Author: Avenor College

We are very proud of our senior year students who had a first opportunity to feel the emotions of their last year of high school when they delivered speeches in front of a very special audience: their teachers, colleagues and most importantly, their parents as part of their Romanian language course graduation. 

They have been preparing for this moment for almost a year, with the support of Liviu Papadima, vice-rector of the University of Bucharest and public speaking trainer. Mr. Papadima was also a member of the jury for this public speaking event, alongside Dana Papadima, educational director and Avenor College’s Communications and Admissions Manager, Raluca Tarcea.

Mihaela Stancu, Romanian language teacher, challenged her grade 12 students to imagine their life 10 years from now. And the result was amazing. Our Grade 12 students managed to capture their audience within the first minutes of their speeches. It was a very emotional moment both for them and for their audience, as their answers were creative, authentic and original. 

Leon is aiming to have a balanced life, pursuing his career in sports and his academic goals. Ana invited the audience to become acquainted with the idea of​ “​I don’t know what my future holds” and “I don’t want to know.” While some of our students set goals for their careers, Tudor, a future Avenor College graduate, ended his speech with a phrase that raised the audience’s applause: “In 10 years, I want to be comfortable with myself.”

As the president of the jury, Dana Papadima concluded, “our students have proven a good friendship with the Romanian language” and very strong public speaking skills, all required abilities for the future leaders of Romania.

Școala de Acasă is a parenting programme dedicated to Avenor community parents. The aim is to bring the parents together so they can share experiences, concerns and find common ground. 

Simona Istrate, Managing Partner at Business Through People, friend and parent in the Avenor community, talked about the real point of offering gifts and receiving them in a new session of the Școala de Acasă programme. 

As we enter this holiday season, it makes sense for us to pause for a moment and think about gifts. Simona Istrate talked about how offering gifts and receiving gifts is something that should not be a chore for any of us: be it parents, grandparents, sons and daughters. When you give gifts, you are giving something willingly without wanting something in return and when you are receiving a gift you must acknowledge that the giver wants to show you how special and dear you are to his heart, Simona explained. 

The parents responded generously to Simona’s invitation to reflect, sharing personal experiences. It turns out that if the new generations, the Millennials and the Z Generation, were born with the natural talent of receiving and giving, the older generations grew up believing that it’s more noble to give than to receive. 

The speaker talked about how the older generations need to learn to accept receiving love, caring, compliments and gifts. Letting ourselves receive deeply and graciously is a gift to the giver, Simona explained. 

The coach encouraged other parents to take a step forward and be part of an exercise: imagine the relationship between two people as a string connecting them. This string is kept alive by intimacy, reciprocity, kind words, honesty and these are all gifts. 

To sum it all up, Simona and her discussion partners concluded that the gift itself and the cost of the gift are not that important. The fact that the item represents care and love is what matters.

Manuela Nae, our Compliance Director, explains why safety is our school’s main priority every school year.

“At Avenor, we co-create the best future for each student, for each member of the community and for all of us together, within and beyond the school. This implies a lot of learning experiences that are metamorphosed into skills later on, but it also implies risks.

For this reason, our priority is keeping the community safe, in all its aspects and no matter the costs”, Manuela explains. 

Avenor College: How does every member of the team know how to act correctly in risk situations?

Manuela Nae: We have a set of specific policies and procedures in place. But the most important aspect is implementing them, and we are aware of it. That is why we regularly train the team on first aid procedures, daily routine procedures, safety rules and risk assessment for any off-campus trips. We consider that all these activities increase the degree of responsibility and responsiveness of each member of the staff, and this can really make a difference in crisis situations. 

At Avenor College, we take seriously our responsibility to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. All staff members should be aware of the early help process and understand their role in identifying emerging problems, sharing information with other professionals to support early identification and assessment of a child’s needs. 

A.C.: In 2018, Avenor College was visited by the BSO inspectors. What did they have to say about the safety procedures in our school?

M.N.: Having safety procedures that are known and implemented by each member of our community weighted heavily when the BSO inspectors gave the final rating of the school. I am very happy and proud to say that our Health and Safety Policies and Procedures met the BSO standards and significantly contributed to obtaining the “Good with Outstanding features” rating in November 2018. 

How early can we teach a child to be safe and healthy? From an early age, we might say.

The week before the mid-term holiday, October 21st – November 1st, involved all of the nursery children in the Health & Safety Week event through a series of fun and practical activities. The Health and safety event helps children to think critically and play creatively, so we planned activities to encourage physical exercise, mental and emotional well-being, food and nutritional habits, and hygiene and safety matters. 

It was a very busy week, so without any further ado find out all of the specific activities which kept us on the boil:

Dr. Livia Sorohan, our nursery paediatrician, visited each classroom and explained to children about hygiene, germs and methods to keep us clean and protected. 

With regards to safety, children from all groups received a visit from Radu Bălașa, a specialised ISU inspector, who explained how to extinguish a fire and how to react in case of an earthquake. Moreover, as part of our regular safety procedures, children took part in emergency drills.

What does a healthy smile look like? This was the question that Dent Estet together with Reception Blue children answered in order to find out the best tips on how to properly take care of teeth.

In order to connect physical exercise with Famous People and History, children from Year 1 visited “Muzeul Sportului”. During the trip to the Museum of Romanian Sport, children found out about the history of famous people and Romanian sport and they also observed photographs, trophies, medals, and equipment.

It is not a surprise that spending time outdoors is one of the most loved activities by all children, as they can spend hours and hours finding various ways of playing, while observing and exploring. Therefore, Nursery Orange, Nursery Blue and Reception Green children went to the Japanese Garden to take part in some interactive movement games. Their trip was a real blast!

Finally, what better place than a market for finding out more about smart nutrition? Year 1 children went to Domenii Market to buy their favourite fruit and vegetables. It was a great opportunity to learn outside the classroom about seasonal products and to practise a little bit of Maths skill by using money to pay for their purchases. 

Remember to keep healthy and safe!

What are the advantages of bringing a young child to the nursery school? How do children learn at a very young age and why is early emotional development important? These are just a few of the questions we’ve asked Ioana Botez, counsellor and systemic psychotherapist in charge of children’s emotional development at Avenor Nursery. Ioana has 12 years of experience in working with children, following the British Curriculum, designing educational training materials for disadvantaged groups and mediating communication with foreign childcare professionals. 

Avenor College: How can nursery activities help very young children develop self-confidence?

Ioana Botez: Nursery schools help children experiment with all kinds of activities that they have never done before or they wanted to do but they never had the opportunity. Here, children become aware of what they are capable of by: jumping, rolling, practising fine motor skills, role-playing and looking at books. In fact, we start looking at books and developing our passion for books from a very early age.

Role-playing builds language, critical thinking, and social skills as children take on roles and develop their own ideas and stories. This is why it is important for toddlers to be guided in all the new activities they are beginning to experience.

A.C.: How do you approach emotional regulation with children as young as 2 years old?

I.B.: Feelings and behaviour are quite a challenging subject at this age, but that’s why we have togetherness and stories. We are looking at the characters and we are discovering that they have similar feelings to ours, such as: happiness, sadness, anger or fear. Moreover, we learn in an experiential manner that it’s absolutely natural to express the way you feel as long as your emotional self-expression does not hurt others. We learn about rules, ways to follow them, but also to break them, because as you may know, at two and three years old, it’s quite fun and useful testing rules as an expression of independence.

A.C.: Why are relationships important at this young age?

I.B.: It’s been well known that relationships help children make progress in all areas of development. If you are looking at children playing in different areas of experience, such as the Maths Area, Small World Area, and so on, you will find out that they build on each other’s knowledge with facilitation from an adult. It’s very important to let children socialise with peers for an extended period of time in order to enable environments for them to spend time away from their main carers, develop physically in both fine and gross motor skills, use and perfect language, as well as build positive relationships with confidence. 

Is your child 2 or 3 years old? Are you considering bringing your child to the Nursery this autumn? Learn more about what the important aspects to be taken into consideration are when starting Nursery. Our Nursery Educational Coordinator, Tania Răduță, explains in an open letter to parents how the environment built by our team helps every child to learn and develop. 

“Dear Parents,

Creating an Enabling Environment in which each child feels safe, plays, explores, and learns is a key aspect in the Early Years Curriculum. This, together with a carefully prepared induction period for each child, according to own interests and needs, smoothens the first days of nursery for children and also for parents who are sometimes more excited than their toddlers.

Our curriculum which provides activities taught in English, are engaging, meaningful, fun, and is built around four major principles. They can be ‘felt’ immediately one enters our setting.

An Enabling Environment supports a child’s development in all of the seven areas of learning. It is child-centred and has three major parts: the emotional environment meaning the atmosphere of the setting, the indoor environment with its available resources which promotes activities initiated by children and teachers, and the outdoor environment which stimulates movement, creativity and exploration.

Providing an enabling environment for each unique child might be challenging but at the same time rewarding for teachers and for children as they benefit from differentiated activities designed or initiated in accordance to their own interests. It needs rigorous background planning and a lot of attention to detail.

We make sure that each child feels welcomed into the setting and we give them time to form an emotional bond with their teachers.

We welcome and value the uniqueness of each child in the Nursery. We understand and we respect what each child brings into the setting in terms of own culture, language, type of family, or beliefs. We also see that each child learns in different ways every day. We see different schemas in their play and what we do is provide opportunities for them to engage in active learning through hands on experiences. We also transform mistakes into opportunities for learning, we encourage them to recognise their own unique qualities, and we support them to make friends, to form and to maintain Positive Relationships.

Only through positive relationships do children learn to be strong and independent. We make sure that each child feels welcomed into the setting and we give them time to form an emotional bond with their teachers. At the same time, the teachers build positive relationships with parents through feedback and effective communication. We listen to parents and children, we take into consideration their feedback and this is what helps all of us become motivated to constantly improve and become better learners.

Learning and Development is what we know that each child is entitled to. This will only result from the interaction of the other three principles described above. In Avenor Nursery, the teaching and non-teaching teams learn from each other and work hard and with great passion to ensure children’s wellbeing and progress. We have the prime areas of learning in mind when planning for toddlers (Personal Social & Emotional Development, Communication & Language, and Physical Development) in order to lay the foundation for the specific areas of learning (Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding the World, and Expressive Arts and Design) for pre-schoolers.

It is not hard to follow or adapt a curriculum; what is the most important thing is to be committed to creating a culture of learning in which the principles are embedded. Then, children, parents and teachers can celebrate the success and continue the learning journey.”

Kind regards,

Tania RĂDUȚĂ, Avenor Nursery Educational Coordinator

Dana Papadima, our Educational Director, talks about the bilingual profile of our school and about celebrating the national identity, an essential element in the profile of the Avenor College graduate.

The bilingual profile of Avenor College makes elements of British language and civilisation coexist harmoniously and balanced with those of Romanian language and culture. Speaking of the Romanian language, the cultural knowledge and skills are not only found within the classes established by the national curriculum of Romanian language and literature for primary and middle school, but at the level of most of the activities and events carried out in and outside the school.

We refer thus to elements of Romanian heritage, cultural, geographical, written or unwritten, to knowledge about Bucharest’s heritage and the surroundings of the Capital, to the feeling of belonging to a socio-cultural community. The Romanian language classes, lessons of geography, history, leadership, arts, trips, cultural events, and school competitions are multiple opportunities to awaken our students’ identity awareness and pride.

The knowledge of Romanian heritage is taken further during the high school Romanian language classes, for which we built a specific programme, based on the national curriculum. The Romanian language course for high school is finalised at the end of each year of study with a graduation activity in front of the public: group project, debate, essay and, in Grade 12, a speech on a given topic.

Celebrating national identity is an essential component of building a reflective, confident, informed high school graduate profile. Linguistic-cultural identity represents the essential and necessary ferment to help create beautiful characters, governed by a system of values and perennial moral principles. The fact that our first generation of graduates found their way to remarkable universities, both from abroad and from Romania, that they “easily” move and develop in and between different systems, different cultures are also due to the school’s care to grow in them and protect their identity culture. Conscious and honoured to have Romanian roots, our students, our graduates naturally become European citizens, citizens of the contemporary world.

Tania Răduță, Avenor Nursery Educational Coordinator, talks about the emotion and challenges of new beginnings and also about the “power of learning” guiding children, parents and the nursery team on their educational journey.

“New beginnings in the nursery school always come with intense emotion and challenges for all the co-creators of our early years learning journey: children, parents and teachers.

Little ‘big minds’ will step into our settings for the first time, some of them feeling more ready than others to meet new colleagues, to trust new adults and to actually live in a new environment that will sooner or later turn into their ‘second home’. We will learn from parents about each individual’s particularities, in order to carefully prepare a flexible adjustment period for each unique child. There are, of course, the inquisitive children who will be happy to continue their learning journey, share their new thoughts, interests and experiences with their friends, and form new friendships with colleagues; they will be ready to ‘have a go’.

And so, parents and teachers will continue their partnership in order to plan authentic activities and relevant experiences for each child. All these moments will enable them to show what they already know and to continue expressing initiative and developing new ideas.

The Avenor Nursery team who work with and for children is ready to take on the upcoming challenges, driven by passion and with a great willingness to learn from each other and to co-create meaningful experiences together with the children.

We keep on growing and changing just like the children and one of the things we believe in the most is ‘the power of learning’.

We benefit from a safe learning environment that plays an important role in developing children’s confidence, self-esteem, autonomy, and stimulates their sense of wonder.
The indoor spaces have been refreshed and the outdoor area is in the process of being improved, in order to better support child-initiated learning.
The daily timetable for Reception and Year 1 groups has been adjusted to enable more outdoor learning and more opportunities for children to play.

Looking forward to feeling ‘the vibe’, as people who visit our nursery like to say, of our 2019 – 2020 journey together!”

Mirela Voicu, Upper Primary Coordinator, explains the role of the game in the process the children go through when they make the transition from nursery to school in the Pregatitoare grade.

“To ensure a good start for the students from Pregatitoare, we, the teachers, adhere to Edouard Claparède’s statement – “The game is the best introduction to the art of working”. Thus, the full development of the young school-age student requires an integrated way of approaching teaching-learning-assessment activities through play.

Through play, the child discovers the world, manipulates objects, and acquires knowledge and self-confidence. The game provides children with a pleasant environment in which to express their curiosity and spontaneity, in which creativity and personal experience are the main element. The child’s development depends on the opportunities offered by the daily routine in school, the interaction with others, the organisation of the school environment or the specially designed learning activities and situations.

Pregatitoare grade removes the brutal transition from nursery to school, having the role of getting the children used to socialising in an organised environment, which contributes to the development of their personality. This will ensure the gradual transition from the interactive nursery programme to the school environment, with a fixed schedule representing for the 6-year-old a universe of stories, learning through play, and not a rigid space of knowledge, of constraint. The child learns by playing and at the same time becomes familiar with the atmosphere in school.

Children have a new, age-appropriate curriculum, and the classroom is tailored to their age, so that it allows them to learn through play and to prepare for Grade 1 using modern learning resources. Children will develop their ability to communicate, strengthen contacts with the world of numbers and letters, learn to observe the environment and interact with other children and adults through teaching games, team activities, discovery activities, drawing or music.”

Ramona Mucenic, Upper Primary Coordinator at Avenor College, talks about preparing students for the transition between school cycles, about school themes and Project-Based Learning (PBL).

“Welcome back dear parents and students,

The school year that, with a little nostalgia, we left behind remains a memorable year for our entire community: intense and marked by pleasant moments, memorable events and exceptional results obtained by our students.
The evaluation of the fundamental competences at the end of Grades 2 and 4 by administering the specific tests of National Evaluation confirmed again the ability of the children to apply, analyse and interpret the accumulated knowledge. Moreover, we pride ourselves on the individual study skills that we develop early on, to grow independent, curious, open-minded students, able to work in collaboration with each other.
One of our constant concerns is to ensure a smooth transition between learning cycles. Regardless of whether you go to Pregatitoare grade, Upper Primary, Middle School or High School, the Avenor student is gradually prepared for change through carefully planned activities. During Grade 4, the children were acquainted throughout the year with the realities of the middle school and the 5th grade, in particular. They met some of the future teachers, participated in lessons of the older colleagues, carried out projects with them. In the second term, part of the grades specific to the primary cycle were doubled by grades/scores used in middle school, so that the future middle school students gradually got used to the new marking system. Teachers and form tutors meet regularly to monitor students’ progress and to think together about the most effective strategies to ensure their evolution, from an academic, emotional or behavioural point of view.

Since last year, the school’s themes have become more visible by transforming the weekly Assembly time into PBL (Project-Based Learning) module. The main objective is to extend the learning by planning, organising and carrying out group projects with an applied character, anchored in the day-to-day life. Through this multidisciplinary learning programme, we practice soft skills competences through which students naturally and authentically appeal to critical and creative thinking, demonstrating empathy and the ability to make group decisions.
This year we move to the second phase of the Project-Based Learning Programme – PBL, being guided by David Taylor, a specialist in cross-curricular approach to learning. The three hours of PBL will cover different curricular areas, including elements of Drama. We aim for our students to practice expressing their emotions, to better relate to each other, to develop their artistic side. We also expect them to be able to make more connections between school disciplines and to propose solutions to real life problems.

We like to look to the future, to prepare our children for scenarios, realities or jobs that do not exist yet. Therefore, it is important for them to acquire those qualities that will help them adapt to any situation. We want them to be confident, creative, involved, responsible, and innovative.