A message from Janice Short, Principal
Dear parents
Celebrating Friendship Week last week really made us focus on friendship, what it means and why it is important. All the children participated in some lovely activities as part of the week and each class gave another class their Friendship seeds to grow, nurture and culture, just like true friendship. Although there were many activities to highlight and celebrate friendship, we also use Friendship Week to look at anti-bullying each day too. Peer on peer abuse and cyberbullying have become part of the education of our children and both of these were a focus throughout the week. Bullying is not tolerated at BIC Sant Agustí, and by educating our children in such matters, we hope that all children will learn how to be good friends with each other.
Part of our ongoing SMSC (Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural) ethos is about giving to charity, another part of friendship. Over the last few weeks we have collected 135 Advent Calendars for the Allen Graham Charity for Kidz, which is absolutely amazing. Thank you so much. Definitely the little school with a big heart!
Following our BIC Sant Agustí objective of “children giving to children”, we will be starting our Christmas Shoebox Appeal next week for local disadvantaged children, so information regarding this will be sent out shortly. Please help us to help local children in need.
Later in December we will be holding our Christmas Jumper Day, organised by our School Council, proceeds of which will be going to “Save the Children”.
We believe that by our children learning to give and not necessarily always receive everything they ask for, they will become more thoughtful, considerate and kind young people, willing to give to others when needed. However, just a little heads up for the immediate future - I have already seen some letters to Santa which contain some fantastic wish lists!
Have a lovely weekend and enjoy the Christmas lights,
Warm wishes
Mrs Short
Principal
Baleares International College, Sant Agustí
Nursery Starfish Class
Practising for our Winter Show is in full swing down here in the Nursery classroom! All the children are working hard on following the actions and learning the lyrics to the songs they will be performing. We are going to continue practising for another few weeks and we are looking forward to the Winter show on Wednesday the 15th of December. As we are slowly but surely leaving November behind us for this year, the festive sparkle of the holiday season is more and more evidently present in our classroom. We have enjoyed listening to Michael Buble playing in the background whilst playing in different learning areas and we will bring our winter chimney into the classroom soon so we can make it look cosy and winterlike!
We are currently learning all about ourselves and our local environment. The Starfish class children have loved walking around the school in search of some natural painting materials and we have thoroughly enjoyed painting with them too. They have also been on a trip to the local beach and did an amazing job walking down towards the beach, paying attention to all the safety instructions! Fantastic job Starfish class.
During Friendship week, the Starfish class has focussed on being kind to each other and inviting other children to play with them. Truthfully, they were already doing a very good job at this but it is very important for us all to continuously create opportunities to remind ourselves of the power of kindness.
Reception Seahorses Class
Last week the whole school celebrated ‘Friendship week’; this was a great opportunity for the children in Seahorses to show us how friendly and kind they are but also to have a common focus with the rest of school and to work together towards the same goal. One of the school projects was to create a friendship garden; every student in school decorated their own stone. The children were so creative. They also decorated a plant pot, planted some seeds and gave it as a present to another class, which will be taking good care of it, the same as we will with friends.
But of all the projects, the one in which all the Seahorses became really aware of the importance of being friendly and kind to others was ‘the wrinkled heart’. They had very clear ideas on which words can hurt your heart and which words and actions can make your heart grow in happiness. The children can be very thoughtful of others! One of the outcomes of the week is that we have started our own kindness jar in the classroom which will hopefully be full of colour and kindness very soon.
Along this, the children have continued to work hard exploring the changes in our environment and creating a beautiful Autumn display. They are also gaining a full understanding of numbers 0 to 10 and they are becoming very confident in this area. In Phonics children are really engaging with the new sounds and the games we play; the ‘fly swat’ game has become very popular lately.
As we are reaching the end of November, the Christmas sparkles are getting closer and will begin to shine soon. The children, meanwhile, are warming their angelic voices in preparation for our end of the term ‘Winter Show’. They are very excited as they can sense that this very special and magical time of the year is almost here! Wishing you all a lovely and cosy weekend!
Year 1 Seals Class
This week was the grand opening of Seals Classroom Library. The children wrote invitations to friends and of course, Mrs Short, who kindly came down to cut the ribbon and officially name our library OPEN! The children came up with wonderful ideas and designed posters, pictures, stories and facts to decorate the special area. They were very excited to have their friends come to read with them, they even brought in treats to share. HAPPY READING SEALS.
We have also been doing lots of activities for Friendship Week, as well as practising our assembly and songs for the winter show, so it is all go in Year !
Year 2 Turtles Class
Did you know that friendship means “familiar and liking of each other's mind” and that people who are friends talk to each other and spend time together...well it’s a good job we’re all such good friends here in Year 2 as we’ve enjoyed spending a lot of time together celebrating Friendship Week. We started the week with lots of ‘odd socks’ walking around the school and it was remarkable to see the children understanding the meaning of wearing odd socks. We used this as common ground to continue our friendship week, completing various activities as to what makes each and every one of us a unique friend.
As part of Friendship week, we planted ´Seeds of Friendship´for our friends in Year 6, we decorated the pot with inspirational messages and then presented it to them to look after.
We have covered a few areas in Maths over the past two weeks and the Turtles Class particularly enjoyed measuring various objects in the classroom. They have been busy learning the difference between centimetres and metres, problem solving which measurement to use for larger and smaller objects. Our mathematicians have also been stretching their brains adding and subtracting two digit numbers.
The great thing about Literacy is that it covers a range of different activities to ensure the children learn and expand their vocabulary, comprehension, fluency and writing skills. We started the week group reading The Guinea Fowl story on the computer. The children then had to talk about the story, in their small groups, sequence the events and answer questions relating to it. This demonstrates that children understand both the vocabulary and interpretation of what they are reading. Year 2 did a great job and could clearly tell us what Jenny, Lenny and Penny had been up to!
In our Wellness sessions we have been learning about Resilience and how we can become more resilient in everyday situations. We have been learning different techniques on understanding and controlling our emotions, problem solving and having positive thoughts.
Rewind two weeks when we had our exciting science day and we planted our seeds, we were very happy with the results. The children were amazed at how quickly their seeds had grown into plants and they enjoyed eating their crop!
Rehearsals have started for the Christmas show. We have started our singing practices in school. Words will be coming home shortly to practice but the children are all learning them very well. All the teachers have them running through their heads too!!
We wish you all a lovely weekend with hopefully a little less rain and a bit more sunshine!
Year 3 Dolphins Class
Last week we started the week in our odd socks to kick off ‘Friendship Week’. We talked about the meaning of odd socks and how we celebrate everyone’s differences! The focus of the week was ‘One Kind Word’ and how saying one kind word can brighten up someone’s whole day. Have you said a kind word or compliment today?
In English, we have been working hard writing our best retells of ‘The Papaya That Spoke’. We first wrote a draft and then we edited our work to improve it. We have used lots of features including inverted commas, adjectives and adverbs. We also made our writing more exciting by adding synonyms! Did you know a synonym is when two or more words mean the same thing. For example, ‘big and huge’ can you think of any others?
In Miss Conway’s maths classes, we have been continuing with time. This week we have been learning to read the time to the nearest 5 minutes. We have been drawing, making and writing the time in analogue and digital!
In Ms Robert’s class, we have been revising our previous learning and have recently completed this term’s assessments!
In our ICT lesson this week, we have been researching facts about the rainforest to discover more about our continent of the week ‘South America’. We worked in pairs and created a map of ideas ready for our next step of learning, where we will create our own Powerpoints!
We have been continuing with our beautiful African necklaces. Last week, we made our clay beads and this week we painted them in bright colours. We also got our hands messy for the whole school handprint Christmas tree. It was lots of fun! Next week, we will be attaching our beads to the necklaces so we can wear them with pride!
Year 4 Jellyfish Class
Odd Socks day started our ‘Friendship’ week in style… Y4 had spots, stripes, bold colours, pastel colours, character and patterned socks. It was a ‘socktastic’ way to ‘kick off’ our week. We all looked at all the different socks we wore and talked about how the different socks represent how we can celebrate everyone’s differences! The focus of the week was ‘One Kind Word’ and how saying one kind word can not only light up someone’s day but can light up your day too. To continue with the ‘One Kind Word’ theme our countdown to the end of term will challenge us to use kind words and kind actions during that day. We made Kindness Tree baubles with acts of kindness on them to help remind us of what we can do to spread kindness.
“A true friend is the greatest of all blessings” - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Friendship week coincided with our PSHE unit, VIP (Very Important People).
We have been thinking about what makes us a good friend and what we like in other people that makes us want to be their friend. We have focused on how we can keep a friendship going, with the ups and the downs and how we feel when we meet someone that we don’t have much in common with. We have been checking in with each other and playing games using kind words to share the things we like about different people in our class.
Our spellings the past few weeks have been tricky! We have all agreed that the ‘shun’ sound at the end of a word can be spelt in far too many different ways; -tion, -sion, -ssion and -cian. At least with the -cian ending all our words were linked to a profession, much easier to remember the rule when you know that the first ‘chunk’ of the word is related to the job someone does! And to topple the ‘shun’ weeks of spellings Mrs KB gave Y4 a lesson on the spelling pattern -ought! 6, yes SIX different ways of sounding this spelling pattern. Can you think of all six?
Maths has been column crazy with adding and subtracting using the column and expanded column methods. Y4 have been working extremely hard to use their partitioning proficiency, their number bond know-how and their ‘mad’ multiplication skills to find the answers to 2 digit and 3 digit questions.
AND… we have been learning our winter show songs and even though we say so ourselves, we are rocking the tunes! Making green handprints to be part of our whole school Christmas Tree...
Year 5 Whales Class
You may have heard the dulcet tones emerging from the Whales classroom over the last few weeks as the Year 5s have been singing their hearts out in preparation for our Winter show. As well as singing, we have been super busy in the classroom especially during Friendship week! We started off by learning about what friendship actually means and what is important to us in a friend. We made bookmarks for each other and felt very special when we were presented with this thoughtful gift.
During the week we also learnt about cyberbullying, decorated friendship stones and also planted a seed for the Nursery class.
The Whales were also busy in English lessons as they have been writing poems. We started by exploring ideas and discovering that a poem can be about absolutely anything! After creating mind maps, we then decided on a theme for our poems and then used rhyme, repetition and rhythm before performing them to the rest of the class.
Science lessons have been out of this world so far this term as we have started learning about Earth and space. In the first lesson we thought about the earth as a spherical body, looking at the shape of the earth from our perspective and exploring theories from scientists over the years.
Some of the Whales are making great progress in their French lessons and recently revised the names for the colours. They had fun creating their own colour wheels and mixing primary colours to make secondary colours!
Year 6 Sharks Class
Year Six celebrated Friendship Week by decorating a friendship plant pot, which they presented to an eager Year 2 class. Every pupil wrote a word that they felt linked to nurturing a plant and nurturing a friendship.
They also produced some fine Friendship Stones with messages designed to encourage kind behaviour for the Friendship Garden the school is creating on Lemon Tree terrace.
In history, we have seen Alexander the Great build his mighty empire and now we are beginning our individual projects to design an educational poster on a Greek era of our choice. When we have the finished designs, we hope to publish some of them in the next edition of the BIC Newsletter.
In science this week, we started looking at metamorphosis and the different stages of a butterfly. We also had a brief revision of Living Things and Their Habitats readying ourselves for the end of unit assessment! In maths we have been learning how to change fractions into their same families using the lowest common multiples and denominators, before moving onto adding and subtracting fractions.
Year Six artists made their entries into this year´s My Favourite Christmas Moment Is … competition with some very festive designs.
Spanish and Catalan with Miss Maria
Esta semana en español los alumnos de year 3&4 hemos empezado un nuevo tema, cuya lectura era sobre los inventores. Todos juntos hemos aprendido la importancia de todo aquello que ahora existe en nuestro mundo gracias a los que un día lo inventaron. Es por ello, además, que nos hemos convertido en genios inventores y hemos diseñado nuestros propios inventos. Aquí os dejamos algunos para que veáis qué bonitos y originales han quedado.
Spanish and Catalan with Miss Ainhoa
Esta semana hemos comenzado a practicar las canciones de Español y, en Year 1&2 nos hemos estado convirtiendo de nuevo en piratas y hemos practicado la escritura, caligrafía y gramática con la letra de la canción. También la hemos representado con dibujos para trabajar la comprensión.
Por otro lado, hemos comenzado las exposiciones del proyecto llevado a cabo por los alumnos de Year 3&4 de catalán sobre el espacio. Hemos conocido aspectos muy interesantes así como la misión más larga llevada a cabo al espacio, o cómo vive un astronauta en la nave.
Sports department news
On Saturday 20th November our young volleyball BIC players attended The Superleague Volleyball match at Son Moix, Fenie Energia Voley Palma - Ushuaia Volley Ibiza
Our pupils and their parents together with BIC volleyball coach, Miss Izabela Zborzynska, went to see volleyball at the highest level on the island, with the Mallorcan team playing in the highest league in Spain.
The purpose of the trip was to give the dedicated volleyball club members the opportunity to see how the game is played at the highest level, encouraging the young people to spend their free time actively and above all, group integration.
The match ended with the score 3:1 for the team from Mallorca. After the match, our students had the opportunity to enter the centre court and take a picture with the players. For all the participants the event was a great experience and everyone is looking forward to having another opportunity to cheer on our great players. There was an extraordinary sports atmosphere at the match, and we had a great time.
Massive thanks to the parents of our young athletes for their support and great cheering during the match!
We would like to say thank you to the team Fenie Energia Voley Palma for the invitation to the match.
