The Spring Carnival will be on Sunday, 12 May this year!
(Located in Higashi Ikebukuro)
E-mail: info@newinternationalschool.com
Website: http://newinternationalschool.com/

This will be the first one!

What happens at the Spring Carnival? Can you give us some details?
Thanks! Karen

Looks like the Spring Carnival is not open to the public due to space constraints but next year the second building will long be finished so maybe it won't be a problem anymore.

Other links for New International School (A1 classroom):

Changes almost every day.
http://www.geocities.com/charlesapperson/frillyhellokitty.html
Bi-lingual:
http://www.geocities.com/charlesapperson/SpringBreak.htm

Dear Amy,
Regarding used uniforms, there is the as yet unused Uniforms - Recycling discussion under the Classifieds section at:
http://www.tokyowithkids.com/discussions/messages/3/837.html

Also there are a limited number of the original uniforms (from the USA) for NewIS being cleared out a discount. You can call Mr. Parr at the school and ask him about those! The new uniforms are made in Japan and supposedly better quality (though I can not say they are terribly great).

If you send me sizes for your kids, I could start scoping things out for you.

As for field trip costs, so far this year there have been 5 field trips that required some sort of extra funding for the 5-6-7 year olds classes (primary A):

Oct: Vegetable field Y2,800
Nov: Book Store and Street Car Y1,500 (change was returned)
Dec: ?(I forgot)? Y3,000
Feb: Sunshine City Aquarium Y1,000
Apr: Fieldtrip to farm (cow-milking) Y5,000
(June 2003: added on)
May: Science Museum at Ueno Y500
June: Round trip train fare to Yoyogi park for the sports day undokai Y160 per child and Y320 per adult.

Then there are optional photos for selection periodically. And I think we are under some pressure to buy the yearbook at the end of they year. But the school carnival is supposed to raise money to lower the cost of the yearbook.

25 June 2003 Additional notes:

The school carnival raised a lot of money (around Y1.2 million) but apparently the money is going towards a variety of things. The year book cost is Y10,000 if you pay for it in advance, and Y11,500 if you pay for it in September.

Also I received a sheet about a week ago listing all the school supply expenses for the year for my daughter and paid a total of Y7365 for her supplies.

Then there were some additional expenses unique to her class. Someone organized an end of the year party at Emi's Party Room close to the school (attendance optional, adults Y3500 and children Y1000) on a Saturday, just for my daughter's class and teacher. I've been to something like this before with her day care center graduating class. So I decided to skip it. But she wanted to go so I arranged for her to go with a classmate and her mother.

And there was a fee of Y1000 per adult and Y500 per child for a pizza lunch on the last day of school in her class. Add in the school uniform (boys slacks OK for girls as if you prefer) and the Tai Kwon Do uniform (Y8000), and transportation and food for daily lunch, etc.

There is an e-list just for parents of kids at NewIS at :
http://www.topica.com/lists/newISparents

This list is for quick and efficient communication between parents of children enrolled at New International School, Ikebukuro, Tokyo, Japan.
Sell/exchange out-grown uniforms, get that lost homework assignment, verify dates and times, network and help each other!
So many of us are away from our homes during the day, and it would be useful to communicate with each other without telephones!

To post a message to the list, send email to:

newISparents@topica.com

Please join.

New International School has just sent parents a notice announcing that it is starting a school bus service for the next academic year (from September). To start with there will be just one route, which I gather will start somewhere around Shinagawa and roughly follow Meiji-dori, with some detours, and stops in Meguro, Shinjuku, etc, all the way to the school in Ikebukuro. This may make it easier for families in south/west Tokyo to get children to the school if they don't drive and want to avoid the crowded trains.

This is new (copied off their web site):
RESOURCE SUPPORT FEE (Charged from the 2006-2007 School year): 30,000 yen per year (to support the enrichment and renewal of the school's extensive educational and technological resources)

I am trying to decide where to send my daughter to school next year after yochien. We are still considering the local sho- gakko, however I have always been interested in the New International School and with the bus system from south west Tokyo it now may be a real possibility. Does anybody have a rough idea of how long the bus to the school takes from Shibuya or Harajuku? Does anyone have any other details of the route ie detours etc? How have other parents and their kids found attending the school? Is there a long waiting list? Just putting some feelers out....

Dear Linda, If I had it all to do over again, I would have sent my daughter to the local shogako for at least 2 years before starting with the international school. But each family is different and has different goals for their kid(s). My daughter is thriving at NewIS. However, she is falling behind in Japanese because we have no native Japanese speakers at home. The way the immersion program works at NewIS is that in the first years, the percentage of time spend in the immersion language (considered to be English) is around 65%. Later it evens out closer to 50/50. For the majority of the kids, this is exactly the right combination since they receive all the Japanese re-inforcement at home after school and on weekends. However, in our house, this is not the case. So even though my daughter is mainstreamed with the other kids in the Japanese parts of the program, she is in fact at the low end of curve in that group.

I think that if she had spent more time in an all-Japanese environment, she would have a firmer grip on Japanese and a bigger vocabulary. Her English would still have been very good, because of the 100% English environment at home and the long summer migrations to the USA. On the other hand, she may have become a different person (with more Japanese behavioral attributes). It's a hard call. There were a couple of other reasons why I put her into NewIS when I did (financial because at the time the tuition was lower and it is then frozen on the year of entry, and logistical, which ended up being a miscalculation).

The school addresses a much needed niche for bi- or multi-cultural children (kids who are already speaking multiple languages at home). All the communications send home are bi-lingual (English and Japanese). With only a few exceptions, these are all kids whose parents expect to stay in Japan long term, and who hope to give their kids a choice between 2 or more countries when they enter the working world. Also, there is a high percentage of purely Japanese families with children enrolled there.

The school is constantly re-arranging the space they have to fit the age groups as they grow up one year, or as a larger number of enrollees apply in one year. This coming year (starting in September 2006) they've expanded Primary B to have 3 years instead of 2 because they now have enough kids in levels 3,4 & 5 to make up 3 classes. The past years Primary B consisted only of levels 3 & 4. But Primary A has always had high enrollment so that has always been a 3 level multi-age class.

I think that if your child comes from a bi-lingual background which includes English, you probably will not need to worry too much about being waitlisted. Mr. Steve Parr will try hard to find a space for that kid. Because of the location, the native English speaker component in each class is slightly below where they'd probably like it to be. The fascinating thing is watching how the immersion really works! As parents we just have to be patient.

One of my daughter's classmates from nursery school (hoikuen) joined NewIS at the same time my daughter did. He spoke no English and both his parents are Japanese physicians (they know a lot of English but never used it verbally at home). After 4 years, I personally can see how he has acquired English. It is not fluid and rich in the same way that it is for my daughter, but he is decidedly able to communicate in English and his comprehension is huge. He's also progressed very nicely in Mandarin Chinese (an optional subject) in the same 4 years.

My daughter doesn't use the bus route, so I don't know exactly what the details are. I do know that sometimes the bus arrives a few minutes after 8:30, and that those kids do not get "tardies" when that happens! The only kid I know using the bus gets on near Shinjuku which is already closer to the school. The good things about the bus is that parents feel that their kids are safer, and it goes straight to the front door of the school.

Cornelia, Thanks very much for all of the information posted above, it has been very helpful. NIS sounds like a wonderful school, although because it is a little far from us we will most likely be sending our daughter there when she gets a little older. Since my last post, we have visited the local shogakko (Jinnan Shogakko) and for the present time we are leaning towards sending her there, mainly because it is only a ten minute walk away, and seems to be a good school that has quite a few foreigners and JSL support. I imagine though there will come a time when my ability to help her with her Japanese reading and writing homework will, on top of homeschooling her in the English curriculum, probably become quite challenging. We'll see how we go, but as you recommended, year 3 or 4 will probably be a good time to change over to an international school. Thanks again.

TIME SENSITIVE - TOKYO: New International School has achieved the Gakko Hojin non-profit school status. The most immedicately obvious benefit was that the students are now formally entitled to the student transportation discount on public transportation services. (Though I never had trouble getting it on the Toden Arakawa tram line at the Otsuka station office before that.)

Another less visible benefit is that a company can make a tax-free donation to the school in lieu of tuition for the children of its non-Japanese employees. This means that it might be useful to negotiate tuition into any employment package, since it is, in essence, untaxed income for the employee.

NewIS is one of the founding members of the International Schools Corporate Contribution Program Association (CCPA), formally established at the beginning of this month (March 2007). A corporate contribution system has been in use at many of the schools but new requirements from the authorities led to the formation of the CCPA. The new Corporate Contribution Plan system will be introduced on March 19th, Monday, at the Lycee Franco-Japonais (also a member). Attendance is by invitation only. If you want your company to be invited, you can procure an invitation for that company by providing:

Name of company
Name of contact person at that company
That person's email adddress

to: sparr [at] newinternationalschool.com
and he will send an email invitation to that person. Please do it quickly because the invitation needs to go out by Friday afternoon at the latest.

Other schools in the CCPA:
The American School in Japan
The British School in Tokyo
Deutsche Schule Tokyo Yokohama
International School of the Sacred Heart
K International School
Nishimachi International School
Saint Maur International School
Seisen International School
St. Mary's International School
Yokohama International School

for a total of 12 schools at this time.

Hi,
Tomorrow, Sunday 20 May is the New IS carnival. If anyone wants to go to the carnival tomorrow, I have 5 tickets for friends. Just give me a call at xx xxxx xxxx or send me an email. (Each student is allowed to invite 5 guests.) It is a good carnival for kids, buy a passport, complete the activities and get a prize, etc. Good way to visit the school!