CVSS says “Hello Singapore”!

In early March, MediaCorp News and Current Affairs approached MOE with a request to interview a school staff regarding the introduction of daily cleaning in schools, for the live talk show segment of their Channel 8 prime time evening news programme, Hello Singapore (狮城有约) on 11 March 2016, 6.30pm.   MOE surfaced our school as one of the schools which has implemented daily cleaning activities in school and MediaCorp selected our school staff to be interviewed together with another teacher from Rivervale Primary School. 

Our Vice-Principal, Mr Wong Jia Wang who oversees character & citizenship education, represented our school for the interview and shared about schools’ role in inculcating in our students a sense of responsibility and care for their own space as well as shared spaces.  Our school has always expected all students to perform their Everyday Responsibilities as part of the GRACE etiquette – Greeting, Readiness, Attendance, Cleanliness, Expectations, which was introduced since 2008.  In line with the MOE’s Keep Singapore Clean Movement and as part of Keep CVSS Clean Movement, the daily classroom cleaning was enhanced with a structured, more thorough cleaning time in the first 5 minutes of curriculum time every school day from January onwards.   

In the show, Mr Wong helped viewers understand this initiative, among other special efforts, by our school to inculcate good life habits and gracious social behaviours in our students in school, at home and in the community.  Mr Wong had a few interesting exchanges with the newscasters. When asked how the school overcomes challenges in the implementation of daily cleaning activities. Mr Wong shared that one effective way of making the cleaning a more pleasant task was by playing an uplifting piece of music - “Be Our Guest” from the Walt Disney movie, ‘Beauty and the Beast’.  One of the newscasters was amazed by our ingenuity and commented that it was a clever move as the music was played in the movie as the characters were cleaning the cutleries and getting ready to host their guest, Belle.

Since the introduction of the 5 minute structured cleaning time, students have been observed to carry out their cleaning duties more spontaneously.  One Sec 3 parent commented that her daughter had told her that the classrooms are much cleaner now.  A Sec 2 student shared that she has become more aware of the state of cleanliness in the environment and will pick up pieces of litter if she sees it in the school compound.  She also shared that in the past, she did not bother to clean up her bedroom, but will now make it a point to clean it at least once a week.  Another Sec 2 student shared that because of what he does in school, he will now also help to throw bags of rubbish placed beside the rubbish chute in his neighbourhood as he is more aware of the importance of keeping the environment clean.

Our school is glad to have been able to share with the public on our efforts to inculcate good life habits and values in our North Stars. Even though the talk show has ended, the endeavour to nurture our students holistically continues. We look forward to the continual trust and support of our stakeholders to provide a student-centric, values-driven education to all our students!

Second and Fourth Placings in IDE LEGO Robotics Competition 2016

The Innovation, Design and Engineering (IDE) LEGO Robotics Competition is an annual event organised by  Nullspace Science for all primary and secondary school students on a national platform.  The competition was held on 17 March at Anglican High School this year.  Our students took part in the competition for the first time and competed against 27 teams from many reputable schools, which includes Anglican High School, Chua Chu Kang Secondary, Riverside Secondary School, School of Science and Technology and Yishun Town Secondary.  We are proud to share that despite our first attempt, our students have emerged victorious and clinched Second and Fourth placings in this competition!

The competition emphasizes on innovativeness, design element and engineering skills. Students are given a mission or challenge which varies from year to year and is revealed only at the start of the competition.  In this year’s competition, students were required to build and programme a robot within 4 hours to complete various tasks, such as removing designated “rubbish” blocks to a disposal area, locating a green block and transporting the green block back to the end area.  It was indeed a difficult challenge.  However, our students have worked hard to train for the competition and demonstrated their use of critical and inventive thinking.  They have also shown great resilience, strong teamwork and good sportsmanship as they faced the more established teams during the competition. All of these indeed exemplify the indomitable North Star spirit expected of all our students!