BIC Sant Agustí News (10/22/21)

A message from Janice Short, Principal

Dear families

I can’t believe the first half term of this academic year has just finished - where did those few weeks go? They say time flies when you are having fun, so we certainly must be having lots of fun as the half term has really flown by!

One of our school values is Responsibility and this is demonstrated in so many different ways in our school life.

Responsibility

We are engaged, promoting actions and behaviours that support a sustainable future.

The School Council has had their first meeting after the representatives for each class were voted onto the Council by their classmates. Well done to these children who will now bring new ideas and suggestions to each meeting, acting responsibly, working with staff and other children to move the school forward. We will look forward to hearing their ideas and acting upon them where possible. We are very proud of them and wish them all the best for their term in office!

The Principal's Award is given weekly in assemblies to a child who has done something special - this could be a fantastic piece of work, showing excellent behaviour, helping someone else, being brave; there are so many reasons but all of them are ultimately about taking responsibility for themselves. Last week the award was given to a Year 3 child, for an outstanding performance in not only one assembly, but two…...and for repeating the assembly song to all the children in our children’s assembly later in the afternoon. Well done -a super example of taking responsibility!

Housepoint Champions - this week the Lions enjoyed their reward for earning so many house points with a trip to the beach. They enjoyed their snacks in the sunshine and played relay games, french cricket and lots of fun with the parachute. The Wolves and Eagles are not far behind so they will be looking forward to their trip out.

We are taking responsibility towards reducing the amount of waste we produce and have introduced a zero waste policy for snacks on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Thank you so much to everyone who has tried to provide snacks with no waste; we will be looking to extend this initiative in the near future along with others, in which we will try to help sustain our beautiful environment. This is a focus topic for the school this year so we will be introducing new initiatives throughout the academic year, taking responsibility and seeing how our small steps can change some of current practices.

We encourage all the children to take responsibility when using the internet. The internet is a powerful tool but one which must be used with care and safety, to protect all users. At school our internet barriers block specific websites and the children do not use the chromebooks and laptops unattended. Cyber safety is paramount in the care of our children. Please check your child’s use of the internet to ensure their safety at all times. This is the responsibility of everyone who has children in their care.

As part of our tradition, we held Pink Monday this week to keep raising awareness of Breast Cancer and to raise money for this cause. All the children were involved in some way, from making items to sell, helping on stalls and taking part in activities to raise awareness. We raised almost 700 Euros which shows the responsibility taken by the children and all the BIC Sant Agusti team to raise awareness and money for charity. Well done and a huge thank you to all!

On the last day of this half term we behaved very responsibly during the Halloween revelry and BIC Sant Agusti was full of little skeletons, ghosts, ghouls and witches - and some big ones too! The children enjoyed a fun day of Halloween activities, dressed in their costumes, before the holiday began!

Unfortunately we have to say goodbye, hopefully goodbye for now, to one of our teachers, as Ms Golden is leaving the school. Ms Golden has enjoyed being with us and she has worked tirelessly in Year 1; we will miss her. We wish her all the best and I am sure we will see her soon. Good luck Ms Golden, the luck of the Irish will stay with you!

The new Year 1 teacher will be Ms Cahill who is an experienced teacher; she has already met the children and we are all looking forward to her being a valuable part of our school family here at Sant Agusti.

Finally, I wish you a lovely holiday. Enjoy spending time with your family, make some memories and have some adventures!

Warm wishes

Mrs Short

Principal

Baleares International College, Sant Agustí

Dates to remember!

Nursery Starfish Class

Everything is in full swing here in the Nursery classroom. As I am looking through all the photos we´ve taken in the past weeks it is hard to make a selection of all our exciting activities. We are still very engrossed with our Harvest topic and we have even made bread in the classroom! It was... well, interesting...but a lot of fun!!

As per all our school celebration days, we were tickled pink to join the celebration of Breast Cancer Awareness on Pink day. We enjoyed making big beautiful sparkly butterflies and attempted to sell them for this amazing cause.

We also took a moment to focus on Mental Health and Wellbeing Day this week, as Starfish we have introduced the focus activity of passing around a candle during circle time…….whoever holds the candle can talk about whatever springs to mind and of course, everybody else actively tries to listen. This is such an important emotional and social skill to learn at this age and throughout life, the Starfish children are aware of each other's presence and did a great job listening to everyones stories.

We cannot believe that we have reached the half term holiday and it feels like only yesterday when all 10 Starfish children came into the classroom for the first time; over the past weeks they have all developed in many ways and are now truly at home here in school, We want to thank all Starfish for an amazing first half term, what a great job you've all done!

We wish you a wonderful week off and we will see each other upon our return to school in November!

Reception Seahorses Class

I can't believe we've reached the end of the first half term! Although the time has really flown by, looking backwards our memories of these weeks in Seahorse class are endless and it really seems that we've been in school for a few months. First of all, we would like to warmly welcome our new seahorse friend to our lovely classroom; she has already been part of our BIC community for years. We are very happy that she has joined us!

During this past fortnight we've continued with our learning journey about "ourselves" but this time our focus has been on our inside, not just getting to know more about our skeleton and muscles but also learning about our feelings. This is a very complex concept but through simple games and activities we've tried to help the children to understand them. Although this is a topic we worked on every day, we had a great opportunity to talk about it during 'Mental health and wellbeing day'. One of the activities we did was trying to fit our emotions in one hand, so we could understand that they all fit in our body. The most important thing is that each of them are as important as the others. Then we matched each finger with a feeling and gave it a representative colour inspired by the book 'The Colour Monster'. We also had a very interesting group discussion on what to do when we are feeling angry and the children's answers were fantastic; these were the children's outcomes: deep breaths, thinking of nice things and remembering happy moments, singing, telling others. It was a great session!

In Maths we've started to learn about patterns using Lego, beads and all sorts of resources. In Literacy we keep learning new words and expressions; some of our new students are already using them within the classroom! We are also working really hard in our letter formation and writing our names.

Last Monday we celebrated Pink Day in school! It was such a special day for everyone; I loved to see all the children taking part in it by wearing something pink, or making a craft to sell, buying things and helping us to run the stalls. The Seahorse class made a very useful pocket tray and the parents loved it! Children are getting really conscious about the real meaning of this event as well as having a great time, and this is very positive. Thank you so much for all your support in this special cause.

We’ve had a fantastic first half-term and we would like to thank you all for your support. Wishing you all a super holiday and week ahead; we’ll see you again in November with more great and fun activities to continue our learning journey!

Happy Autumn Half term!

Year 1 Seals Class

Mrs Armitage on Wheels was the last in our series of books with repeating patterns. The children absolutely loved this story, and it was a wonderful end to what has been an excellent block of work in Literacy. The improvement in use of language and in comprehension strategies has been noticeable. In maths we had some fun with real life Venn Diagrams and took a look at flat 2D shapes. We made our Maths Eyes glasses to help us have extra sharp and observant eyes. The Seals love to make mathematical connections to our everyday environment and each day we look at photos of the world around us trying to spot maths, we have seen shapes, numbers, patterns everywhere! In Humanities we finished our block of work called Our School. Rosie, our faithful hen friend, wanted to know about traffic in our local area so we headed outside to do a traffic survey on Tuesday morning. We learned how to do a tally and we are now counting up to 50 in 5´s! We counted 43 cars in the space of 20 minutes. In phonics we have come to the end of our second set of sounds and the children are blending their sounds and enjoying reading. They are logging into the Bug Club almost every evening! In Art we created some of our very own Mark Rothko imitations on canvas. They look wonderful on display in the room. We had a very insightful art appreciation class where the children really enjoyed looking at Rothko's work and we found out that colours can help us with our feelings.

One of the highlights of this last fortnight was of course Pink Day. It was a wonderful day, full of hope, faith and a love of ALL things pink! A great cause. The children thoroughly enjoyed being part of this great cause.

As this is my last newsletter I would like to leave you with an old Irish ( Gaelic ) expression about young people :” Mol an oige agus tiofaidh siad” which translates into ´Praise the young and they will follow´ I would like to thank the children for all their energy, curiosity and fun. It has been a real pleasure to teach them and to have been allowed to witness their growth in this wonderful school.

Enjoy the half term break.

Goodbye for now,

Ms. Golden

Year 2 Turtles Class

As usual in Year 2 its been a busy two weeks with lots of learning and fun activities going on, in and out of the classroom.

We took Maths outside for some of our lessons this week. We use our chalk boards to practice number bonds and greater than/less than. We were also learning about ordinal numbers so we ran races around the playground and then had to form a line and say what our position would be. All those numbers with ´th´on the end are difficult to say!

We have been working on a number of Halloween projects this week. It started with our Literacy lesson when we had to use a range of adjectives to describe a witch; mostly they were evil nasty witches although we did have the odd one who used her powers for good actions! We followed this by creating witch pictures cutting shapes from different papers and patterns. During the next lesson we described the witch's cat and then after reading the children's classic book ´Room on the Broom¨ we re-created the story with us in it!

Our Handwriting award last week went to Amelie and Ignacio and this week to Edoardo and Noa - well done everyone, it is getting more difficult to pick star handwriters every week as you are all trying so hard! Keep it up!

We had great fun with year 1 making all of our craft items for Pink Day, we all hope lots of money was raised for this good cause.

Year 2, Ms Eccleshall and Miss Jacqui wish everyone a happy half term and lets hope the sun keeps shining!

Year 3 Dolphins Class

It’s been a busy couple of weeks leading up to half term in Dolphins class! We’ve had two assemblies, celebrated Pink Day, Mental Health Day, Dia de Las Virgenes and let’s not forget… HALLOWEEN!

We absolutely loved sharing our goals with our loved ones during our assemblies. We all worked incredibly hard, practising our lyrics, dance moves and writing our aspirations. Now all we need to do is achieve them by remembering our 3 rules for target setting … We try, we persevere and we celebrate!

In English, we have continued focusing on our story ‘The Papaya That Spoke’. We have been using thesauruses and word mats to gather exciting adjectives to describe the characters to make our stories more interesting! We have also been learning how to use punctuation for direct speech. Our aim at the end of the unit is to write our own stories based on ‘The Papaya That Spoke’.

In maths, we have been learning our 3x tables and 4x tables, we really enjoyed learning the chants as we are able to use these to help us when we don’t know the answer.

In Miss Conway’s maths group, we have been looking at addition and subtraction.

Our History and Geography sessions have combined with Art this week, as we created our very own models of European landmarks. Do you recognise any of them below?

We had a fun music lesson this week with Miss Conway, where we used the glockenspiels to play the classic tune ‘Twinkle Twinkle’. We managed to learn all of it in just one lesson because we listened so well. We are looking forward to showing Mrs Baggaley what we have learned.

We wish everyone a wonderful half term break full of Halloween fun and spookiness!

The past two weeks have been busy as we have been getting ready for the end of term and thinking about what we have been learning about over the past 7 weeks, plus we have been preparing for all the special days that have happened, such as Pink Day, Dia de las Vírgenes and Halloween.

In English we have had a focus on the alphabet and how the alphabet is used in a dictionary to help us find out what a word means as well as the correct spelling. We have continued being bossy and learning about imperative verbs in instructions. We have seen how bossy verbs are also used in explanations but that the words are not used in a commanding way…

In science we have had a focus on the very first part of the digestive system, the teeth. We have been finding about teeth of different animals, different teeth and lastly we experimented with what causes tooth decay. We used eggs to mimic the effect of coke, coffee and vinegar on our teeth. The results were quite ‘egg’streme!

In maths we have moved on to units of measurements, thinking specifically about time and length. We have used our 5x tables knowledge to help us tell the time in 5 minute intervals as well as practising converting the analogue time into digital time. Our class clock has become very helpful with time management… We have reviewed our knowledge of mm, cm and m, what this means and how we can explore the length of something. We have also investigated how many centimetres there are around our hands. We estimated and then tried to find a way to measure around our hand. We discovered that using a ruler just didn’t work. Instead we drew our hand in our books and then used string to measure all the way around the perimeter. Multiplication Station is now the place we go to find out anything we need to help us with our times tables.

In ICT lessons we have been recreating our pyramid paintings using a programme called ‘Paint’. We have learnt how to draw lines, make shapes, use different thickness lines and fill shapes with colour.

We are having a great time continuing to explore different aspects of ancient Egyptian life. Our mummified eggs are fully mummified and our fabulous Pharaohs are keeping an eye on everyone as they use the corridor outside our class! We can’t wait for the end of November as we will be having an ‘Ancient Egyptian’ day where we will bring all our learning together and have an awesome time.

Have a wonderfully restful half term. We can’t wait to get back to school on Tuesday 2nd November.

Year 5 Whales Class

This half term has been jam packed and the Whales have worked super hard on everything they have done! We are well into our Humanities topic and the children have become true Mexico experts. After carrying out their research, they created detailed fact-files with information on Mexican food, nature and landmarks. They also found out key facts such as currency and population. We think they look pretty good!

Our ICT lessons this half term have focused on internet safety. We learnt all about plagiarism and how to cite sources, creating strong passwords and how to spot spam. In the last session, we looked at how photographs can be edited to give a false impression of reality! We compared two photos and tried to work out how the photo had been changed. Then we tried changing some of our own photos to change our eyes, hair colour and facial features.

This term’s Science topic has been really interesting and the Whales have learnt a lot about living things including plants and animals. As part of our lessons on life cycles we looked closely at chicken eggs and identified the different parts including the inner and outer membranes, shell, white, yolk and albumen as well as understanding their function.

We then took on the role of naturalists and observed nature during a trip to the local forest area. Sitting quietly for ten minutes we were able to listen to the sounds of nature around us and look carefully for minibeasts and birds. Later we learnt about some famous natural scientists such as David Attenborough, Steve Backshall and Jane Goodhall.

On Monday we celebrated Pink Day and had great fun making our crafts. First we made a salt dough which we all had fun kneading! Next we used a cookie cutter to cut out heart shapes and then used a smaller cutter to cut out the inside. After allowing the shapes to completely dry out we painted them in shades of pink. Once dry we cut out pieces of cardboard to stick on the back and put a photo inside. Finally we used a glue gun to stick magnets to the back- tada they were done!

Year 6 Sharks Class

Year 6 have worked hard this half term, especially in English where their main focus has been to improve their paragraphing. To celebrate Halloween and practise their paragraphing they have been writing a particularly blood-curdling description of the monsters they drew at the end of year 5. In maths we have revised multiplication before starting to learn all about algebra! Some great work so far, well done Year 6!

In Science this week, we practised our memory skills to see which team could produce the most accurately drawn and labelled diagram of the parts of a flower in under five minutes. Each team member took thirty seconds to mentally record as much information as they could and report back to their team.

In PE, Year Six have been showing their prowess at gymnastics and putting Mr. Hodson to shame with their superior flexibility and their ability to defy gravity!

Finally, we have evolved from the Dark Age into the Archaic Era and the beginning of the Olympic Games. Year Six put their detective hats on and examined primary evidence in the form of Greek vases depicting scenes from the Olympics to see what they could deduce about the original games.

Spanish and Catalan with Miss Maria and Miss Ainhoa

El 12 de octubre, con motivo de la celebración del Día de la Hispanidad, los niños y niñas de BIC Sant Agustí estuvimos aprendiendo y recordando todo aquello que ya sabíamos sobre el importante personaje histórico Cristóbal Colón y el descubrimiento de América. Además de eso, la actividad planteada por nuestras profes fue la de crear nuestro propio cómic relatando con viñetas y texto la hazaña y todos los detalles que envolvían a este gran viaje. ¡Mirad vosotros mismos lo bien que han quedado!. Enhorabuena a todos los alumnos/as por esos maravillosos trabajos.

Sports department news

To build a healthy spirit of competition and team spirit amongst students, sporting events are organized all year round.

Last week, our primary students were having inter-house competitions in the game of hockey.

The overall winners are Leopards!

Well done to everyone, you did really well!