Motions Day turned into a huge fundraiser to raise money in support of the charity Knæk Cancer

Last year, you will remember, that Mr Ryan and Mr Bettger teamed up together for a new initiative during our Autumn Break Motions Day. Motions Day is a yearly event that takes place in schools throughout Denmark. The purpose of Motions Day, on the last day of school before Autumn Break, is to encourage students (and staff!) to participate in physical activity and promote healthy lifestyles. This year at AIS, all the students took the day out of the classroom. The EY students went outside into their playground to play team games, our PYPs went down to Tangkrogen to do as many laps of 1km within 45 minutes, our MYPs took part in a 5km cross country run through the woods and along the sea in Marselisborg.  

As part of the imitative last year, Mr Ryan and Mr Bettger encouraged the PYPs to turn their laps into a sponsored run, inspired by the Terry Fox Foundation, in order to raise money for KnækCancer. This year, we repeated the success of last year, this time opening up the sponsorship to the entire school. 

Well, we are delighted to announce that the our school community raised 15,482kr during our sponsored run for this year’s Motions Day – a record amount of money that we could donate to such a fantastic and worthy cause. The donation has been sent to KnækCancer to support cancer research projects in Denmark. You can read more about KnækCancer here – https://knaek.cancer.dk/da 

Thank you to everyone who took part and donated money. It is truly amazing what we as a school can achieve when we work together for a common goal! 

In October 2025, led by our school counsellor Megan Behnke, AIS led its first Wellbeing Week. Each day had a special focus that was introduced at the start of each day in order to get students in the right headspace and mindset for the rest of the day.  

Monday

We started the week with Mindfulness Monday, where each class was engaged in some type of mindfulness activity. Whether this was a small meditation, yoga movements, or a check in with ourselves and something we look forward to the week bringing.  

Tuesday

Tuesday was talk-it out Tuesday. Often stress or anxiety stems from misunderstanding or miscommunication, or not being felt you are listened to or heard. Communication and talking it out, often reduces the number of conflicts that happen and helps find resolutions to issues or problems. Each class spent some time together to talk about an issue that was really important to them. It helps teach student to listen to each other and give space for everyone’s opinion. In this way we become closer together and relate more to each other, reducing the points of conflict that can occur.  

Thank you to our wonderful school counsellor, Megan Behnke, for putting together this stimulating week of wellbeing and mental health. It is a really important subject to keep our minds and body healthy and encourages our students to instill good habits into their daily routines.

We look forward now to making this an annual tradition with Wellbeing Week 2026!

Our MYP5 students have rocked their exams once again!

Aarhus International School Launches Major Renovation Project

Aarhus International School (AIS) has initiated a comprehensive renovation of its older buildings on Dalgas Avenue in Aarhus. Originally built in 1961 by Aarhus Municipality, the buildings are largely unchanged.

Thanks to generous donations totalling DKK 22 million from Villum Fonden, Lars Larsen Group, Salling Fondene, and Poul Due Jensens Fond, AIS can now bring all of its facilities up to modern standards.

“We are incredibly grateful for the support we’ve received. These contributions are vital to securing a strong international school offering in Aarhus, which plays a key role in attracting global talent to the city,” says Head of School Robert McCluskey. “With this support, we can ensure all our facilities are up-to-date and prepared for the continued growth of our school.”

Board Chair Niclas Kvernrød adds: “Our priority is to improve indoor climate and learning environments, ensuring that our facilities meet the growing needs of our students and offer the best possible conditions for teaching and wellbeing. These donations will enable us to bring our older buildings up to the same high standard we expect across the entire school, and for that, we are truly thankful.”

Donation Breakdown:

· Villum Fonden: DKK 10 million

· Lars Larsen Group: DKK 4 million

· Salling Fondene: DKK 4 million

· Poul Due Jensens Fond: DKK 4 million

Sport is a top priority at our school, not just to create good healthy habits for our students, but also emulating these values amongst staff too.

There are many different sports initiatives at school from our staff, who play a variety of different sports from curling to cricket, ballet to basketball, SUP and yoga.

Basketball has definitely been a rising favourite sport with our collaboration with the Aarhus Bakken Bears. The bears have made frequest trips to the school with some of their coolest players: they demonstrated tricks, signed some autographs and promoted their basketball club which now houses quite a number of our students. But basketball is also supported by our staff with some keen players especially among our female staff.

A final sport to mention is running. There are lots of runners in our staff of varying levels. Every year in August, the school staff take part in the DHL staffattest – a relay race of 5km walking or running. It is a fantastic tradition where some personal bests and personal achievements are made. This year we also set up our own staff running club, and no less than 6 members of our team ran the Aarhus Motion BESTSELLER Half Marathon 2025 – with veteran runners running their 8th or 9th race, and debut runners demonstrating their risk taking, discipline and dedication.

Danish A students break new AIS records on the hall of fame.

Danish at AIS is taught on 3 levels: A, B and C. Danish A is for native-level Danish students, who study Danish as a language and literature, which mostly follows the Danish national curriculum. At the end of MYP5, Danish A students are entered into the Danish-only afgangprøve, which is the end-of-school exam taken in most Danish folkeskoles.

To get students ready for this, and to push their thinking in spelling, writing and grammar, Mr Tobias offers different challenges that students can participate in.

These challenges are optional for students to try, so those that decided to compete showed a good curiosity and personal determination. They were risk-takers, and demonstrated their knowledge and responsibility for their own learning. These tasks, whilst also getting them to focus on technical language accuracy, is also a challenge of time management, where they can learn to gauge how long it actually takes to complete the task. It is also a demonstration of accuracy and focus, where the challenge comes in being thorough in your work, to build sharper proofreading skills, and to pay attention to detail. These skills are extremely useful for students who are preparing for their MYP5 eAssessments and beyond.

PYP4 student competes in the World Maths Day challenge and come out on top for the school and country!

In the last week of January, Dokk 1 was once again the host of the national Danish school’s challenge championship, DM I Fagene. And as is tradition, a small group of MYP 3-5 students from AIS took the bus together over to the library at the harbour, ready to throw their name into the hat and participate in the challenge. Historically, AIS have always done quite well in the DM I Fagene challenge, and this year wasn’t to disappoint either.

When students arrived with Ms Nina, they were greeted along with all the other participants. They were participating this year in the Danish subject category. To start the day, they were given a tour of Dokk 1, where there were also different activities dotted about that they could do, and a welcome speech by DM I Fagene.

As you are all very aware now, our Early Years department moved from their location in Højbjerg to join our Dalgas campus in Aarhus C in August 2024. A modern, brand new, state of the art facility came with many new opportunities. Each classroom became a blank canvass for each teacher. How could they use the space to be inclusive, exciting, and conducive to learning, play and relaxation? How could the learning space be set up to include all learner preferences and meet all learner needs? Our aim in the Early Years has been to make creative, playful, engaging learning spaces where children’s voices guide our planning and practice.

This all-day workshop was centred around creating responsive learning spaces, that holistically support all students to enter the learning environment. Together, we explored how documentation and observation can help us co-construct learning environments that respond to children’s interests, needs, and expressions. By engaging with open-ended materials and thoughtful provocations, we grew in our capacity to promote inquiry and agency in our classrooms, ensuring each student feels supported and inspired.

Thank you to Anne for sharing your amazing knowledge with us, and to the teachers from Billund and Hellerup. It was a fantastic opportunity for reflective practice not only with ourselves, but to also share that knowledge with other teachers from other IB international schools. This workshop reaffirmed how far we’ve come in shaping our new spaces and strengthened our commitment to child-centred, inquiry-driven learning.

The school holidays are often seen as a chance to unwind and relax after a busy term of hard work and learning. It is a very real need to unwind and relax, and getting into good habits of how to do that is tricky.

Some might prefer to go outside; others take up exercising or a creative hobby. One way we also try to encourage students to help them unwind is also through reading.

As you may be well aware, reading is a big part of our school life here at AIS. Each classroom has a reading corner with books students can access and read, either for fun or to expand their knowledge around a unit topic. There is a dedicated quiet reading time in PYP and MYP, where students can read a book of their choosing. We also hold an annual Book Fair, where families can purchase new and pre-loved books for home. We have a Book Week with many activities centred around reading and literacy. And our brand-new library is stocked filled with so many books in various genres, in over 10 languages.

Getting into good reading habits is important therefore for us and the students, and something we continually encourage and reinforce.