Shintaro offered to use his wood-crafting activity to help the birds that live on the Léman One terrace by providing a very well made nest box. It didn’t require any owlgebra or a crow-bar, but to put it up we might require a crane and receive a very big bill.

This weekend seen us compete in another House Competition. This is a great way for us to show our House Spirit and what we can accomplish as a team. Iman took the lead this year is baking our entry. He did an amazing job and we hope our cake does well.

We hope you enjoy a bite,

Of our winter snowy delight.

Tomohisa finds time to relax and apply some TLC to his routine.

Iman joins his second of three activities this weekend, the running club. He manages a respectable 7.5 km and is very supportive to the youngest member of the group.

Raphael nicely captures the sunny autumn morning today with a couple of splendid abstract and landscape shots.

This past week we celebrated ‘Spirit’ from our school motto and each section of the school did a project to demonstrate their Community Spirit. Within the Boarding Community we aligned this with our Wellbeing Pillar 2- Promoting Diversity and Protecting Against Bullying. We believe we have a strong bond as a Boarding Community and that together with the diversity among us we bridge cultures to come together and show our community spirit. To demonstrate this we created a video.

This weekend we again had a multitude of different activities available to the Boarders. This included tennis, horse riding, badminton, table tennis, zumba, photography, boot camp, biking, woodcraft, yoga and fashion club.

While the student’s opportunity to go off-campus is limited we, therefore, promote and encourage them to get as active as they can on campus. Staying fit and healthy is important for our wellbeing as we continue to act on the lessons from the Wellbeing Pillar 1

As we continue to think about our healthy diet, let us share with you our food options for Sunday Brunch.

This is always something to look forward to and a meal that is enjoyed by all. There is a huge variety to satisfy all.

As part of our House Competitions which aim at building House and Community Spirit we had our traditional pumpkin carving competition. The boys did excellent with their creation (with ALOT of help from Mr George), but we are proud to say that we came 1st!

How does it work?

Many people are familiar with the STEM acronym (Science Technology Engineering and Maths), but fewer are familiar of the more recent STEAM acronym which also includes the Arts. With the addition of Art, typical STEM projects can be made fun and more engaging to all students while encouraging imagination and creativity which before was typically limited.

This Halloween presented the perfect opportunity to demonstrate how art plays such a fundamental role in STEAM by creating a spooky Arduino pumpkin project. Arduino is a highly versatile and open source mechatronics platform that many schools with STEAM being a fundamental part of their curriculum have adopted. It was used in this pumpkin project to control the ghostly sequence of opening and closing of the jaw and activation of the lantern and eye lights in response to inputs from the ultrasonic distance sensor installed in the nose of the pumpkin.

Using his lockdown time wisely, Gabriel got creative tinkling those ivories.

Shintaro joined the intermediate biking group today and did leman 1 proud by cycling almost 8km this morning

Léman One played Concha House twice this week and emerged victorious in both fixtures with a result of 6-2 in football and 37-25 in basketball. The end of this week concludes our first wellbeing pillar of healthy bodies and minds so it has been great to have seen so much participation and enjoyment in these games.

This Thursday we will be hosting a Movie Night for the students. Our first movie night will be The Social Dilemma.

‘Set in the dark underbelly of Silicon Valley, The Social Dilemma fuses investigative documentary with enlightening narrative drama. Expert testimony from tech whistle-blowers exposes our disturbing predicament: the services Big Tech provides-search engines, networks, instant information, etc.-are merely the candy that lures us to bite. Once we’re hooked and coming back for more, the real commodity they sell is their prowess to influence and manipulate us’ (IMDB.com)

We had another fun-filled weekend of activities on offer. This weekend included Tennis, Crossfit, Horseriding, Hip-Hop, Volleyball, Climbing, Biking, Golf and a day trip to Montreux.

The Leman boys represented well again.

We launched our Community project two weeks ago and the boys have been working incredibly hard to do their extra steps! As a reminder, we committed to walking an additional 1,000,000 steps over and above what we normally do in the day. This works out to be an additional 16km each, that we all have to walk.

This is part of us all trying to improve our exercise and recognising the benefits of doing so. It also highlights to the boys that walking 16km is the equivalent to burning 500 – 700 calories. And there are 500 calories are in a Big Mac which equals a lot of walking just to burn that off.

In addition, we promoted our community links by fundraising for ESCA to raise money for their Cancer Support initiatives in Geneva. You can help us support this great charity and give the students an extra purpose to do their steps.

As part of our Wellbeing Programme, we are covering the topics of Sleep, Nutrition, Exercise and Emotional Wellbeing. Our aim is to cover these topics within the House in our weekly meetings. However, for Emotional Regulation we had Jody our Boarding Counsellor lead us in a Workshop. This helped us to reflect on stress points and triggers in our lives and to identify what kind of response we have to this.

The boys from Léman One Boarding House share highs and lows as they scrabble amongst the tree canopy and swing back down to earth.