15 September
- For this Week
- Senior Leadership Conference
- Tuesday Staff Meeting
- ESF-Wide Professional Learning Day
- Increase in Seasonal Flu Cases
- Seasonal Flu Vaccination Consent Forms
- Staff Calendar
Morning all, here’s what’s coming up this week.
It'll be a busy week ahead. Due to the forecast for unsettled weather and possible squally thunderstorms this week, we’ll need to adjust our plans for the Tuesday staff meeting.
Thank you everyone for your ongoing support and care for our community. Have a good week!
- Monday: ESF School Partnership Visits (AM)
- Tuesday: Staff Meeting – Inclement Weather Prep
- Thursday & Friday: Senior Leadership Conference
The ESF Senior Leadership Conference will take place this Thursday and Friday. Laura, Brenda, and I will be away both days, but you can still reach us by phone if needed. For any operational or administrative matters, Jaz will be your main point of contact. Please feel free to buzz down to the admin team for support as well. In case of any emergencies, contact us immediately.
I have every confidence that you’ll continue supporting each other and using your collective expertise to manage anything that arises. Jaz and the admin team are ready to help as needed. Thank you all in advance for your flexibility and teamwork. 🙏🏼
Tuesday Staff Meeting – Video Resource Bank Update
As we prepare for possible disruptions, please remember the ESF guidelines for continuity of learning during inclement weather (T8/ Red Rain and below), especially for Early Years:
- Early Years children often need adult supervision and may not have easy access to devices at home.
- Our expectation is to support learning mainly through asynchronous activities, but with some ‘live’ elements.
- ‘Live’ aspects can include you recording yourself reading a story, singing songs, or modelling an activity for children to try at home.
This approach allows children to see and hear their familiar teacher, which helps them feel connected to their teacher and school community, even when learning from home. At the same time, it gives parents and carers flexibility to fit learning around their own schedules and the availability of devices.
Instead of our usual meeting this Tuesday, we’ll use this time to create new videos for our resource bank. Many of our old videos were made during COVID. Some links are no longer working, and some staff have since left. Please drop the videos HERE.
Focus areas for new videos:
- Sensory activities
- Music and movement
Please keep these videos general (no class names) so they can be used by anyone. This will help us build a more up-to-date and versatile resource bank for the whole team.
As mentioned in Brenda’s email, Monday, 13 October is an ESF-wide professional development day focused on the ESF 2030 strategic driver, “Personalisation.” Both sessions on offer support Hillside’s Observable Impact goal of self-regulation and will help us personalise learning for our students.
- “Designing for Impact: Designing to the Edges” is more theoretical, focusing on design theories.
- “Building Strong Foundations: Brain Development & Self-Regulation in Action” offers more practical strategies.
As part of our Observable Impact work, we hope you can apply your learning from the ESF-Wide PL day directly in your classrooms, using the S-E-T and OI planning approach.
We’ll start by focusing on the “S” (Students) and targeted professional learning, then come back together as a team to continue developing our SET work.
We are looking into arranging a bus to Renaissance College for the “Building Strong Foundations” session. If the numbers don’t work out, you can claim taxi shares.
The Centre for Health Protection (CHP) has asked all schools to do daily temperature monitoring. We will check students’ body temperature each day on arrival to help identify anyone with a fever. We have set out our good ol' temperature machines again for this purpose and will continue until local flu levels return to normal.
We have sent the seasonal flu vaccination consent form to all parents via Feed. Parents who want their child to join the programme need to print and submit the original form to school. Please expect some forms to come back in students’ school bags—kindly pass these to admin. If a parent asks for a hard copy, please email kinder@hillside.edu.hk, and we will send one home with the child.
Upcoming Dates
Please check our internal calendar below. We might forget to remind everyone of odd dates. We will continue to add events as soon as they're confirmed.
Here's the full 2025/26 Calendar.
Thank you!
