BIC Sa Porrassa Primary Weekly News (6/11/21)

Dear families,

One of the earliest things we did at the start of last school year was to relaunch the Parent Teacher Association (PTA), led so ably by the fabulous Paula Cannady. As a school, as an international school, the relationship with our families is of the utmost importance to us, as we all work together for the same thing, the best interests and outcomes for our children and young people.

This week we held a meeting with several members of the PTA to plan a range of varied activities for next school year, events that will bring our families further together, promote our school community, develop relationships and welcome new families, and - just as importantly - to have lots of fun. We have scheduled a grand black tie ball, a Christmas and spring fair, a quiz night, an art fair, a summer festival and a family sports day. We will be sending out the dates before the end of term - please put them in next year's calendar already and save the dates! And if you have suggestions for other events and activities we could organise, please join in the discussions.

We are looking forward to welcoming nearly 100 new students (and therefore their families) to our school in September, and the role of the PTA is a really important one in helping them to feel settled and welcome. We have various committees within the PTA and we are really keen that as many of you as possible get involved, at whatever level. Some of you, led by Nadine Smith, are doing tremendous work with the library, which is looking really fantastic (thank you to everyone for their endeavours), and we are very energised at the thought of everything we can do together, for the good of our children, in the years to come. The possibilities are limitless!

I am also really pleased to introduce you through this newsletter to our incoming new head of maths, Mike Cachia, whose passion for maths and vision for the subject are hugely exciting. Alan Sparks is stepping aside from leading maths, which he has done for the last three years, to focus on his role in the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme (as well as teaching maths!). We are very much looking forward to welcoming Mike, Barry Drumm and Gilli Hawksworth to our school community in September, three excellent new teachers to join our already outstanding teaching team. Although we are all looking forward to a summer break, next year is set to be fantastic!

Enjoy the sunshine this weekend,

Alison Colwell

Principal

Dear families,

This week we have thoroughly enjoyed celebrating ‘BIC Environment Week’, linking to World Environment Day on June 5th, and with a special focus on World Ocean Day on Tuesday 8th June.

This week's primary news highlights just some of the ways we have encouraged students to take a deeper dive into their environmental understanding and responsibilities.

As I have written about in previous weeks, we really value and see the importance of the outdoors and learning outside. In addition, taking students out of the regular curriculum is essential to ensure children from the youngest ages grow up with respect and show compassion for our planet, and develop into caring global citizens. This week, Year 3 students have been debating about plastic pollution and learning about our oceans, Year 4 have focussed on water power and how we can use it to produce cleaner electricity, Year 5 have created environmental maths trails for the younger pupils, and in Spanish, students have been learning about endangered species!

Find out more here @ https://worldoceanday.org/

A special thank you to Mr Adam Fairless, our acting deputy head, who has organised a wonderful, collaborative and creative project between our two schools on the island. Read on to hear more about it.

The energy and outdoor activities continue next week with our BIC Olympics and Swimming gala. There are many more fantastic events coming up - see below - so please, keep your diaries free.

Have a wonderful weekend,

Ms Laura Hodgson

Acting Head of Primary

On Wednesday 16th June students are going to have an off timetable session with their tutors focusing on Healthy Minds and Bodies

On Thursday 17th June there are going to be sessions running throughout the afternoon with a mental health specialist from Mental Health Mallorca.

For more info, check them out athttps://mentalhealthmallorca.com/

This week we have been celebrating Environment Week here at BIC to celebrate World Environment Day and World Ocean Day. In celebration of this, we have been appreciating the beautiful, natural world that we are very lucky to have around us here in Mallorca. We have been excited to run a joint creative project between both BIC schools on the island, BIC Sa Porrassa and BIC San Agustí. To enter the project, the students were asked to produce something creative connected to the environment, such as a drawing, a painting, a sculpture or a craft. At both schools we have had an amazing response and a real showcase of the students’ creativity, with absolutely astounding work entered into the project. Ms. Colwell certainly had a very hard time judging and selecting the winners here at BIC Sa Porrassa, and could have chosen so many. I am delighted to announce the winners below, and I would like to thank each and every one of those that entered and put so much thought and work into their creations.

We are excited to remind you that next week will be the BIC Olympic Week 2021 where all students in primary will take part in a swimming gala, a field activity and the traditional athletics activity.

For more details please access the information sheet and schedules: BIC Olympics and Swimming Galas

Now that sports day teams have been chosen for all houses, we have been watching with great anticipation students practising hard in their PE lessons. At the moment it really is too hard to call as to which house will gain the most points! It really is all to play for as well, as we could see a change to the leaderboard for which house will be victorious for the year after sports day. Keep your eyes peeled for the next 2 weeks for all the updates!

The children did some great work investigating the relationship between repeated addition and multiplication using arrays.

The children enjoyed being creative using nature this week. After lots of great fun leaf printing leaves, the children put their design skills to the test to create a large scale, vibrant peacock.

We have had a busy week in Year 2. In English we have been thinking about putting plant names in alphabetical order. It was trickier than we thought as many started with the same letter so we had to look at the second or third letters.

In art we had a carousel of activities, including flower sand art, flower stencils, paper sculptures and frottage.

During our extra maths lesson, the children with English as an Additional Language played a variety of games.

We really enjoyed our PE lessons this week. The focus was on rugby skills. We worked well in teams as we developed our throwing and catching skills.

In science we completed our final recording of our sunflower diaries. We were surprised at the different rates at which they have grown.

On Tuesday it was World Oceans Day; we learnt about the different oceans and where they are on a map. We also learnt that the largest ocean in the world is the Pacific Ocean and the smallest ocean is the Arctic Ocean.

Then Year 3 had a lot of fun learning the Oceans Rap Song.

We also made beautiful underwater pictures to celebrate our oceans.

In English this week we have been working hard writing our own imaginative stories. We focussed on using adverbs, adjectives and similes. We enjoyed reading our stories with each other.

First we planned our stories:

Then we began writing our stories:

Afterwards we read our stories to each other for peer feedback. They were fantastic and full of description.

As part of environmental week, Year 3 learnt about plastic pollution in PSHE, and then we split into two teams to debate if plastic should be banned or not. There were good arguments from both teams, but we decided overall that it should be banned because we wanted to protect future marine life. Research told us that each year about 1 million marine life get injured or die from plastic pollution in the oceans. We wanted to help stop this.

This week, Year 4 has been painting rainforest frogs in the style of Oenone Hammersley, a British artist who specialised in colourful images of the rainforest flora and fauna. We all followed an instructional video for the sketch then chose our own colour palette for the painting. What a vibrant range of tree frogs.

World Oceans Day gave us a great opportunity to discuss the phenomenal power of water. We enjoyed learning about the essential function that plankton has in giving our planet 50% of the oxygen supply that is so essential to life. Linking in with our electricity science unit, we were able to see how the gravitational pull on water can be utilised to create a turbine and power a generator to produce electricity, in an entirely sustainable way. The next watery excitement we have to look forward to is the Year 4 swimming event next week. We can't wait!

Humanities continues to be a source of inspiration to our learning. Having researched an endangered animal from the rainforest, we learned how to trace a silhouette outline of an animal and used the image to create word art pictures with the information that we gathered.

Thursday saw us visiting the local Sa Porrassa garden centre. We all learnt so much about plants as medicines and plants we could eat (and not just fruit and veggies). We were shown an array of tropical plants and listened attentively as we smelled eucalyptus leaves and learned how orchids can grow high up on rainforest trees. It was a fascinating time out of the classroom that brought our other rainforest learning to life.

Year 5 have had a wonderful Environmental Week creating an Outdoor Maths Trail around the school. They worked in small groups to devise questions that students in Year 2 were able to answer by finding the mathematical patterns, shapes, and angles around the school grounds. They had a fantastic time practising the maths trails with Year 2. Year 5 pupils were caring and thoughtfully guided the younger students through their awesome maths trails.

Year 6 went outside to collect natural materials for their Mallorca model. They are enjoying putting the final touches on their wonderful creation.

Year 6 had a lot of fun competing against each other in a maths quiz and playing games to consolidate their understanding of ratio and linear number sequences. We encouraged quick thinking and teamwork.

Year 3 students had lots of fun while practising the javelin throw in their PE lesson.

We are delighted to share details of an exciting opportunity for your son/daughters to take part in KIDS RACE Half Marathon Magaluf 2021.

On Friday 25th June, Starting at 6.30PM on Athletics track in Magaluf.

Online free registrations to the race until 24th June 11 pm. https://sportmaniacs.com/es/services/inscription/kids-run-hmm-2021

Day: 25th June

Place: Athletics track Magaluf

Schedules:

• 6.30pm Collective warm-up

• 7pm Race starts

Distances:

Online free registrations to the race until 24th June 11 pm here: https://sportmaniacs.com/es/services/inscription/kids-run-hmm-2021 .

ATTENTIÓN: On-site registration can be done 1 hour before the start of the races, as long as the registrations are not sold out.

GENERAL INFORMATION FOR THE KIDS RUN HALF MARATHON MAGALUF

A fun race that aims to promote the practice of physical activity among children in the municipality of Calvià and the surrounding area. Sport allows us to promote values such as effort, social integration, solidarity, collaboration, fair play, respect, among others, without forgetting the intrinsic social component it has.

It should be noted that this race is part of the Half Marathon Magaluf 2021 event.

Features:

Gifts and prizes for all the participants

All the athletes will have race insurance.

Athletes up to 6 years old must be accompanied by their parents.

Online free registrations to the race until 24th June 11 pm here: https://sportmaniacs.com/es/services/inscription/kids-run-hmm-

ATTENTIÓN: On-site registration can be done 1 hour before the start of the races, as long as the registrations are not sold out.

On the occasion of International Environmental Week, the students of Señorita Montes have been thinking about how they can contribute to improving the world. For this reason, they have created an amazing guide with useful tips to respect the environment with small changes that we all can make at home and at school. Every little help adds up!

Access the environment guide here: Useful tips to respect the Environment

This week, the primary students have been celebrating environmental week at BIC. In Spanish, we wanted to contribute by learning about some endangered species in Spain. The Year 3 students in Ms Rodríguez’s class created these amazing banners and posters about animals which are close to extinction. This helped to raise awareness about the necessity of protecting them.

Mr Cachia grew up in Fife, Scotland attending Strathallan School in Perthshire before reading Law at the University of Leeds. He qualified as a Mathematics teacher on the Teach First program, completing a Post Graduate Certificate of Education at Sheffield Hallam University and a Masters of Education at the University of Manchester, whilst gaining two years of teaching experience at the South Leeds Academy. Mr Cachia spent four years teaching in Australia at Ballarat and Clarendon College and a year at Gordon’s School in Surrey before joining Blundell’s School in Devon as Deputy Head of Mathematics in September 2019. He is relishing the opportunity to lead the BIC mathematics department next year and is committed to ensuring that every child reaches the limits of their potential in the subject. A passionate sportsman, Mr Cachia has played and coached rugby, football and cricket to a high level. He is extremely excited about moving to Mallorca and experiencing a different culture whilst enjoying the many delights of island life.