BIC Sant Agustí Weekly News (04/23/21)

Dear parents

Welcome back to the final term of this academic year - I hope everyone had a lovely holiday with family and friends.

We are focusing on our BIC Sant Agusti values of Respect, Independence and Compassion. We have been looking at the values in assemblies and lessons and the children have been looking for examples of them throughout the school day.

• Respect - building empathy and celebrating diversity.
• Independence - inspiring our children to be self-reliant and promoting continuous learning.
• Compassion - encouraging care and kindness.

The children in Year 1 Seals class were telling me today how independent they are becoming, so I am sure these values will become important words for all the children at BIC.

Today we have been learning about and celebrating Sant Jordi in Spanish lessons as it is one of the important festivals in Mallorca, where the custom is for men to present roses to the important ladies in their lives. This is a wonderful example of how the children at Sant Agusti combine their education because St George is the patron saint of England. St George’s Day is celebrated in England, with people sometimes wearing a red rose as the national symbol of England.

The legend of St George / Sant Jordi is similar in different countries. St George was a soldier who rescued a princess from a dragon, after she was chosen as a sacrifice to save her village. When he killed the dragon, as its blood hit the ground, a red rose bloomed, which St George then gave to the princess. This is the reason men give red roses to their loved ones.

Another tradition for Sant Jordi is to present books as gifts and to enjoy book readings. This tradition commemorates Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare, two very famous writers, one Spanish, one English.

There are so many links within our curriculum which embed the values we foster and encourage as well as helping the children to learn and accept so many diverse yet similar cultures in our school community - a huge positive for international education!

Have a lovely weekend

Warm regards

Mrs Short

Our first full week back after the holidays and the Starfish class children have been very busy with their new topic, ¨You can find me in the garden¨. We planted our first flower seeds, had a look at the lifecycle of a flower and spent a lot of time outside on the Lemon Tree terrace observing all kinds of things we can find in nature. We enjoyed a little messy experiment by making bird feeders, the result remains to be discovered!

As the weather will hopefully soon turn very sunny, we are looking forward to preparing some changes in the garden so that the children can get more engrossed with outdoor and messy play!

Have a nice weekend!

Welcome back, I hope you all had a great Easter. Term 3 has started and we are rolling already!

This week has included Earth Day which has got us set on our new topic: ‘Looking after our planet’. We started off with a private visit to the Y5 Exhibition where we saw the Earth models the Y5 children had made. We loved them all! This got us inspired so the children made their own rocket that took them to outer space, so they could watch our planet from a distance. We’ve also used Google Earth to explore around the Globe and to look more in detail to certain areas such as the desert or the poles. In Art we got really messy and we have made our own Earth models of ‘paper mache’ and a spinning paper Earth. We still have a lot of things to learn and explore about but the children are so excited about it! Have a lovely and safe weekend!

Children are human beings to whom respect is due, reason of their innocence and of the greater possibilities of their future” Maria Montessori

Hello everyone and welcome back!

We are starting this term with a reminder of what our school values are: RESPECT, COMPASSION and INDEPENDENCE.

Here is a small sample of what the Seals class had to say about those words today. I really wanted to share them with you all and give them space.

• RESPECT- “It’s when you look after class stuff and you look after people”
• COMPASSION- “ When somebody falls down we help them up”
• INDEPENDENCE- “You can do stuff by yourself”

Thank you Seals! SUPER seals!

What a wonderful first full week back! Y2´s theme this term is “What a Wonderful World” so as we explore our learning we will also be exploring the wonderful world we live in. We have already started to find out about all the different countries we were born in and have lived. Mrs K-B has plotted her country of birth (Germany) and 3 countries that she has lived in ( Australia, Dubai, UK).

In English we have been learning all about poems, especially poems we can read and recite and perform. Mrs K-B and Mrs C were excited to watch us perform ´Tell it to the Dog´ by Joshua Seigal in assembly and amazed by just how brilliantly we have all performed poems and tongue twisters throughout the week. We have also looked at riddles from around the world…

A riddle, a riddle, as I suppose,

A hundred eyes, and never a nose.

In Phonics we have been looking at silent letters… these sneaking letters don't make a sound but you have to write them so that the word makes sense! We giggled a lot when we looked at silent w as one of the words we found was wrinkles and Mrs K-B can wrinkle her forehead to make LOTS of wrinkles!

Maths has been all about multiplication this week, learning about the different ways you can represent multiplication sums. We have looked at groups, lots of, arrays, repeated addition, number sentences and times tables…

Science this term is all about materials. Over the holiday Mrs K-B challenged Y2 to make a contraption to protect an egg whose dream is to fly!! We have had a few contenders come into school and have started the experimental flying (dropped from a height) lessons! We tested one contraption this week as it had helium balloons attached to it. We were very eggcited to open the contraption and see that the egg was perfectly intact.

In PSHE we have been thinking about choices, Mrs K-B explained that we are the boss of ourselves and can only be the boss of what we say and do. We talked about the impact our choices can have on others. We played fun games to show we all make choices about things we like or don’t like and these can be different to what others choose, this makes the world an exciting place to live!

The summer term is here. Where does the time go?! We will be starting new topics this term which will take us up to the end of the year.

Before we start showing you all the amazing things we will be doing this term, we would like to share our photos from the last few days before we broke up for Easter - it was lots of fun!

We made Roman helmets, painted the walls around the school, took part in an Easter egg competition and even went on an egg hunt.

With batteries recharged it was great to see the energy and enthusiasm of the children back in the classroom after the Spring Holiday. This new term sees new topics and lots of new and exciting learning opportunities.

In both English and Science we are revisiting the Rainforest, using our knowledge of different species of animals to interpret different writing and presentation styles. Based on the story ‘The Great Kapok Tree’, the children have enjoyed memorising different scripts, pretending they were talking animals! From sleepy three toed sloths, the slithering boa constrictor to excited squirrel monkeys, it has been entertaining listening to their interpretations of how they imagine these animals would talk, if they could!

Maths has seen us learning about perimeters and calculating how to find out the perimeters of different shapes. In true Jellyfish style, we had fun using our bodies to make the different shapes and measurements.

Year 4 have certainly felt the beat and rhythm in Music with Mrs Baggeley. They have each been given their own ‘cup’ to practice a piece of music called ‘When I’m Gone’, by Anna Kendrick. This song features the official Cups beats. This week’s Year 4 child/parent challenge - can you perfect Pitch Perfect!?

Welcome back to our last term in Year 5, it's going to fly by! We rounded off the end of last term with our Easter Activities which included our Easter Egg Hunt, and egg decorating competition. Well done to Eagles for winning the class competition, their entries were amazing!

Our TimesTable Rockstar champion at the end of last term was Valentina, and she has held onto the champions crown this week as well, well done Valentina!

In Maths this term we have been starting to look at weights and measure, we have been working in small groups to calculate the weight of different items.

We had to remember to be very accurate!

This week we have enjoyed learning about each others’ Science Projects. There has been so much effort and thought put into these that they went on display in the Science Room for other classes to come and take a look at. A huge well done for the whole class on their super-imaginative planets!

Year 6 are enjoying our new topic of travel and tourism and have had a great week in English learning about travel writing and creating travel blogs about different countries. We have carried out research into different countries and then wrote introductions using strong vocabulary, lists to include lots of information and a focus on the positive to try and entice the reader to visit each place. Will you be inspired to visit any of these incredible places?

Our Humanities lessons started with learning about the different types of tourism and then we began to explore how transport has developed over the last few hundreds of years. By creating a timeline we were then able to show the history and development of transport from domestic horses in 2000BC to the first locomotive in the 1880s!

Como bien ya saben nuestros alumnos, este viernes 23 de abril se celebra el día del libro aquí en España. Tal vez os fijéis en algunas personas por la calle este viernes portando algunos libros o tal vez alguna rosa. Esta tradición viene de una leyenda muy conocida: “La leyenda de San Jorge”. Pues hemos querido hacer homenaje a esta querida celebración trabajando con esta leyenda durante toda la semana.

Nuestros alumnos, de todas las edades, han conocido la historia de San Jorge y el dragón y han estado realizando diversas actividades alrededor de ella.

Además, los alumnos más mayores han tirado de su imaginación y ¡se han inventado un final alternativo a la historia! Han salido finales muy originales.

It has been wonderful to see our students again and to hear about their active holidays. We are all excited to throw ourselves into the summer term.

This Wednesday during our PE class, Year 2 students were having fun while practising fundamentals of the hockey game. Students have practiced dribbling, moving with or without the ball, stopping and changing directions.

Miss Izabela is so proud of all of our pupils that continually work hard and try their very best during every single PE class.