At M.I.S. we passionately believe that a good education consists in more than just an academic curriculum, important though that is, but provides children with opportunities to encounter a broad range of experiences, activities and ideas. It is often these extra-curricular activities that provide a platform for building character and discovering aptitudes, and where children are able to learn about themselves and others in a richer and more rounded manner.
We try and find as many ways of introducing extra-curricular activities as we can without disrupting the pursuit of academic attainment. Once a term, for example, we encourage our teachers to take their classes out of school on field trips. Meanwhile, some of our older children get involved in supporting local charities.
We also ask our teachers to provide activities for the students during one of their weekly lunch breaks. There are a number of different activities the children can sign-up for including sports such as football (soccer) and basketball and creative pursuits such as drama and a computer club.
In addition to these voluntary activities, we put a lot of effort into celebrating important occasions at M.I.S. These celebrations include and involve the whole school community and sometimes occupy a whole day, typically on the last day of term. Thus Christmas, Songkran and our International Day celebration bring each one of our three terms to a close in fine style. The time and effort some of our staff put into these events is really quite remarkable and is reflected in the marvelous sets, costumes and choreography that mark these occasions.
We are very proud of the sports programmes we are building at MIS and have recently appointed a Sports Director to coordinate and develop this area of school life.
We currently focus on 4 key competitive sports – basketball, volleyball, football (soccer) and swimming. Each of these sports fields teams drawn from the upper end of the school (typically from about Year 4 up) and, in most cases, has squads for both boys and girls. Our team members, and other students keen to participate in these sports, meet after school to practice skills and learn tactics. There is a small fee for these sessions to cover the overheads.
As with our sports department, we have also recently appointed an Arts Director to oversee our rapidly developing arts sector. We offer a range of lunchtime and after-school arts programmes including a ballet class for our very young students and a Primary School choir. There is also a thriving drama club which aims to put on a least one long-form production a year as well as many smaller ventures that it takes into classrooms around the school.
We have recently built an amphitheatre towards the rear of our campus, something we believe to be unique amongst local schools. This is destined to become a popular performance space where everyone from our celebrated Secondary School rock band to our traditional Thai dancers will be able to strut their stuff!