BIC Sant Agustí Weekly News (04/30/21)

Dear parents,

Every class has been very busy this week, as the topics for Term 3 begin to expand and be explored in more detail. As I go into each class every day, it never ceases to amaze me to see not only how the children are learning, but what they are learning. The children are really engaging with their learning and are having fun. One thing I often say is, “If a child is happy they will be ready to learn - a happy child will be a successful child.” The children at Sant Agustí really do have fun learning. This week has seen children going to the forest as part of science, planning party budgets in Computer Science, making collages in Art and designing gardens and outdoor areas in Early Years.

The weather has started to improve and the children have enjoyed playing with their new playground equipment, improving their sharing and participating skills as they work out how to keep the equipment in bubbles! Restrictions make us all think in a different way but we can always think of a solution to a problem!

Over the holidays many of the children participated in our Extreme Reading challenge and we had some amazing entries with children reading books on beaches, in trees, on sheds, on cars, upside down and in the bath! These are a flavour of the entries:

After spending some time judging this competition the winning entries are those from Preslav (Y3), Sophie (Y4), Rut (Y2) and Valentina (Y5).

It is Mothers’ Day in Spain on Sunday and I hope you enjoy the cards the children have made for the special ladies in their life. We have been thinking about how important it is to look after these special people and spoil them on Mothers’ Day - and hopefully on other days too! I am sure you will be delighted to know that Miss Maria has a new addition to her family, a little boy, Sergio, so she will be spending Mothers´ Day as a mummy of 2! Congratulations!

Have a lovely weekend and I hope you all have a wonderful Mothers´ Day!

Warm regards

Mrs Short

Principal

Oh how I love this topic, and I am so happy that all Starfish are getting very engaged with it too! This week we have spent a lot of time outside; we have been collecting leaves, flowers and sticks and looking at their differences and similarities. All children had a blast cutting up all the natural treasure they found and smelling the different smells, feeling the different textures and observing the different colours and sizes. Each Starfish filled up a cup with the flowers and leaves they cut and together we filled each cup with water. These cups are currently sitting in the freezer, waiting to be taken out next week so that we can play with the flower ice blocks we've created. It is needless to say that the photos of this activity will feature in next week's newsletter - just so that we can keep you in the loop of all the exciting things we do here in Starfish class.
Wishing you the best weekend!

What a busy week again in Seahorses! We’ve continued to explore about our planet Earth and learn new things. This time our focus has been on ‘What does it look like?’ and what elements we can find on it, such as water! The children have their own ideas about how the water and the sea looks and they were so creative when reflecting these on their collage. We also looked at the inside of the Earth; we were so impressed with the lava ! We found out that Hawaii has a lot of volcanoes! Do you know how many? We’ve also visited other places of our globe such as the pyramids of Egypt or the North Pole, using ‘Google Earth’.

In Maths, we’ve continued working hard on our counting skills while we are getting very independent in using our 0 to 20 rocket number lines. To end the week with a great project the children made their own rockets; they did a great job and they were very independent during the process.

Finally, I would like to give a very warm WELCOME to our two new Seahorses! We are so happy that you have joined us. We are going to have lots of fun together!

Wishing you all a lovely and safe weekend and a very special HAPPY Mother’s Day to all our mums!

Medieval dancing, castle floor plans, trips to Antarctica with BIC airlines and lots lots more! What a great week of learning and doing this week. Portcullis, battlements and drawbridges are now words in the Seals everyday vernacular! When it is time to bring the castles home you can enjoy listening to your child tell you all about life in castles in days gone by!

Creative Writing Fun- we have made our passports, checked in our luggage and boarded our flight to Antarctica! We learned some very interesting facts about this frozen desert this week- did you know Antarctica is 50 times larger than the UK!

In Science we watched a video of a weather forecaster presenting the evening weather and we are poised to try our very own presentations tomorrow! We have learned lots of new vocab and we know quite a few weather symbols now!

And of course our Maths Eyes are open wide from the get go each day with our morning mental maths challenge!

Have a lovely weekend.

This week has gone so very quickly…

We have continued to explore and delve into the wonderful world of poetry. We created our own tongue twisters, linking phonics and English lessons by using consonant blends and alliteration and of course playing our favourite game, KABOOM!

The sneaky snake snuck the snail’s snack.

The critters crashed into the croc and cracked the crate.

The glass glove glittered and glowed in the gloom.

We have listened to wonderful different types of poems; poems with rhythm and rhyme, poems with alliteration littering them and twisting our tongues, short poems, longer poems, poems sprinkled with onomatopoeia and similes like the twinkling stars in the night sky, free verse poems, nonsense poems and poems with repeated words and phrases, phrases, phrases..! One of our focus poems was ´Three Good Things´ by Jan Dean. The first verse inspired us to think about 3 good things that happened the day before…

At day’s end

I remember three good things.

The last verse helped us with our Best Write and Mrs K-B said that she has a whole class of poets.

Money, money, money… Yes, you've guessed it we have been learning about money this week in Maths. We have been recognising coins (British pounds and pence and the Euro and Euro cents), 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…

We have been absolutely EGGmazed by the number of EGGcellent contraptions that have been tested this week in Science. The different sorts of materials used have been EGGstordinary, we have seen paper, fabric, plastic, fluff (not sure what it was made from but it was fluffy!), tin foil, wood, polystyrene, cotton wool, the list is LONG. We used our planning house to write up the experiment. The trickiest bit was thinking about how to make our test. We soon figured it out though and made it a fair test by keeping the height the egg was dropped from the same. Mrs K-B was up and down the stairs like a yo-yo!

In art we have started making our ´What a wonderful World´ books, as well as learning the song in music. Mrs K-B and Mrs C had tears of joy when looking at the amazing pages of beautifully wonderful lyric inspired illustrations. We can't wait to finish them and show them to everyone.

In Geography we were inspired by the book, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. We have thought about physical and human features and started looking at maps and symbols; making our own fantasy island with symbols and a key to match. One of Mrs K-B´s favourites was the Island of Candy!

Have a super sunny weekend, summer is nearly here… Slip, Slap and Slop and stay sun safe! And Happy Mother´s Day...

This week we ventured out of the school to our local forest as part of our Science topic. We went in search of wild flowers and we were in luck as it seemed everything was blooming- the forest was full! When we arrived back in class, we dissected the flowers and identified the different parts of the flower. It was quite a challenge trying to dissect the smaller flowers but we managed! Afterwards, we looked at the processes of pollination and fertilisation!

In maths, we have been working hard finding equivalent fractions and in English, we have finished writing our own fantastic diary entries. We will be putting our work proudly on display!

Yet another week has whizzed by and the children were buzzing to get started on their new Science topic, Electricity. We used each others’ knowledge and experience to share what we already know about electricity. We then took a walk around the school in search of different appliances which need electricity to function.

Our Geographers have been getting lost in the world, discovering where they are as to how hot it is. They’ve been sweltering on the Equator, visiting the polar bears in the North Pole and waddling with the penguins in the South Pole. They’ve also been time travelling throughout the world, using the lines of latitude and longitude to establish the time difference to Mr Hodson, who was stuck in Greenwich Mean Time.

This week’s art lesson has focussed on the artist Berthe Morisot. Morisot was a French impressionist who liked to create shadows using charcoal. You will see below a couple of outstanding still life drawings using charcoal and shading.

We love the sunshine and have been so glad to welcome back the warmer weather this week. The children have thoroughly enjoyed being outside using the new equipment and games on the playground.

Let’s hope the sun continues to shine for you over the weekend...if not, create your own sunshine!

Year 5 have been busy this week in Maths learning how to multiply 2 digit by 2 digit numbers. They have all made great progress and always challenge me to find bigger numbers for them! It is so good to see the ¨lightbulb¨ moment when their learning all falls into place and we have had a lot of that this week in Maths! Well done again to Valentina again as our TTRockstar Champion, she has held the title for 3 weeks now! Celeste and Eugenia are closing the gap so maybe next week the competition will be fierce! Also well done to Kaitlyn who is in second place on the school leader board! Keep it up girls!!

We completed our Earth and Space topic and all the children scored very well in their assessment, I am pleased to announce. We have now introduced our new science topic - Forces. We are learning all about push/pull, friction, air resistance, buoyancy and water resistance. They have some fun homework this week to learn about the opposing forces of air resistance and gravity. I would love to see any photos of them carrying out the experiment!

We have just started our own personal projects in art. We are all working on a canvas of a Mallorcan beach scene. We will be using a range of textures and materials to build up a 3D effect, to help bring our pictures to life. Hopefully they will be wall- worthy pieces of art by the time we are finished!

Party planning was our focus in our ICT lesson this week as the Sharks used their knowledge of spreadsheets to calculate a spending budget for an imaginary party. They selected and pasted different food and drink items, decided on the quantity and then set formulas to calculate the cost of each item as well as the running costs so far. By creating a formula to calculate how much of their budget they had used so far, the children were able to see how much money they could still spend! They also had to make sure each person, of the twenty guests invited, had enough to eat! Well done to Gio who had only 18c left over from his budget of €60!

This week in our art lesson we learnt about the artist Rorscach and then had a go at creating our own symmetrical abstract art forms. After folding a piece of A4 paper in half we black splodged paint on one side of the paper using pipettes and then pushed down carefully. When we opened the paper we discovered our creations. Once they were dry we added detail to make the paintings come to life. What can you see in this painting?

Este domingo día 2 de mayo será un día muy especial para todas las mamis, así que en BIC hemos estado creando unas tarjetas maravillosas, donde cada niño ha tenido la oportunidad de decirle a su mamá cosas bonitas, cómo la ven ellos y porque cada mamá es la mejor del mundo para ellos.

Los niños han utilizado su creatividad para que una vez montada la tarjeta el resultado sea increíble.

No os olvidéis de darle un beso y un abrazo enorme a las mamás el domingo por la mañana junto a vuestra tarjeta. El equipo de español y catalán espera que paséis un día fenomenal en familia. FELIZ DÍA DE LA MADRE.

This Wednesday during our PE class, Year 3 and Year 4 group were having fun while playing a basketball game. Students have practiced dribbling, moving with or without the ball, stopping and changing directions. Our young players have explored the variety of ways to pass the ball to a partner in a game situation.

Well done to everyone!