DHA News & Updates
Friday 15th April 2022
Week 1
Ramadan Kareem. We hope that you have all enjoyed the spring break holiday with your children. As we start the third and final term of the year, we have enjoyed hearing all about the students' exciting holiday stories as many of our families have been travelling.
As our Muslim families celebrate the Holy Month of Ramadan, this is perhaps a good time for us to reflect upon the last year and renew our hope for better times ahead. If you are celebrating, we wish you a very happy and blessed Ramadan.
With just over 12 weeks until we break for the summer, we have lots of learning, activities, assessments, celebrations and events planned to keep the students, teachers and our community busy. Don't forget to keep an eye on the calendar for more details.
We will kick off the term with our community Iftar next week. More details can be found about this event in the newsletter.
Please enjoy the weekend, stay safe, keep well and we look forward to seeing you back at school on Monday for Week 2.
Dates for your diary
April
Monday 18th of April - Book Fair in the run up to World Book Day
Wednesday 20th - Community Iftar (TBC)
Thursday 21st April - Book Day
Friday 29th April - This is Me Day
July
Thursday 7th July - End of Term 3
Don't forget you can keep up to date and access our calendar online via our website or by using the following link and adding it to your own calendar:
Welcome to DHA
We have seen our community grow again with 9 students joining the school this term. This includes 2 students who previously left us and have decided to return back to DHA. Whilst some have joined us from Dubai, others have joined us from much further afield places such as the UK, Jordan, Russia and Bangladesh. We would like to take this opportunity to welcome the Williams, Sic, Snell, Zaman, Slinkov and Al Ottom families to our supportive and diverse community.
Community Iftar
We would like to invite you to join us for a whole School Community Iftar being held at Oaks Hotel, Ibn Battuta Gate on Wednesday 20th of April at 6:00pm.
Prices:
Adults - 130AED
Students between 7 - 14 years - 75AED
Students under 6 years - Free
If you and your family would like to join us in celebrating the Holy Month of Ramadan and coming together as a community kindly complete the form below by 10:00am Monday 18th April.
Ramadan Kareem from all the team here at DHA.
Parent Annual Questionnaire
A huge thank you to all our parents who helped us by completing Part 1 of our annual parent questionnaire. We shall start sharing our findings and next steps in the coming weeks and months.
Please would you all kindly take the time to respond to Part 2. It does not matter if you did not complete Part 1 as we need as many responses as possible to make this survey viable for use in guiding our school self-evaluation and school improvement processes.
Part 2 will focus on the final 3 performance standards in the UAE School Inspection Framework:
Standard 4 - Curriculum
Standard 5 - Care, Guidance and Support of Students
Standard 6 - Leadership and Management
The questionnaire can be completed in 5 minutes, providing longer answers will take more time. The deadline for completion is 4pm on Friday 22nd April.
If you have not completed Part I of the Parent Annual Questionnaire but would like to, please click below.
Some gentle reminders
Distance Learning Provision
In line with directives from KHDA we are only permitted to provide distance learning for the following eligible categories:
- Positive cases
- Close contacts (showing symptoms)
- Those with appropriate exemptions
Any request for distance learning due to any of the above must be supported with the appropriate documentation.
Attendance and Punctuality
We believe that all students are only able to achieve their potential if they attend school punctually and avoid missing lessons. We thus expect students to achieve 100% attendance and punctuality.
Both attendance and punctuality are recorded termly on a students’ academic report with an overall attendance rating at the end of the academic year based upon the KHDA attendance rating.
Outstanding - Attendance is at least 98%
Very Good - Attendance is at least 96%
Good - Attendance is at least 94%
Acceptable - Attendance is at least 92%
Weak - Attendance is less than 92%
Very Weak - Attendance is less than 90%
Given there are typically 182 days in a school year each day accounts for 0.55%. If a student has just 4 days off per term their attendance will be less than good.
Each year, a number of students achieve 100% attendance records, showing that this is an achievable target. In addition, a number of children have achieved this level of attendance in successive years.
Every minute counts
If your child arrives late to school everyday, their learning begins to suffer. The graph below shows how being late to school everyday over a school year adds up to lost learning time.
Book Day & Book Fair
Book Day
On Thursday 21st of April we will be celebrating book day at Dubai Heights Academy.
This is a really fun day where children get to celebrate their favourite books and authors
During Book Day teachers will plan lots of exciting activities for the children to take part in. They will be making cartoons, reading with their buddies and even making a superhero.
On the day children can come to school dressed as their favourite book character. They might come dressed as Harry Potter, Flat Stanley or Big Nate.
A special competition will be taking place on this day which is called caught reading. Caught reading is where parents take a photograph of their children reading in a very strange or unusual place. There are prizes for the most imaginative photographs. Photographs should be emailed to Miss Naomi marketing@dubaiheightsacademy.com
Book Fair
We have The Book Hut book fair at school on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday next week. Each class will be allocated a time to visit and children can then purchase a book of their choice. Pupils will be told which day they are visiting and if they would like to purchase a book they should bring some money to school with them. Books range from 30 DHS upwards. Parents are invited to visit the book fair with their children between 2pm and 2.30pm on these days.
Budding Author
We would like to take this opportunity to proudly introduce to our community, Sienna D’Mello’s book “Caley's Dress Mess” , published through Young Author Academy.
A fabulous fun story about a candy-cane who thinks about a perfect solution to her problem.
Sienna had so much fun bringing her candy-cane character to life and we are sure you will enjoy reading about it too.
Will Caley the candy-cane be able to ever wear her favourite dress ever again?
It’s time to find out!
You can reach out on the link below which allows you to pop into the Amazon website and get you access to your very own copy!
A masterchef in the making!
Ramadan Mubarak
The month of Ramadan in which was revealed the Qura’n, was a guidance for mankind and clear proofs for guidance and the criterion(between right or wrong).
Ramadan is not like any other month, it comes once a year with mercy, forgiveness and goodness, along with all qualities and ethics that Islam has imparted in muslims.
During this occasion we are keen to raise the religious spirit of of our muslim students by reminding them about the virtues of the holy month of Ramadan and recalling the great attitudes that we have known about Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and his righteous companions, to nourish the sole of our muslim students. May God return this Holy Month to our Islamic nation with all goodness and blessing.
Before the holiday the students performed some very informative assemblies about Ramadan. You can watch some highlights by clicking the video below.
Ramadan Fridge
Thank you to all parents, students and staff who have donated to our Ramadan Fridge so far to support less fortunate community workers and labourers. It has been great to see the smiles on their faces. Please continue to support this initiative.
Quran Club
The early morning Quran club has been very successful this week with 11 students joining us every day. It would be lovely to see more students joining in next week.
Arabic Reading Competition
Embedding the love of reading in the hearts of our students is instilling the foundations of progress and development of our country. Accordingly in DHA we encourage our students to read, not only during their Arabic lessons, but also at home. We believe in the role of the parents and family in the education process. We hope that you will continue to support us by encouraging your children to continue reading at home by using the 'I Read Arabic' and 'I Start Arabic' programs. A we all knows reading can have a huge impact on a students’ personal and academic development.
We would like to congratulate the winners of the recent Arabic Reading competition:
KS1
Chris Boulos - Y2 Purple
Rayan Jawabry - Y2 Green
KS2
Adam Moussa - Y3 Aqua
Seanna R Van Dam - Y4 Green
KS3
Shamsa Bin Sulayem - Y7
Eyad Akila - Y7
Well done and we hope to see more students joining in our future competitions.
Music Week - March 2022
Before we broke for Spring Break Mrs Bannister was busy conducting "Music Week" with our students. She has compiled a video for our parent community to show the talents of all of our classes. Singing, dancing, playing instruments and performing are just some of the exciting items showcased in the video from all our year groups.
Well done everyone and we look forward to our music department growing from strength to strength as we move forward.
PE & Sport at DHA
This week the students worked on improving their basketball passing in isolation and in games. The students made outstanding progress and this sets us up well for basketball fixtures after Ramadan. We also had Ms. Wendy show our Year 5 students a trick or two!
Ramadan & PE Lessons
Please note that we advise fasting students to sit out during PE lessons as it could potentially be dangerous if fasting while doing high intensity exercise. However, we also request that these students have a conversation with their parents over the weekend to discuss their fasting options on PE days. Some pupils may still prefer to take part in lessons.