versions. We have compared these stories with the version written down by Charles Perrault in 1697, with which the children are more familiar. We have looked for common elements and themes in these stories and have started thinking about what these stories can teach us about the culture of the time. The Chinese story Yeh-Shen includes a magic fish and so in our art lessons we have been making model fish. Look out for these on the breezeway next week. We have also considered why the story of Cinderella is so popular – apparently nearly every culture has it’s own version. In maths the children have been making bar graphs of the different genres of books that we have read since the start of P4/5. Next week we will work with pictographs, Venn diagrams, Carroll diagrams and line graphs.
Wednesday is the final day to purchase a ticket for the Halloween meal on Friday. Tickets cost 6000 Tshillings. If you wish your child to participate in the meal please send the money in a named envelope to your child’s teacher.
Deborah Mills
P6 Class
Welcome back to a new quarter! I hope that you were able to have a relaxing break with your family.
P6 had a very busy week. It was exciting to see the growth of the bean plants and the way they twisted and turned around the student-made mazes to get to the light.
We also started a new Unit of Inquiry:
Transdisciplinary Theme: How We Express Ourselves
Our Central Idea: Media helps us to create, extend and challenge our perception of the world.
Lines of Inquiry:
Forms of media and their role.
How persuasion influences the way we see the world.
The power of visual communication.
Our responsibility in virtual environments.
As a starting provocation, P6 explored advertisements and discussed how different strategies can be used to entertain and inform. In Art, we focused on the power of colour in making products stand out. P6 experimented with different colour combinations and discussed how colour can be used to capture attention.
Next week, we will continue our guided reading groups and we look forward to Clubs beginning once again.
Wednesday is the final day to purchase a ticket for the Halloween meal on Friday. Tickets cost 6000 Tshillings. If you wish your child to participate in the meal please send the money in a named envelope to your child’s teacher.
Natasha Berri
Outdoor Pursuits
Life changing is the only way I could describe the Kili experience. Every day on Kilimanjaro was a completely different experience. Seeing the role altitude was playing on the surrounding environment was astonishing. We started off our journey at the base of the mountain, hiking up to Mandara Hut. The hike was a beautiful one where we passed through dense rainforests. This is where you could start to see the great spirit we had as a group. On the second day we hiked out of the rainforest through the clouds and got to Horombo hut, spirits were high and the camp was magical in my opinion in spite of the tiny beds, this place would become my favorite part of the whole trip, the surroundings of the camp looked very alien with trees and terrain that aren’t comparable to anything I’ve ever seen before. The third day was my favorite, going to Zebra Point with no backpack and no weight and then coming back down to Horombo for acclimatization was a very relaxed hike and left a lot of free time for us to explore camp and the area around it. The fourth day was anything but relaxed. It was tough to say the least, we started off the day climbing to Kibo Hut, the highest of the huts and hardest to reach because of the altitude, it is higher than Meru the second tallest mountain in the country. Getting there, many of us were starting to feel the altitude, but that didn’t stop our group. We all made it, the morale was still high, and people cheered each other on. I was extremely proud of what we had done so far. On Kibo, we had dinner, talked about what was to come, and then went for a short nap, only a few hours, then the summit hike. Waking up was tough, getting ready was tougher. I felt the fear set in on me and my friends. The next 12 hours were a blur, walking endlessly up the mountain scared, exhausted, freezing, vomiting, and feeling like I would never make it. But having my friends make it bearable, one step after the other, slow pace and even slower breathing, we eventually got to Gilman’s point. No turning back from there, the sun was rising, and the rays of light translated into rays of hope. The view from Gilmans is something I will never forget forever ingrained into my mind. Walking the ridge from Gilmans to Stella to Uhuru was the most tiring I had ever been. Without Mr. Salim I don’t think I would have made it, but eventually, with an even slower pace and countless breaks, I got to Uhuru where I saw the rest of the group. I am filled with pride, about my friends, about the limits I had just pushed, about how far the body can go when the mind is strong, it was all just amazing. Standing at Uhuru looking at the jagged and rough peak of Mawenzi, knowing I was at the roof of Africa, was truly breathtaking. Something that I had dreamed of even since landing in Tanzania, and now I was here and so were my friends and colleagues. For only a short while, I got to enjoy the peak before starting to go down, but that is not the part I remember, nor is it important. What does matter is that we climbed the highest free standing mountain in the world, and I got to be a part of that!
Hashem (D2)
From the Counselors
Hello everyone. This has been a busy week with in-person visits to Goucher College, UBC and College of Atlantic as well as D2s finishing their last steps before they’ll submit their early applications in 9(!) days.
All three visits were different and had a lot of interest from our students. Goucher College being one of the best innovative and best value colleges shared many opportunities available there, College of Atlantic shared about self-directed programs and UBC about their updates. Our students enjoyed learning more and being aware of more of the opportunities available for them. Just a reminder for all community members that visits are there for everyone from M5 to D2s and their parents/guardians.
A Very Virtual Week Next week will be filled with informative opportunities that go beyond learning about Davis Partner institutions, with specialists sharing their expertise to assist with the college application process. Please prepare to log into virtual programs that span the globe from North America to Europe, and end with a virtual event from Japan on Saturday. Take a moment to review the Upcoming Events calendar on the UWCEA Careers website, and add items to your calendar so that you do not miss out!
Here is a sampling of what is coming your way…
UPCOMING College and University Events
24 October: 7:30 PM EAT University of Rochester – Competitive admissions
25 October: 7:30 PM EAT Bowdoin College – Writing in the application process
26 October: 4:00-6:00 PM EAT Education USA Virtual Fair for students in Sub-Saharan Africa
26 October: 7:30 PM EAT Reed College and Completing the CSS Profile
26 October: 7:30 PM EAT Methodist University session with Campus President and UWC alumni
30/31 October: Moshi/Arusha 3:00 PM EAT NYU Abu Dhabi
2 November: 10:20 AM EAT Sciences Po (France) virtual presentation
4 November: 7:30-11:00 AM EAT SAT exam – Moshi campus (See uwcea.org/tests for more information)
15 November: 4:45-6:00 PM EAT 15 on the 15th: US Liberal Arts Colleges Presentation and mini-virtual fair. November focus: SEVIS, 1-20, F-1 Student Visa and Enrollment. Link to register
I have been getting many questions about financial forms and want to attach this resource from our sites to help you navigate this big of applications as well.
Hope everyone will have an enjoyable and restful weekend.
Aizhan Smagulova – University and Career Counselor
Student Climate Summit
Following the launching of the Tanzania’s Students Coalition on Climate in June 2023 in Dar es Salaam, the coalition is pleased to host its first-ever national Students Climate Summit in Moshi on 10 & 11 November 2023.
With the precious help of our outreach partner and our sponsors, we hope to be able to host representatives from some 18 international and governmental schools in Moshi for this national event. We are honoured that Her Excellency Elizabeth Mrema, UN Assistant Secretary General and UNEP Deputy Director, will be on an official UN mission to Tanzania for this summit. Further, we will be joined by the Honourable Khamis, Deputy Minister of State (Vice-President’s Office), amongst other dignitaries.
During this summit, we will provide the opportunity to different organisations and climate stakeholders in the region to showcase the amazing work that they are doing to the dignitaries who will join us in Moshi. This will be done through booths for which members of our community can sign up to demonstrate what they are doing using posters, flyers, etc… If you would like to hold a booth, please email Conn M (connm24@uwcea.org) and Mathieu D (mathieud24@uwcea.org). Kindly specify your organisation and why you would like to hold a booth.
