Happy Birthday Cherry we hope you have an amazing day!!!

lots of love,

the New Portena Team

xx

Today is the Mid Autumn festival in China, our amazing Mary showed a video about the festival to all our girls and then we all shared some delicious mooncakes  🥮🥮🥮

thank you Mary for sharing the story of the festival and a small piece of your culture!

lots of love,

The New Portena team x

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Happy Birthday Sabine!! Hope you had an amazing day!

lots of love,

The New Portena Team x

Yesterday a lot of our new Portena girls volunteered to help the lake Geneva Cleanup project. They were there to help with setting up the equipment and tents for divers and volunteers that would be the ones actually cleaning the lake. Here are some pics from the day.

Pillar 1 of our wellbeing programme in CDL is Nurturing healthy bodies and minds. One of the takeaway points from this pillar is “How important is sleep?”. We find it a crucial topic for the students to explore when discovering how to take care of themselves and how they can maintain a healthy body and mind.

The teenage years are a formative period. The brain and body experience significant development, and the transition to adulthood brings important changes that affect emotions, personality, social and family life, and academics. Sleep is essential during this time, working behind the scenes to allow teens to be at their best. Unfortunately, research indicates that many teens get far less sleep than they need. Sleep is vital for people of any age. For teens, though, profound mental, physical, social, and emotional development requires quality sleep.

During one of our Boarding House assemblies, we asked each girl the effects that can be caused from lack of sleep, and how it can impact many areas of our lives? We got a lot of good answers and have condensed it into this poster. Enjoy!

Some of our girls teachers came to visit us today and it was so nice to have a chat and for them to see the house. It was great for us to meet them and share some cakes !

lots of love,

The New Portena Team x

This weekend our lovely ladies went to the Leysin Mountain weekend with all the boarders. It was a full weekend of fun where they did a range of activities from acrobranching and castle visits to mountain biking and Hiking.

Lots of love,

The New Portena Team x

Bice, Sayuri, Sara, and Sabine did some shopping in Lausanne and then visited the Olympic Museum.

It was a big week for cooking and baking in the New Portena house.

Sara, Sayuri and Sabine made some delicious pasta arrabiata.

Sakura baked some chocolate chip cookies.

Both Defnes, Anya and Cora made some apple crumble as well.

We are now entering the second week of the first Pillar of our wellbeing programme – Nurturing Healthy Bodies and Minds.

One of the takeaway points from this pillar is “How important is sleep?”. We find it a crucial topic for the students to explore when discovering how to take care of themselves and how they can maintain a healthy body and mind.

During our Boarding House assemblies this week, we will be talking to the students about the effects that can be caused from lack of sleep, and how it can impact many areas of our lives.

Lack of sleep reduces focus and it will make it more difficult for student’s to learn. Studies have shown that poor quality sleep, or not enough sleep, can lead poor organisational skills, a decrease in mood or behaviour, reduced attention span and even memory loss. We would like to outline the importance of sleep to our students so that they are fully prepared and they give themselves the best opportunity possible to achieve their full potential – in all aspects of their lives. Allowing the brain the sufficient amount of time to rest and recover means we give ourselves the best chance to succeed.

Also throughout this pillar, we are running a Daily Fitness Challenge across our Boarding Community. This is to encourage our students to get active, have fun and take their minds off things that may be causing them stress. The participation, competitiveness and enthusiasm the students have shown so far has been fantastic and we hope to see this continue throughout September with even more students taking part. Please find some photos below from the challenge so far…..