Your guide to all news at school
A message from Janice Short, Principal
Dear families
What do these pictures mean to you?
Bullying - a word which has a huge impact in thought, word and deed. Bullying brings emotions of all kinds. Bullying can be vicious, nasty and have an impact into and during adult life. Bullying has lasting effects on the bullied and the bully. There are different kinds of bullying - verbal, physical, being a bystander and cyber-bullying. Bullying happens for different reasons - because someone is different, or a bully is jealous, a bully may have a negative image of themselves or they may have suffered themselves.
Any possible isolated incidents of bullying are never taken lightly here at BIC Sant Agusti and during this past week of celebrating International Friendship Week, we have been spending time every day looking at not only how to be a good friend but also at issues surrounding bullying, talking about how to prevent it and what to do if you are being bullied - answering the points in the first paragraph. This can be a hard hitting subject for primary schools, but a necessary part of growing up and life education, regardless of the age of the child. Of course the language we use is appropriate to the age and abilities of the children but it is a life skill which is needed.
Your children should be able to tell you that bullying is when someone hurts someone else on purpose and that it happens over and over again. It is not when someone does or says something unkind once. They know that they should go to an adult immediately, with a friend if necessary, to report what has been happening.
As well as looking at bullying we have focussed on friendship too and on how to be a good friend. We need to be tolerant, kind, a good listener, able to have fun and laugh, give compliments and be there for each other. There are some wonderful lessons to be learned and reminded of as adults too!
Have a lovely friendship filled weekend,
Warm regards
Mrs Short
Principal
Baleares International College, Sant Agustí
Nursery Starfish Class
Flying through the school year as we have so far, we also flew into our week's holiday! We hope you have enjoyed the wonderful week of family time.
In Nursery we have started with our new topic ¨The Weather¨ this week. We are learning about different weather patterns we notice here in Mallorca and in particular what kind of weather occurs in other places around the world.
Alongside this topic we will focus on the autumn weather surrounding us here on the island. We have collected autumn leaves from around the school and looked at the changes we can observe in our environment.
Meanwhile, the Starfish class children have continued learning about the different letter sounds and songs and they are swiftly expanding their phonics knowledge.
We are also learning to play number and letter games on the Chromebooks, something all Starfish class children get very excited about.
A favourite game this week has been musical chairs. We all had real belly laughs looking at the children trying to secure a chair when the music stopped.
We are always learning, moving, laughing, busy and having a lot of fun.
We are looking forward to the next weeks to come, in which we are also going to start practising for our Christmas show.
Have a lovely weekend!
Reception Seahorses Class
Seahorse class have been exploring all things cold!They have been doing different experiments, from guessing which objects would freeze to discovering the best way to melt ice. They have created their own melted snowmen pictures, tried writing a word independently to tell us why they melted, which included taking a hot bath and being in the sun for too long.
Staying along the theme of writing, Seahorse class have been doing really well with their sounds and word recognition. We are now up to the sound ‘u’ and hopefully at home they are as enthusiastic with their sounds as they are in school. Some children are even sounding out and writing words correctly and independently- Keep up the great work Seahorses!
We have also been looking at adding 1 in Maths, using our helpful jumping frog to find 1 more. We have also been impersonating the frog on our own giant number lines, jumping along the numbers to find the answer, as well as using dice to create sums.
Year 1 Seals Class
What an amazingly fun packed last two weeks we have had in Seals. The end of last term was busy enough with Halloween (we all had so much spooky fun!) and this term we´ve already had birthdays, Friendship week, topic learning and have started to practise the songs for the Christmas show.
We have started our new English topic and have been looking at Fiction and Non Fiction books. The children have grasped very quickly the points that make a book fall into a specific genre. We have not only enjoyed listening to a variety of stories but also have enjoyed flicking through all the facts and information found in real life books. The children also used the camera to take photos of some of their favourite classroom fiction and nonfiction books, before using the photos to support their learning for an activity.
Two children then took the role of teacher and helped the class to sort the classroom library books into piles of fiction and non fiction books. The library is now organised in an easier way, with all the story books on one side and the information on the other.
We all worked together to help sort the rest of the books into the correct genres. We now have a super organised classroom library. READING IS FUN!
During maths we have been focusing on numbers above 10, especially the teen numbers. The children are now able to recognise and name the teen numbers correctly. To help support this learning they have been playing number games in teams, matching objects to a given number. They have also been ordering and sequencing numbers from the smallest to the largest and vice versa. This has been fun as the children have been working with numbers up to one hundred.
Positional language has also been introduced this week. After listening to the song ´Where's the Monkey´, the children enjoyed using the class monkey and placing it into different positions. Some children were saying the position and the others had to follow it. Good game, this can be played at home too!
It is great being able to use the Art room, being able to spread out and get all creative with colours. This week we have been colour mixing! Using the primary colours, red, blue and yellow, the children mixed them together to see what colours they could make. The end results were amazing! Each table created different shades of colours, we linked the paintings to our Science topic of Seasons. During the activity the children could be heard relating the colours to the different seasons; Winter, Spring, Autumn and Winter. Good job Seals!
The Four Seasons shown with trees. The children used a variety of resources to complete the trees to match what they look like during each season. These are now displayed in the classroom, along with the colour mixing activity.
Computer Science is another lesson Seals enjoy….not only are the children learning all about online safety but also how to log on, type a website address correctly, play age appropriate learning games and then log off, but also how to share and work together with a Chromebook. These lessons take place every Tuesday afternoon and the whole class seems to really enjoy them. Next week we have a new art programme installed and ready to use. The children will be able to get creative, while learning the skills of drawing, clicking, dragging, enlarging, shrinking and adding images to a piece of work. Great skills to have for the future.
Watch this space for further Computer Science photos!!!!
We will finish this week, Friendship Week with the lovely words said by the children in Seals. When asked about what one word sums up the meaning of friendship, they replied…..
happy, love, best, sharing, playing, nice, kind, smile, hug, fun
May this world take note of these words from young 5 and 6 year olds, wonderful!
Year 2 Turtles Class
We ended last term with a bit of a bang - our Halloween Assembly. Everyone looked fantastic in their costumes and enjoyed performing their assembly, twice! In the afternoon we played halloween games, decorated pumpkins and sang songs. After that we were definitely ready for our holidays!
We have started our new literacy focus for the term which is Postcards and Letters. We started the term by reading the books - Dear Teacher and John Patrick Norman Mc Hennessey - the boy who was always Late! The boy in the story used to make up wild excuses to his teacher about why he was late to school. Using this as a prompt the class used their imaginations to write a postcard to their teachers about a goo lo d excuse why they are late for school. Some were taken away by mad scientists, some went to Africa, New York, under the sea, fairy castles and even desert islands as an escape from school! So many almost convincing excuses!
In maths we have started the term learning about position and movement. This included using the beebots for programming. We wrote a programme using the road maps that we had drawn out on big pieces of card. Each group had to try and successfully work their way around the route on the maps.
We have now moved onto measure, learning all about centimetres and metres. We have estimated the length of different items in the classroom and then measured them accurately to see how close we were…. we even measured all of our feet!!
In our Humanities lesson we are learning all about Communication, so this links in very well with our Literacy lessons. We have looked at communication in the past - cave drawings to smoke signals, carrier pigeons to sign language. It is hard to believe that there was life before mobile phones, Facebook and Twitter!
In Science we are learning about Living things. We are starting by conducting a study of the area around our school classifying things into groups - living, dead and never alive. It certainly prompted a lot of discussion amongst the children!
Art - we have started to work with clay and are learning to use tools to cut and decorate clay shapes. We will be making some Christmas decorations soon as time is going by so quickly this term already. Christmas always comes early in school and Christmas songs for our show can be heard all around the school.
This week we have also been taking part with the whole school for Friendship Week. We have explored the topic of bullying in its many forms and discussed what we can do if we come across this in or out of school. We have also looked at what makes a good friend and how random acts of kindness can make anyone happy. The class has been given a kindness challenge to complete this week so ask them about this and let's hope the compliments and kind actions become part of normal conversations and behaviour. Have a lovely weekend everyone!
Year 3 Dolphins Class
This week , we have been celebrating Friendship and Anti-Bullying Week. The children have been learning songs, reading and writing poems and creating pieces of artwork which will be displayed around our school. We have been discussing how we should celebrate our similarities and differences and how we should support each other.
In Maths, we have been ordering fractions and finding a fraction of an amount as well as identifying different coins and making about in pounds and pence.
In Geography, we have enjoyed studying the third and fourth largest continents- North and South America. We have been learning the difference between the human and physical features of a continent and have also been studying The Amazon Rainforest in more depth.
The children thoroughly enjoyed examining different rocks and crystals in class. We discussed the different ways in which we could classify rocks and worked within our small groups to categorise the different images into natural and man-made rocks.
We have been studying the style and technique of Georgia O`Keefe and recreated our own versions of her work by examining flowers in nature and through a variety of blown up images.
Year 4 Jellyfish Class
Year 4 have had a busy return to school after half term and have dived into new learning. They have been learning lines for upcoming assemblies, plays and performances. To say they are honing their performance skills would be an understatement. It will be lights, camera and action time very soon!
In English we have continued our theme of fables and fairytales but with an Egyptian twist. Our focus book this week served up a wonderful fusion of an old familiar fairytale ( Cinderella) but set on the banks of the River Nile. The children have been using their critical thinking skills, imagination and debating prowess to analyse the story and to question if it really was a happy ending for our main character Rhodopis. One thing everyone did agree on, however, was that the Egyptian version was better than the traditional tale.
In Humanities we are coming to the end of our Ancient Egyptian unit of work. The children had so much fun hopping into a class time machine and travelling back almost 5,000 years to get to the year 3,100BC to see what life was really like there. On the way we met the Tudors, the Vikings, the Greeks and of course played a few of those old fashioned Victorian games. Having a good sense of a timeline is a very important skill. Year 4 now know where they stand in history and who came before them and when!
Class Assembly practice is in full swing in both classes and the children have had much fun preparing their class play for you. Best of luck!
In maths we have been zoning in on decimals, fractions and most recently weight. We have been weighing everything from pencils to mandarins to rice and pasta. The children have used many different types of weighing scales to see how to read them and to convert those grams into kilograms . Predicting, estimating, converting and calculating- all such important skills for life.
End zones, dribbling, controlling- all important football skills for boys and girls. In Sport we have moved on to football skills in both classes which involves team work, reaction skills and of course shooting for goals! A lot of fun was had by all! We end each lesson with a big thumbs up as we shout “RESPECT” at the end of each game. Respect is an integral part of the beautiful game and the children learn a lot from playing as a result.
Speaking of respect, our attention turned towards Friendship this week as we celebrated the theme of Reaching Out against bullying. Year 4 enjoyed a week of learning new songs, poetry, kindness hunts and art activities to make one message loud and clear: We always say NO TO BULLYING here at BIC!
Year 5 Whales Class
Year 5 Whales are straight back into the swing of things and enjoying lots of new topics. In Literacy we have been learning about slam poetry. First we thought about the features of slam poems and read lots of different poems, discovering that there are no rules at all and they can be written about anything at all! After performing a few poems, we started planning our poems. We mind mapped lots of ideas from hamsters to Justin Bieber and a piece of paper to Godzilla! Next time, we will share some of our super poems with you.
Finally our Humanities topic is starting to focus on chocolate and this week the children have thought about some significant events in history - from the cacao bean all the way through to the yummy chocolate bars we eat today. Using timeline cards, the children sequenced the events and tried to work out which date each event took place.
In our art lessons, we have linked our Science topic of ‘Life Cycles’ to learn about botanical illustrations. We closely observed different flowers and then created some beautiful pieces of artwork which comprised several different parts of the flower.
Good enough to be part of an art gallery, we think!
Our new topic is focusing on Central American art so for our first lesson we learnt about the famous Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. We looked at some of her paintings and discussed what we could see as well as how each painting made us feel. Next, we had a go at drawing our own Frida Kahlo paintings, trying to recreate her unique style.
Year 6 Sharks Class
In English, we have been digging deeper into “Holes” and unearthing as many new words as we can to increase our vocabulary.
In science, Year 6 finally inserted their brains into their human bodies as they were taking a close look at the human nervous system.
In History, we have been channelling our inner hoplite Greek warriors and they designed our own hoplon, the shield and helmet of two of the most famous Greek city states, Athens and Sparta. The pupils will soon be looking at these two cities' turbulent history as both reluctant allies and fearsome enemies.
Finally, congratulations go to Kailani and Ella. Kai received the principal's award for all the hard work she carried out during Pink Day and Ella for her wonderful winning entry into the poetry competition.
Sports department with Mrs Izabela
Last Saturday 12th November, our BIC Sa Porrassa and San Agustin students had an exciting opportunity to take part in the Volleyball Tournament organised by Consell de Mallorca.
Our BIC students had their first tournament and they did very well. It was amazing to see parents cheering them on the whole way!
What great memories they will have!
There was an extraordinary sports atmosphere at the match, and we had a great time.
Spanish and Catalan with Miss Maria
Esta semana la protagonista en el colegio ha sido LA AMISTAD. Es por ello que con los alumnos/as en clase de español nos hemos centrado en este tema y hemos realizado maravillosas actividades llenas de enseñanza. Además, con la clase 5&6 hemos jugado a un divertidísimo juego sobre la compatibilidad con nuestros amigos/as. Lo hemos pasado genial y sobre todo hemos comprendido la importancia de la amistad y es que, como ya sabemos, quién tiene un amigo, tiene un tesoro.
Spanish and Catalan with Miss Ainhoa
¡Otra nueva semana aprendiendo cosas nuevas! En la clase de español Year 1&2 estamos viajando a diferentes lugares y descubriendo muchas curiosidades. Para terminar estas dos semanas hemos estado conociendo Japón y, como resultado, hemos preparado y completado un resumen apuntando las palabras de vocabulario que hemos descubierto. Además, ¡hemos escrito en japonés!
Por otro lado, comenzamos ampliando nuestro vocabulario en español haciendo uso de un juego “Yo aprendo” manipulando las diferentes letras de vocabulario y practicando nuestra lectura.
Spanish and Catalan with Miss Marina
¡Hola de nuevo! Esta semana les ha tocado a la clase de Year 2 de catalán. Hemos empezado un tema nuevo en el que hemos leído un cuento sobre unos animales (La moneia i la gorra) (“El mono y su gorra”). Para mejorar nuestro vocabulario y nuestra lectoescritura en catalán hemos hecho un cómic sobre la lectura. ¡Mirad qué bien nos ha quedado y qué dibujos más bonitos! También hemos sido capaces de resolver algunas preguntas que Miss Marina nos puso y… ¡lo hemos hecho solos!.
