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"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn"
- Benjamin Franklin
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This month at Gateway, we’ve seen a lot of student involvement in the learning process! Hope you enjoy reading about it; here we go…
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Table-Tennis Tournament!
This month, the Gym and Sports Day teams organized our first tournament of the academic year; a Students’ Table Tennis Tournament. Students and staff wore house colours to school and cheered on their teams!
Congratulations to the winners: Aneitej Srinivasan, Swaminathan Sunil from the Blue Beasts and Nirvaan Shetty from the Red Predators.
We're also proud of our runners up: Rohan Raja and Harshita Parmar from the Blue Beasts and Ritam Patel from the Red Predators. The Blue Beasts won this tournament with a total of 150 points and the Red Predators earned a total of 75 points!
Watch this space next month for the results of the upcoming Teacher’s Table Tennis Tournament!
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Theme Day : Favourite Sports Person
Last year, we had a few successful “theme days” where all Gateway students and staff dressed up to school; superheroes, book characters and pyjamas were some of the themes we celebrated. To kick off our theme days for this year, we held a "Favourite sports person" dress up day! Football, cricket, badminton and tennis players seemed to be the popular characters who showed up to school that day!!
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Janmashtami Celebrations
All students benefit from learning about current affairs and cultural events, and in order to help our students build this knowledge, our high school teachers initiated a cultural celebration for Janmashtami. Students wore traditional clothes and took part in a ceremonial breaking of an earthen pot on the soccer turf which the team decorated for this occasion!
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Independence Day Celebrations
To celebrate Independence Day, students and teachers wore our national flag’s colours on 13th August, participated in a flag hoisting ceremony and sang the national anthem. Since we also had a whole school Grandstand class that day, students were given an opportunity to perform an item of their choice in this space. We watched some graceful dancers, heard melodious singers perform songs of patriotism and a few students even gave speeches! It was a proud moment to watch our students perform solo or in small groups in front of an audience of over 120 people!!
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Commissioned!
Our recent graduate, Anirudha Desai was recently commissioned an artwork and did a spectacular job completing it! We’re so proud of his artistic ambitions and wish him all the best in his endeavors. A big thank you to Ms. Penny Patel and Ms. Nayantara Thakker for supporting him and providing him with an opportunity to acquire this commission! This painting will be hung in Ms. Nayantara Thakker’s twin daughters’ bedroom.
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Student Spotlight
Building Capacity in Students
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Culinary Study-Tour
As part of a Study Tour, the Infinite Learners visited the Sheila Raheja Hotel and Catering School, Bandra. The objective was to complement the theory that they learnt in school in a Unit on “Food” with real-world exposure that would blend both theory and practice and also to get a peek into the world of hospitality. The institute houses numerous kitchens including a garde (cold) kitchen, bakery, confectionary, butchery and training restaurant and students got a tour of each! Chef Iyer who lead the tour, taught our students how to make pasta noodles with different pasta sauces, and different techniques to pipe buttercream icing onto cupcakes! The study tour concluded with a delicious gourmet lunch which was put together by Chef Iyer and his band of dedicated students. What a mouth watering approach to learning!
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NIOS 10th grade Internships!
The NIOS 10th graders, The Infinite Learners are currently engaged in internships within school which focus on learning basic job skills needed for real life transitions in the future.
The Gateway School Radio Show is an internship project that has been adopted by five students in this homeroom. Research, identifying themes based on societal needs and current affairs, effective communication and scripting are the core skill sets being strengthened through this initiative. The first radio show was aired on the 16th of August, 2019 and was scripted along the lines of India’s Independence. The Gateway School Radio Show will air once a month on Friday during our lunch break!
Six students from the same homeroom intern at The Gateway Cafe; our in-house cafe which sells delightful snacks and goodies every Friday and is open to all Gateway students and staff and visitors. They even send out a “pre-order” sheet so that staff and high school students who can’t make it to the cafe due to classes so they don’t miss out on the cafe experience! The skills involved in this cafe internship include interacting with customers, being hospitable, communicating and coordinating with other team members, money transaction, planning, and problem solving; all real life skills!
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Parent Spotlight
Building Capacity in Parents
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Parent Support Group (PSG)
Our first PSG meeting for the year started off with a mix and mingle activity where parents roared like lions and sang songs to introduce themselves! Old Gateway parents then shared with the new parents what the PSG means to them. Parents then discussed what they’d like the PSG to focus on in the coming year.
Watch this space for the next PSG updates; we may also see parents conducting some sessions this year!
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Professional Development
Building Capacity in the Team
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A number of our teachers attended workshops over the past few months and are either in the process of, or have started implementing their learnings in classes!
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Attending Workshops
Drama teacher, Ms. Aditi Dalal attended an acting workshop; “Source of Performance Energy” conducted by Adishakti Laboratory of Theatre Arts and Research, Pondicherry. The workshop taught well-researched performance methodologies drawn from traditional Indian art forms. This year, Gateway’s lower and middle school Arts curriculum focuses on Indian cultures for the first half of the year. One key aspect taught in the workshop she attended was “rhythm” and she’s taken her workshop learnings and introduced it in drama classes across lower and middle school. The students have been enjoying working with the "djembe"; an African percussion instrument, and using rhythm to regulate and move!
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Ms. Aditi Ghosh and Ms. Nikhita Sharma participated in a two day workshop on "Integrating Drama into your School and Curriculum" facilitated by Ms. Fenella Kelly, organised by Consilience: Learning Reimagined, and held at the Mount Litera International School, Mumbai. They were introduced to a variety of drama conventions and skills which can be transferred to teaching, engaged in introspection, self-reflection, strategies to develop trust in the self and others, and learned effective communication and performance skills. Ms. Fenella Kelly also demonstrated tools by Augusto Boal, founder of theatre of the oppressed, and how they could be used in education to analyse perspectives, explore a historical event, define a problem or conflict and drive for change as a community. They are excited to draw these learnings into Language, Science and Humanities and Social Emotional Learning classes to enrich the learning experiences of our children in exciting ways!
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A team of teachers; Ms. Alisha Nagree, Ms. Meghna Visaria, Ms. Pooja Thakkar, Ms. Steffi Lobo and Ms.Yesha Doshi attended a workshop “Developing communication in Autism: Intervention Strategies”. This workshop was facilitated by Ms. Deepa Bhat Nair; a Speech therapist with 25 years of experience. The workshop covered recent evidence-based intervention strategies to develop pre-language skills, visual scaffolding for communication, alternative and augmentative communication, parallel talk, vocal play, proto-vocabulary, treasure maps for narratives and many more strategies, as well as behavioural challenges in Autism from the communication perspective.
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Professional Development for Leaders
The American School of Bombay (ASB) hosts a Teacher Training Program (TTP) every year. This year, they have extended an invitation to past TTP participants who might be taking leadership roles in their schools to join them in a “leadership strand”. The goal of this is to build leadership skills in teachers to enable them to implement learning from the TTP. Ms. Rudri Joshi, math coordinator and Ms. Radhika Chandrasekaran, lower and middle school coordinator have accepted this invitation, and are keen to engage in this leadership professional development initiative with such a highly reputed school!
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Outreach and Community Engagements
Building Capacity in the Community
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Gateway’s professional development programme (PDP)
Our 3rd PDP session, held tomorrow, Saturday, 31st August 2019 will see workshops on: The brain and learning: Language development, Executive function, Building fluency in reading and Understanding the inquiry process in Science and Humanities. Through the day, Gateway teachers will also introduce participants to various technology tools, movement break activities and class structures in a fun and hands-on way!
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Drop Everything and Read!
Hasanat High school, a private ICSE co-educational school based in Marol, Andheri organized a D.E.A.R (Drop Everything and Read) week this month. They invited Ms. Indrani Chatterjee, our librarian, and Mr. Abhishek Panchal, our arts program coordinator and visual arts facilitator to do read-alouds for their students and share their journeys with the students.
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Ms. Indrani Chatterjee started her session with a group of fifth-graders by dropping everything and reading with the students for fifteen minutes. Then she read aloud the book “The Librarian from Basra” by Jeanette Winter, after which she shared about her journey as a reader. The students were active participants; making connections to their own reading lives and asking relevant questions about the content and vocabulary. She also had a chance to tour the brand new school and visited their library.
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Mr. Abhishek read aloud “Once Upon an Alphabet” by Oliver Jeffers to third grade students. He then spoke about his journey as an illustrator and teacher. The session focused on understanding Oliver Jeffer's illustration style and guided students to illustrating their own stories.
We’d like to thank Hasanat High School for inviting our teachers to be a part of such an exciting initiative and look forward to continued collaboration with them!
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Teach for India Workshop Series!
Ms. Zara Parekh, a former Teach for India teacher who is now at Gateway, conducted a workshop on "Growth Mindset" for students at her previous school. She showed the students videos on growth mindset and used technology tools called "Plickers” to assess the students. She made technology accessible by laminating Plickers bar codes for each student and giving it to the school, so that this can be used by the students in their day to day learning. She will also be conducting more workshops in her former school and aims to teach the students Gateway strategies in order to enhance learning! We wish her all the best in this personal outreach goal!
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This month at Gateway, we had 6 trainee teachers from Hashu Advani College of Special Education interning for a month. The students have an internship component as part of their Bachelor in Special Education program and chose Gateway as a place to intern.
Ms. Riddhi Gogri facilitated the internship program and mentored the interns along with other mentor teachers: Ms. Meghna Visaria, Ms. Mariam Munir and Ms. Indrani Chatterjee.
The interns made observations across the school, conducted child studies, did assessments for a few students and planned lessons as an intervention. It was a great learning opportunity for the interns and for Gateway and we look forward to more such engagements!
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Book Club
We’re back with the first book club of this academic year! At Gateway, the purpose of the book club is to engage our professional community in collective sense-making of new ideas from research, transforming our teaching practices, and thereby increasing student learning outcomes.
"The Inspired Teacher: How to Know One, Grow One, or Be One" by Carol Frederick Steele is our first book club reading for the year. Steele offers insightful advice for teachers of all levels to help build the skills essential to effective and motivating instruction.
We’re happy to announce that we had 32 overall sign ups which includes 14 external participants!
Please email Ms. Indrani Chatterjee at "i.chatterjee@gatewayschoolmumbai.org" if you’d like to join the book club.
Week one started on Monday, August 26th, so please do sign up at the earliest!
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NIOS 10th Exam Results!
We’re proud to announce that all ten students who appeared for NIOS 10th subject exams in 2018-2019 passed with flying colours! Congratulations Arnav Jain, Jay Mathur, Joshua Warjri, Karthik Ramakrishnan, Niharika Shah, Parth Pawar, Purav Shikhare, Ritoban Chatterjee, Siddharth Bakshi and Zainika Jagasia.
A special thank you to a Gateway parent, Ms. Shalini Bakshi, who taught some of these students to bake yummy goods and helped them prepare for their Bakery exams. We greatly appreciate your support and guidance!
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We warmly welcome two new team members on board:
Ms. Sangeeta Dude - Accountant
Ms. Sonia Makkar - Administrative Executive - Front Desk
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