Bulletins & Newsletters

Practical work by Grade 11 DP Chemistry students is not just focused on the study of chemistry. Mathematical skills are key to exploring important concepts in chemistry. Required mathematical skills in Chemistry often include rudimentary sciences which are acquired in both the PYP and MYP years. 

Grade 4 students had a successful learning experience while exploring the topics of explorers and inventors. It's always encouraging to see students take an interest in history and its relevance to the present day.

Our congratulations are extended to the G10 students on showcasing a wonderful Personal Project (PP) Exhibition that took place from Tuesday 7^th to Thursday 9^th of February.  The Grade 10 students presented their independent inquiries to the parents and students from across many year groups, including Grade 5 students who are to present their projects in the coming weeks. 

The printed yearbook for 2021-2022 is now available for purchase for 80 QAR! With your own copy, you can relive all of the unforgettable moments from the previous academic year. We are excited to share with the community the experiences and memories that helped shape the 2021-2022 learning journey.

This term, new extra-curricular activities (ECAs) have been introduced to our activities programme, alongside many of our firm favorites from the previous one.  One such activity is the Astronomy Club that meets on Sundays. Those joining this new club have a keen interest in various aspects of space. Sujood Abdelhameed (G11D) & Idil Arat (G11B) run the club as part of their CAS (Creativity, Activity, Service) programme.  

The Grade 1 students have started their new unit "Who We Are" which involves learning about new cultures and making connections. To do this we held a Cultural Fair where the parents came in and taught the students about their own culture. It was a fantastic afternoon bringing everyone from around the world together.

ISL Qatar is experiencing an exciting time of reflection and renewal. We must ensure the best learning and community experience we can provide for our students, families and staff which distinguishes us from other educational organizations in Doha, the region and internationally.

Grade 2B students have inquired about the human impact on the environment with their groups. Individually, students have selected their topic of interest and during this week they will be finding out more and going further in the inquiry cycle. 

Last academic year, our Yearbook had a special concept: community, belonging and identity. For us it was truly important to share with our families the values that bring us together and make us unique.

Grade 4C had their Assembly on the Sharing the Planet unit of conflict resolution. Their Assembly included role play, singing and dancing, and a special visit from Kelso the frog, who shared his knowledge of how to solve small problems using Kelso's Choices with the students.

ISL Qatar is experiencing an exciting time of reflection and renewal. We have been preparing since last year for our upcoming joint IB/NEASC accreditation team visit in March 2023. Through this process, our stakeholders have engaged in working groups reflecting on several aspects of the school, what we do well and where we have opportunities to grow. 

The primary students celebrated Sustainability Month on October 30th by presenting poetic, musical and theatrical numbers. Children from Kindergarten to Grade 5 showcased their talents in the choir, percussion ensemble, poetry slam, homemade instrumental group and theatre troupe.

ISL Qatar will be hosting the Beyond COP21 Symposium on Wednesday 2nd, November and Thursday, 3rd November, 2022. We are delighted to welcome Dr. Tok as the keynote speaker! We are the first school in Qatar to host this prestigious event!

The Grade 5 students were very excited to have their first Celebration of Learning for the year. They inquired into ancient civilizations for our Where we are in place and time unit of inquiry. They explored artifacts, systems and technologies invented by various ancient civilizations like Persia, Greece, Roman, Maya, Incas, India and China, to name a few. 

The Tree Planting Marathon is a project that is part of Qatar’s ‘Sustainabilty Week’, a national campaign, coordinated by Expo2023 and started on Saturday, 8 October.  It is the intention of the Earthna Centre to plant a million trees in Qatar.

When focusing on Student wellbeing, an emotionally healthy school involves the whole school community – students, staff and parents. We started doing just that. We had our first parent meet-up where we discussed the topic “What does student well-being mean?”

Now that school has been back for a month and the activity programme is up-and-running, those members of the ECO Club in KG to Grade 5, have been participating in a variety of activities aimed at improving the school’s environment for the benefit of all.  Club members are currently studying soil and water mixtures to learn how to improve the balance of compost at school. 

Grade 4's explore peace and conflict resolutions in their Sharing the Planet transdisciplinary unit. We delved deeper into understanding unit concepts using concept formation strategies like the four-corner debate etc., to enhance our understanding.

This week, we celebrated five educators at ISL Qatar being selected as new Microsoft Innovative Educator Experts (MIEE). This is a specialist award that recognizes outstanding practice in the classroom using digital tools, innovation in digital pedagogy and a commitment to professional learning.    

ISL Qatar is delighted to have received the Green Flag Award and Plaque during the assembly on Tuesday. This award shows our commitment towards Sustainability and Well-being in our school community We would like to congratulate the Eco club members, staff, and parents for their hard work in readiness to obtain this award.

In Grade 9 Global Perspectives, students have begun investigating Migration by considering their own migratory experiences and interviewing their parents and grandparents to observe similarities and differences.

Welcome back to school! We hope you have had a fun-filled summer with your family.  

If you are interested in learning more about early childhood education and child development, we invite you to read The Whole Child series we will be publishing in every PYP bulletin. The first article aims to answer a question we often get asked by parents: What does it mean to be Reggio-inspired?  

What a wonderful first day back! It was a joy to welcome our learners and families back to school today. You could feel the energy and excitement as students, staff and families had the chance to reconnect at school again. We look forward to building on this positive momentum.

Congratulations to all ISL Qatar students for successfully completing another year of learning and personal growth! Especially, I want to wish our Class of 2022 the best as they depart to commence their exciting next adventures. Thank you to all the families and staff for your support of our learners and the school.

On Saturday, 4 June at 4.10 pm, an audience of proud parents, teachers and students entered what the day before had been a Sports Hall into a carpet-covered and flower-filled Graduation Hall.  

As the Student Press Corps has reported in previous Secondary Bulletins, the MYP Community Project (CP) is a collaborative project which students in G8 complete in small groups (no more than three) and focus on a group-chosen topic linked to a group within a community.

After a tough year, one filled with hard work and life-long memories, the Grade 12 students are on the verge of moving their mortarboard tassels on the right to the left and welcoming the next chapter of their lives with arms fully flung wide.

For 6 weeks, the Grade 1 students have been exploring how a scientist thinks and conducts experiments. The Science Fair was an amazing end to a young scientist's journey, inquiring about different reactions and interactions. It was a wonderful event to showcase their learning. 

Welcome back! I hope that everyone had an enjoyable and restful holiday. It’s hard to believe, but we have reached the final stretch of the 2021-22 academic year. We have lots planned for learning, community engagement, and celebration over these next five weeks.

As part of student involvement and collaboration across the school, our Gr11 students Assil Hanoun and Tenatic Gonzalaz; and Gr12 students, Kamilla Riparip, Danielle Arugay, Katrina Indico, under the guidance of our Artist-in-Resident, Anny Ku, are making great progress for a mural project in the Research Hub.

“The most significant transformation from the group was their capacity for empathy!  Their sensitive listening skills exceeded my expectations, along with their unwavering respect and support of one another.  A truly inspirational experience for me and one that I feel very privileged to be a part of.” Mr. David Bryan

The Eco Club is a group of students and staff who care about the environment. Together, we want to make the school community more eco-friendly by doing activities that promote sustainability and responsibility. A big part of this is the 3 Rs: reducing, reusing, and recycling. 

We would like to share with you some snippets of last week's Grade 5 PYP Exhibition. This is only a teaser to our special edition bulletin in two weeks which will focus on celebrating the PYP Exhibition in its entirety. 

At ISL Qatar, the word ‘graduation’ refers to the completion of a student’s IB courses at the DP level and the awarding of their final grade transcripts. It is a moment to celebrate the culmination of 12 years of study, which for some has been undertaken entirely at ISL Qatar.

In the blink of an eye, we are in the FINAL full week into the PYP Exhibition process. After formulated their own questions to investigate their passions, Grade 5 became clearer of what directions they were going to take in this learning journey.

G10 Students Exhibit their Personal Projects 2022 - In a rapidly changing and information-rich world, our students need to acquire the capacity to be discerning learners: to absorb, to question, to challenge and to reflect upon their learning.

In the Primary, we are always on the lookout for those teaching moments. A teaching moment is when a situation occurs in the class that the teacher has not planned for but because of its authenticity, and relevance to the students it warrants instant attention. 

Students have created mathematical averages of 32 images by combining two at a time, reducing the number of layers by half and cutting the number of layers in half again, in geometric sequence, resulting in a single average image.

Traces of our signature blue color have been seen around school, and that is just the start and the beginning of the exciting and meaningful Well-being month that is ahead of us. The Well-being Month Leadership team and the volunteers have prepared many fun activities for this month that we hope that you can enjoy! A few activities planned are:

Research has shown convincingly that a parent’s engagement plays a vital part in a student’s growth, performance and progress, and there is a need for a strong partnership between the home and the school. 

We began the week with optimism and confidence, but we'd like to hear from other students about how they appreciate their online learning experience. Please send your images along with a brief description to marketing@islqatar.org.

Have you ever felt as though you were just in the right place at the right time? That those around you are so much brighter than you? This is something called the imposter syndrome and it spreads like a silent killer amongst st

Dear parents, we are happy to be back on our journey. Back to online learning we all feel a mix of emotions. Still, we are together during these transformational times and we will support each other, as a community. We have always wanted to offer you valuable and meaningful information. 

ISL Qatar Eco Club received a medal during the Appreciation Event organized by the Qatar Green Building Council for our participation and initiatives made in the Qatar Sustainability week . We are very proud of this achievement and recognition, and we will continue to organize more projects with the whole community.

With Qatar National Day slowly approaching, grade 4 seized the opportunity to further their knowledge about the culture and traditions of Qatar. Students looked at presentations about the history of Qatar and participated in class discussions of what they have experienced while living here. They reflected on the traditions and customs in Qatar as well as why they are grateful to be a part of the Qatar culture.

Every student has something unique to offer: a talent, skills, and many ideas. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and realizing this to know how to interact and appreciate one another as unique individuals -as if reading someone’s instructions manual- is essential to achieve desired academic and motivational results.

Our name defines our connection to our family, history, culture, beliefs, and values. Our name is part of our identity and personality. At ISL Qatar we value every child’s identity and celebrate his/her diversity, but we also believe in the importance of developing student voice, choice, and agency. Therefore, we decided to ask our students what name they wanted to create for their classrooms as a collective identity. 

Finally, after many meetings on Teams, this happened: On Monday we saw the Research Institute students face-to-face in the Research Hub at school for the first time!

Children as researchers, creating their own successful project and becoming avid 'real world' researchers - this was the goal we set in September.

Today ILoveQatar.net published the video about our Tech Hub Education (Videos/ Trending in Qatar) and we would like to thank their team for the collaboration. The finished product really does exemplify the learning at ISL Qatar and help us to pioneer these innovative learning engagements for our learning community.

The mother tongue lessons and the classroom are very important so that the student can grow in to the community. Hannah is EC2 student drawing and writing about herself and her family. The unit Who we are - Friends and family , which is taking place now in every mother tongue classroom, help people become part of the community, works great in the beginning of the year when some of our students are new to me, the school and even in the country. 

Sustainability Week at ISL will be taking place during the last full week of October (October 24th to October 30th). The purpose of this week is to raise awareness for sustainability by providing students and staff members with the opportunity to engage in various activities. These activities include an upcycling workshop, a paper reduction campaign, an anti-waste campaign, a sustainability workshop, the creation of educational digital posters, and more.

At ISL Qatar, we are continually working to improve everything that we do. This includes our communication. This week, and over the coming months, you may notice ongoing changes to our communication including our bulletins and newsletters. We have an exciting new Marketing team who has already conducted focus groups with parents and staff to get input regarding our current communications.

Our Mission states, “At ISL Qatar, we believe in our students' ability to build a bright future, and that our purpose for being here should guide everything that we do.” This week’s bulletin shares examples of Mission implemented through actions.

We continue to make progress and hit new milestones during a challenging time. I want to congratulate our primary school faculty for successfully hosting the first PYP Parent Evening since March 2019. Our teachers put tremendous effort into making the evening informative and welcoming. Thank you to all primary parents who attended.

Learners and educators come together, cultivating their own erudite pathways and forging their own identity in the world of education.  The IB programmes afford both learners and educators the opportunity to engage together, collaborate and share their experiences.

Welcome, or welcome back, to ISL Qatar for the 2021-2022 school year! We are looking forward to a new school year, and one in which we can look forward to working together. 

As we come to the end of an extraordinary year at ISL Qatar, it is a good time to for us all to take a moment to reflect on what together, we have all achieved.

As a proud salute to our 2021 Graduates, my article this month features members of the Class of 2021.  This year’s celebrations may have looked very different this year, but this should not take away the pride that they, their families and their teachers feel about each one of them as they journeyed together towards completion of their final year at ISL Qatar.

It gives me great pleasure and pride to be trusted with the role to offer you, the graduate class of 2021 some advisory words that might influence decisions you are about to make.  Decisions with potential consequences that may last a lifetime. It is an honour to have this privilege, and I have taken this challenge very seriously.

There are trends in education that are just this: Mere trends!  Fashions explode before our eyes and disappear as soon as a new trend emerges. Fashion in education is often driven by external pressure and often, politically motivated forces.

We have collated quantitative data, like our enviable record of +80% IB Bilingual Diploma compared against a world average of only 30%. 

Lent’s main concern is to highlight how profound similarities of our cultural evolution emerged at roughly the same era across the globe to civilisations that had no discernible contact. 

During the month of Ramadan, Islam invites us to reflect on ourselves and judge our abilities to be kind to others, charitable to the most needed as well as forgiving in our actions. 

One does not need to go too deep into our imagination to conceive the astonishing way in which our children are experiencing a world that is far more complex than the one you and I experienced as a child: For you and I, the act of buying an ice-cream was reduced to a few coins in our pocket. Contrast this to a world in which fiat money is an abstract set of numbers in a bank account that we retrieve in our smartphone, which of course, we use for payment.

This March completes one whole year since we started online teaching, digital schooling and blended learning models. March is also the month we celebrate key achievements in some of our graduating students' academic lives: The Grade 5 have completed their PYP Exhibition and the Grades 12 Visual Arts students completed their DP Art Exhibition.

In this poem, Gibran proposes that work and love are inseparable from one another. The poem pierces deep into our understanding of the concepts of love and work as he exposes how work defines our relationship with the material and spiritual world. In doing so, Gibran defines who we are.

It is then only appropriate for me to contemplate the rights of women and girls and ask; what is it that you do at your school? How do we contribute to in overcoming this struggle and ensure parity in the school community?

Last week we celebrated the UNESCO World Mother Tongue Day

I took advantage of this important day in the international schools' calendar to refresh our minds about the strong connection between proficiency in the mother tongue and one's academic performance in any subject area.

External motivational phrases such as: you get a good grade if you complete this work, I'll take you to the movies if you study, finish your homework before dinner, I love when you work so hard are typical recourses of limited effect. In my view, these external incentives do not lead to long-lasting learning.

It is a special day for the promotion of multilingualism, and cultural and linguistic diversity. Around the world, people and organizations celebrate International Mother Language Day with social media posts, workshops, and various events to boost the awareness on the importance of the day. 

The exhibition has multiple purposes; not only does it function as a celebration of achievement, but it also allows our students to communicate their passions in a public arena. Besides, it sets the tone to the new generation of students in Grade 9. The Grade 9 students who have only just started their preparatory work have a chance to see multiple examples of a Personal Project. The younger students have a context in which they engage in meaningful conversations about the display with older students.

At this point in the academic year, students are usually eagerly anticipating the school’s scheduled ‘Week Without Walls’.  This annual event is planned to develop student exposure to culture, outside adventure learning, and service.  Due to obvious pandemic restrictions, however, this year’s event cannot take place.

This week I had the pleasure of attending a primary division professional learning session on Tuesday afternoon. The grade-level teams presented both their tried-and-test assessment tools and some of their innovative ideas on assessing children's knowledge and understanding.

Over 60 years ago, a psychology professor from Yale University called Stanley Milgram, became famous by carrying out some controversial experiments using electric shocks. Today these kinds of psychological tests have all been banned, but the results of many of the investigations remain in the public domain.

Every year, International School of London Qatar participates in the annual Quran competition hosted by the Ministry of Awqaf. This competition is not tied to the chapters of Quran that learners memorize at school, but include additional chapters that they must memorize in their own free time. 

The Qatar National Day is a day of unity that is the day we come together irrespective of our identities, cultures, languages. We come together to celebrate this great nation that we are all helping to build.

Next to Passion, Identity, Diversity sits UNDERSTANDING as the ISL fourth pillar of our most cherished values.

This week an old philosophical question came back to my mind: is it possible to understand something that you cannot imagine? Or the reverse: is it possible to imagine something you don’t understand?

The Pandora Box was never a box but a jar. No less than the great Scholar Erasmus made a trivial mistake when he translated the mythological story from Greek to Latin. This is of course an innocuous mistake that leaves the spirit of the story intact.

Green spaces, both in and out door, promote mental and physical wellbeing. Why? Green gardens contribute to the decrease of pollution; these gardens can help to absorb noise pollution, and gardens can be comforting and relaxing environments.

We are halfway through November or shall I call it Movember, and the faces of some of our male teachers is transforming. “Movember” means “no-shaving of facial hair for 30 days”.

ISL Qatar took on a whole new dimension of synchronous learning with their unique participation in the Microsoft Global Learning Connection.  As the only school in Qatar to engage in an interview with Anthony Salcito as part of the day, Garin Rees and his Grade 1 Class were more than a little excited!

The three-day dress-up event in the primary was great fun and a memorable talking point. It was lovely to see the superheroes and storybook characters come alive as students and teachers walk in the school. Thank you to all the parents that made this fun event possible and especially to the G11 students who had the idea.

The implicit meaning of such a request is the association we make between academic rigour and examination. It is implied in this assumption that the more frequent your child is assessed, the more she will study. 

This week’s Grade 2 celebration of learning was a valuable testimony of the power of learning in an international environment. The individual exploration of their own history, their travels, their lives in different places, their experiences in different schools and their description of their families – that is, the narrative of their own historical journey was enriched by the contrasting with those of their friends in the class.

During the pre-pandemic era, co-teaching meant one of six teaching approaches involving two teachers (1) one teach, one drift, (2) team teaching, (3) parallel teaching, (4) alternative teaching, (5) one lead the other observe or (6) station teaching. 

Most of the online sessions are recorded, which gives students the opportunity to revisit any section that they need recapping or want to re-examine. 

The exciting news is that the secondary lessons (online or face-to-face) will be delivered from the school campus as we have permission to house 80% of the staff on campus. 

Following on the success of the online school orientation for new students and the full online training to new teachers, this week we held our first 100% online IB Diploma Information Evening where the DP Coordinator, Jackie Isherwood, shared information about the courses and other components of the Diploma Programme.

Our face-to-face days have been orderly and very well received by our students, and the safe practices have been commended by the representatives of the MOEHE and MOPH who visited us three times this week.

This week we held our first-ever primary and secondary students online orientation, those who participate will agree with me that it was very special and very well organized – my big congratulations to the admissions team for conceiving and organizing this event.