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Middle School Principal's Letter

The middle years (our Middle School includes Grades 6, 7 and 8) are the transition years. When a child becomes a young adult there are tremendous emotional, physical and social changes taking place. Sometimes the child seems to be growing and changing right in front of our eyes! The current generation of adolescents faces many unique challenges that were not faced by teenagers in the past. The world is truly becoming a global village because technology allows us to be aware of events on the other side of the world ‘as they happen'. In the next ten years the amount of information is the world is expected to increase by 500% and the Internet is able to link us in an instant with much of this knowledge.

Students need to learn how to handle this changing world. The Inquiry Learning approach and the skills of Information Literacy give them the ability to find, judge and use data – both critically and thoughtfully. In the Elementary School students have developed a good understanding of Inquiry and in the Middle School we continue to base student learning on the Inquiry approach. Last year the Middle School and High School teachers worked in curriculum development teams to implement this approach and to revise and rewrite all curriculums taught from Grades 6 – 10. It was a tremendous achievement and this challenging task was completed on top of their normal (heavy) teaching workload. Our new curriculums represent the best practice from curriculum all around the world – we consulted curriculum documents from the US , the UK , Australia , Canada , France and New Zealand before writing out own. I wish to sincerely acknowledge the impressive standard of researching, thinking, debating, questioning and collaborating done by all these teachers – you have indeed modeled the learning attributes we wish to encourage in all out MS students. This year the hard work continues as we trial and further revise these documents. Our curriculums are available for parents to borrow and we will also have them available on our school website. Again, I welcome you to our website. I love living in Syria and am proud to be associated with this school. If you are a prospective parent please feel free to contact me. Marlene Smith (trikoru@gmail.com)