Touring the School

The Saturday before my birthday, we celebrated the fact that parents are now allowed to tour the ISKL campus.  This meant that Jeff got to come on campus for the first time, and he (accurately) described it as the Disney of school campuses.  In standard Jeff fashion, he took about a hundred pictures, so I'm just going to include a few.

When you first walk into the school, you see the main theater decorated with flags from all the countries that are represented at the school.  This is also the theater where Vivian performed in High School Musical Jr. last week, another thing to celebrate.

Our tour then went left to the elementary school, where the sign in front of one of the playground entrances welcomes everyone.

There are several playgrounds on the ground level, and they are all fabulous, but most of them are for the younger kids.  Since Elena is now in 2nd grade, she gets the big kid playground up on the rooftop.  But she still gets to use the purpose built elementary school kitchen for her after school cooking class, and any other cooking projects they do in school.

Her current science unit is focusing on ecology, and the elementary school has its own little fish aquarium to study in one of the playgrounds.  The part facing the kids is glass, and if I was in elementary school, I would probably just sit and watch the fish swim around for as much of the day as I could.

The music classrooms are also on the ground floor, and we got to peek into Elena's music classroom.  They focus on percussion in the earlier grades, and it looked like they have at least one of every percussion instrument ever invented.

Then we went upstairs.  There are several staircases throughout the elementary school, and you can see the efforts to green them up.  The campus is relatively new, since it just opened in 2018, so I have a feeling it will be covered in greenery over the next few years.

Even without the extra foliage, the view is spectacular.  This is from the balcony near where Elena eats snack and lunch.

When it's time for recess, there are several play areas, both covered and not.

Her favorite though, is the rooftop playground, which was just completed this year.

Jeff liked it a lot too.

But they told us that parents were not allowed on the zip line ;-)

While we were up in the classroom areas, we got to see the science labs and the maker space, all of which looked like places to have a lot of fun.

We also got a chance to peek into Elena's classroom and see her desk, which she was so excited about.

There are two libraries, one for elementary school and one for middle and high school, and we got to see lots of other facilities as well, but our favorites for Vivian were her Humanities classroom, which I love, 

and the outdoor balcony commons for 8th grade.

Every grade level has an indoor common area that is air conditioned and has lots of study and work areas, but they don't have the breeze and the view that the balconies have.

Jeff was contemplating just staying there all day and not going home.

We're so thrilled that the girls have such an incredible place to spend their days.  It has helped them transition back to in person school after over a year online, and we are looking forward to them enjoying this school for the next two years.