CIC Training & Development Programme.

On 23th May 2009, staffs from all centres including HQ gathered in front of CIC HQ around 6.30am before leaving to Melaka by bus for “Staffs training and development programme”. Around 7:15am the bus departed from Putarajaya to Kompleks Falak Al-Khawarizmi and arrived around 9.20am. After check in and registration, the programme started by all HOCs and staffs from HQ gave a warm welcome to other participants while they entered into the conference room. The programme then continued by a performance from HQ’s staffs, opening speech and launching ceremony by our CEO Mdm Hjh. Qutren Nada. The first session of the programme including correction moment, group show by teachers from every centres and a presentation of motivation session by our CEO.

After a lunch break we continued our session with “Dark Star Adventure and SOS Planet Film 3D which was held at the planetarium in the Kompleks Falak Al-Khawarizmi. We continued our session with Usrah session by Ustaz Azizi before we had a tea break and solat.

The programme continued after we had dinner with Solat Maghrib followed by Improvement Al-Quran session which was done in group.

The second day of the programme started with breakfast and followed by physical exercise by Mr. Fendy then continued with group game activity and Oxford Reading Tree reading improvement session in group to improve teachers reading in English.

The programme ended after lunch on that day and we departed by bus to Putrajaya at 2pm and arrived at 4:30pm.

Report on CIC Mid Year Sales Conference

On 22th May 2009, at 3pm, Mid Year Sales Conference was held at CIC HQ in Putrajaya. The conference was attended by Madam Hajah Qutren Nada bt Ahmad, Ustaz Azizi bin Ahmad, Mdm. Rohaida, Mdm. Salbiah, Mdm Zahra and HOCs from every centres.

Second session of the conference was on how to improve teaching technique and skills presented by HOC from every centres according to the subject they teach.

During refreshment, a birthday celebration was done for the staff. The conference continued with teaching technique and ended at about 7:30pm.

Selected Mother's day Story

High school student Daniel cheers describes how his reaction to his mother's death from cancer turned from shock and stoicism to confusion and guilt.
I’d always been closest to my mum. She would help me with tricky assignment ,fashion advise, and although she never had the chance I know she would have loved to have fixed my girl troubles. Her calming influence is something I’ll sorely miss this year during my final year of high school. But my love for my mother got a bit lost in the chaos of my early teens. I knew I could depend on her for love and support, and there was a hug waiting for me every day when I got home from school, but between schoolwork and social dramas I never found the time to truly value her. I suppose this was the foundation of my fear that I didn’t care enough.

The first hint that Mum was no longer invincible came when I went with my parents to a medical centre where they did MRIs, one of the many terms which, at the point, I had only experienced on TV. Even now I feel distant from it, as through a part of me still believes that tragedy happens in everyone else’s family. I sat in the waiting room and watched Maybe Diva win her third Melbourne Cup [in 2005], and so began the semi-nomadic existence that was to be our lives for the next six months. School.waiting room, hospital rooms, intensive care unit (yuck) and finally back home to sleep. Mum and dad sat my sister and I down at the kitchen bench and told us Mum had a tumour in her hip. Words like benign and malignant were mentioned, life-changing words, although I didn’t realise that at the time. I didn’t panic; I didn’t have any reason to worry. The doctors would biopsy it and fix it and it’d be cool, just another event for Mum to get the family through.It’s been a tradition in our family to navigate Sydney in relation to cake shops. Destinations were near or on the way to patisseries. That was how our lives operated; leisurely enough that cake played a major role. By the time Mum had been sick for a few months, Sydney was instead a series of hospitals and medical centres. Cakes became less important. I won an award at presentation day the year Mum was sick. I didn’t realise she was there at the time, but I can imagine now my heroic year adviser ensuring that my parents were seated well before the rush of students, in a spot next to the door in case mum was sick. Every prize since then has brought Dad to tears and hug we share in that moment is always emotional. My school result take on a new meaning when he says she’d be proud of me. Mum was staying in hospital for a week or so while she recovered from a spinal operation, but the week became months and soon I was accustomed to having no parent at home. My younger sister and I learnt to cook and, essentially, how to look after ourselves. This was a revolutionary notion to us, a pair of heavily parented kids.When given the option, I always chose to hear the medical details of what was happening to Mum. If I knew what was happening in scientific, objective terms it was easy for me to assume that the doctors would be able to fix it. Once I’d made the unknown known it stopped being scary. In retrospect, I think that by hearing Mum’s illness described in medical terms I could distance myself from it. I could still believe on some level that it wasn’t my mother they were talking about. Once Mum started to deteriorate, she asked to be told in advance if my sister and I were coming. She’d go to great lengths to ensure that her usually pale face was made up with help from the nurses. It was her way of making sure we never saw her at her weakest. Although at the time I might not have, now I appreciate this small effort. No child should have cancer and treatments.Because of the cancer, the woman who made the family what it was – who would keep us together in any disaster, whether it was chickenpox or alien invasion – now could only wince at the bump caused by my poor wheelchair-steering or, after an apparently successful operation, lie unconscious, attached to a machine that breathed for her.Even the friendliest nurses could not remove the atmosphere of helplessness and illness that for me filled every hospital. Standing in the corridors I once witnessed a pair of nurses wheel a sheet-covered body from an adjacent room. They glanced at me guiltily and I knew that this wasn’t something they wanted me to see. To be confronted with death, at this late stage of my mum’s cancer, was a haunting experience. I couldn’t help but see the same thing happened to Mum.The day it happened I had been to visit her in hospital. She’d been getting better – I even announced to my friends that my mum would come home soon and it was all going to be OK – but over the last week everything had gone downhill rapidly. I suppose that cancer. I spend a long time at her bedside and although she was a sleep I held her hand, something I didn’t often do. At one point she woke up hand snatched her hand away. I can only guess, but I don’t think she was ready for me to start making the most of our remaining time together. Once she’d fallen asleep again I began to leave but I paused at the door and said, “I love you.” I’m so glad I did.That night, Dad came home and told us that she had died. Neither my sister nor I wanted to see her body, choosing to remember her as she was alive. The three of us violently embraced, determined never to let each other go, as though if we held on tight enough we wouldn’t lose anyone else. We spent the rest of the night in front of mindless sitcoms, sitting through episode after episode rather that deal with the alternative. Over the next week we planned the funeral and caught up on lost sleep between visits from family and friends. We didn’t have time to realise she’d never be there again.The small speech I’d prepared for her funeral must have been barely hundred words, but I can remember standing ,shaking at the pulpit for an eternity. My dad had always maintained that a speech should ‘make ‘em laugh and make ‘em cry” , a saying I was thankful for when the audience’s laughter gave me slight reprieve. But it wasn’t until after I’d sat down that I stopped shaking. I’d always turned to my mum for help with speeches, anything written. She had been, among many things, an author and had read to me since I was two weeks old. I was moving to the rhythm of Crocodile Beat before I could due, at least partially, to her. The wake was a mess of second and third cousins I had never met before and haven’t seen since. Distant family members used it as an opportunity to catch up with each other, or tell me I was a poet-a title I was more than happy to receive; any link between mum and me was something to be treasured. The Distance that had grown between my mother and I while she was sick meant that to me, she could still be lying in bed at the hospital. But after a week of people telling me how sorry they were, it began to sink in. The shock of the first weeks gradually became confusion and guilt about how I had reacted. I felt I wasn’t as upset as everyone else because I hadn’t cried. I couldn’t help but wonder why. Why did I cope with it so well? Why didn’t I need counselling like the rest of my family? Why wouldn’t I cry? I felt like I must not have valued her enough. I’ve been told numerous times that people grieve differently. But that didn’t prevent me doubting the strength of my love for my mother.It was especially confusing because, since my mum’s death, my life had become suddenly easier. There were no more takeaway dinners in front of hospital TVs or homework in waiting rooms and no Intensive Care Units, which to me were full of machines, tubes and beeps more terrifying that an invisible cancer. After six months of that hospital smell ,it was a relief to know I didn’t have to go back. And that only made me feel guilty. Within weeks I could return to a life of relative normality, but I hated to think that things could be normal without my mum, as though this was an insult to her.Just to make me feel worse, I couldn’t help but think that I had become a better person because of my time without her. I was more independent and mature, but I didn’t want to be stronger because of her death. I wanted it to make me feel terrible and weak, but the six months of her cancer had prepared me for her death. All I can do is remember that there were things she hadn’t yet taught me, wisdom she still had to impart. As I’ve grown older, the hardest part of her death has been that I never got to know her as an equal. To me she was a super here, just my mum, without fault. Had she been around for longer I would have been able to see her as a person with her own weaknesses and love her in a completely new way. Even in the last six months, despite no longer being invincible, she still wasn’t quite human. She didn’t have faults, she had cancer.

Writer: Daniel Cheers
The Weekend Australian Magazine

H1N1 Flu (Swine Flu) in Malaysia

Dear parents,
As we are aware, the swine flu crisis is already spreading across Mexico to other countries. There are few cases reported in Malaysia. Therefore we at CIC has taken a few precautions steps in order to prevent from germ and sickness at our centres. Symptoms of the strain of swine flu are similar to other types of flu and include fever, sore throat, coughing, aches, headaches and chills. Our preventive steps include: frequent hand-washing at every 30 minutes, we advice children to cover their mouth with tissue when coughing or sneezing and throw the tissue into a waste basket, keeping hands away from eyes, mouth and nose, we will also close our indoor area section by section to clean up with antiseptic . We strongly advice the parents to keep their children who are sick at home and if possible to pick up the children early from school to avoid or reduce time of group interaction in school.
Thank you for your continuous supports and cooperations.

First H1N1 Flu (Swine Flu)case in Malaysia

Mother's day Special

What 'Mother' Means
M... is for the million things she gave me,

O... means only that she's growing old,

T... is for the tears she shed to save me,

H... is for her heart of purest gold;

E... is for her eyes, with love-light shining,

R... means right, and right she'll always be.

Put them all together, they spell "MOTHER," A word that means the world to me

CIC trip to KL Bird Park

On 8th May 2009, CIC had organized a trip to KL Bird Park. The Bird Park is "The World's Largest Covered Bird Park" or "The World's largest Free Flight Aviary". The Group left in five buses around 8.30am and arrived at the KL Bird Park at about 10.30am. Around 221 students participated on this trip together with 22 teachers. The park was quite well maintained, and it was not crowded. Hence, the group took a slow walk around the park checking out all types of birds. There were also a lot of monkeys in the park. The class teachers were responsible for guiding their own students into the park. The students explored more about the birds like Flamingos, Hornbills, Waterhens, Parrots, Cockatoos, Storks, Pheasants, Mynahs Pigeons, Macaws and Ducks.

CIC’s Children were very excited to see the bird show organized by the Bird Park. There were about four parrots that were performing all sorts of tasks given to them by the host - bicycle riding, rolling, flying through circles, solving simple arithmetic tasks, and so on. The show went on for about 30 minutes. Another show was about the eagle where the trainer showed how to feed the eagle. Although it was tiring, the children had enjoyed themselves, learnt something and made some new friends. Most important that the team spirit was established among them.