BIC Sant Agustí Weekly News (05/07/21)

Dear parents

This week the Early Years staff and I have been attending a course about the changes to the Early Years curriculum which will be happening in the next academic year. Although most of the curriculum will be similar to the one we teach now, there are some changes which include:

• more information on self-care and healthy eating.

• a greater focus on development from birth to reception and on the link between gross and fine motor skills.

• a stronger emphasis on literacy learning, and the links between language and reading and writing.

• more detail on the importance of shapes,awareness of space and measure and how children can foster a love of maths.

• wider experiences of understanding the world around them for children.

• a wider variety of ways children can develop their creative skills.

These changes will add to the solid curriculum which our Early Years children already experience. The Early Years curriculum provides the foundation for all learning. In the Early Years Foundation Stage the emphasis is on the children learning - through play. One question I am often asked is, “Do the children have to sit down all day long?” Quite simply - absolutely not!

Three to five year old children learn through doing, through being active, by exploring the world around them and by finding things out for themselves. Play is a very important part of a child’s development. Playing helps children’s brains to develop and their communication skills to develop. The simple games the children play develop their problem solving skills, their motor skills and are vital for children to lay the foundations for the more formal education which comes later. By looking at the photographs of our Nursery and Reception class you can see many examples of learning through play - and having a huge amount of fun at the same time!

We are delighted to share the news that Mrs Thorpe has a new Early Years member of her family - her baby boy, Dexter, was born yesterday, so we wish her and her family many congratulations!

To keep our school community safe, can you please ensure that you collect your child from the designated gate - we cannot allow children to walk down streets or steps to meet you, due to safety reasons.

Have a lovely weekend,

Warm regards

Mrs Short

Principal

Starfish class is on a roll! We are having such a good time in class and exploring around the school. We are enjoying the weather getting milder and spending a lot of time outside. This week we had a closer look at creepy crawlies. We have installed our minibeast aquarium and the children have been busy finding minibeasts to bring them safely to their new (temporary) habitat in class. Accompanied by the book SUPERWORM we have learned the letter sound w for worm, we had some worms in the classroom to have a look at them wiggle and squirm.

Starfish class had a great time manipulating the flower ice blocks, feeling temperature differences on their hands and hacking away at it, trying to get some of the plants and flowers out.

It's been another great week! Wishing you a great weekend!

Keeping ourselves busy as always and spending as much time as possible out on our terrace, this week has flown by. In our monthly topic, this week we have focused on ‘What sort of things we can do to look after our planet’. The children are gradually understanding how little steps can make big changes and that every little gesture is important.

One of these things is planting seeds and growing plants and that is what we’ve been doing. Do you remember those tiny lentils and beans we grew in a cup two months ago? They are big plants now ready to go in our new planting area. The children have loved getting their hands dirty and looking after them every day. We also added a few other extras such as radish and tomatoes.

In Maths we’ve been talking about 2D shapes and introduced a few 3D shapes. This week the children have been exploring their creativity by mixing up different shapes and mixing up primary colours. They’ve painted amazing things just by using these three colours togethers in different ways and creating their own colour shades. I hope you like them! Have a lovely and safe weekend!

Lots of activities again this week with the seals class. We left Antarctica and under the steady hand of First Captain Catherine we made our way down under to Australia! We have learned a lot of interesting facts about this country this week! We used it as a Free Writing inspiration hook to help us write all by ourselves. This was a nice activity and the children shared their efforts afterwards on our special Author´s Chair! It is great to see the children take efforts alone to write using their own phonics skills and strategies! We thank Ms. Jo for her informative and lovely presentation. Our love of Australian wildlife just increased a million fold!

In Maths we are working on place value. We can now say with some degree of certainty that we know the 100 square inside out and backwards! We are counting experts! Well done seals! Maths Stations this week saw us playing Space Rocket Place Value games, counting bead strings to 100 and making numbers with our colourful pegs- after all that hands on work, the workbook activities were a breeze!

In Science we are studying weather patterns and we have been making scientific observations outside watching and recording weather changes! We presented the weather to the class pretending we were on TV! Next week we will be looking at shadows and day and night changes.

We have been taking a look back at castles throughout history. We look forward to bringing our castles home tomorrow!

And after all that work, learning and fun some seals were spotted doing a little mindfulness….. And being very ZEN!

Have a sunny, bright and ZEN weekend everyone.

Love from the SUPER SEALS CLASS

What a wonderful week in Year 2…

In Literacy we have started our Traditional Tales unit so over the next few weeks be ready for lots of `Once upon a time´… magical tales. This week our focus has been on the types of traditional tales and the features that all the traditional tales have. We had great fun trying to figure out what this new unit could be about. Mrs K-B hid clues around the classroom and then we had to put the clues together and think about what we would be learning about. Once upon a time… and Everyone lived happily ever after..., were the two best clues that helped us guess traditional tales. Mrs K-B told us different versions of the tale of Red Riding Hood. We have now heard different versions which have lots of similarities and this helped us to sequence the story. We will be looking at traditional tales from other cultures so we all discussed stories from our own cultures.

In our SPaG lessons we have started to investigate contracted words… There are a lot of words that can be shortened, but there are rules which are really helpful to remind us of which letters are eaten and replaced with an apostrophe.

Maths and money has continued this week with lots of recognising, sorting and adding puppies, no wait pineapples, no, pounds and pence! Mrs K-B helps us to remember to write the units of measurement by asking if the number we´ve written is the amount of pizza we have or some other thing beginning with p. We´ve also explored amounts of money by using play money, real money and pictures of money.

Science has been hands-on again this week as we played - what's in my bucket? We all had a go at putting our hand in the bucket, choosing an item and trying to describe the material to everyone so they could try and guess what the object was made from. There were lots of different things in there, some soft and fluffy, some hard and cold, some rough or smooth. Thankfully there were no slimy objects! We focused on sorting objects using their features too. Different groups had different criteria, but all of us managed to sort the objects really well.

Have a great weekend!

In maths this week, Dolphins have been looking at fractions! On Tuesday we headed out to the playground for some outdoor learning where we placed ourselves and our fractions on a number line. We love it when we can take our lessons outdoors, it makes everything so much more exciting! In Science this week, we made our own flowers using plasticine; doing this enabled us to see exactly what each part is and why it is used. We identified the stamens, the stigma, the style and the ovary. Do you know what each of these parts do?

This week between lessons we have been focusing on respect and kindness and what they are. We compared kindness to a ripple in the water when a stone has been thrown in. Our actions and words are that stone and everytime we act or speak a ripple is sent out that reaches all of those around us. As a class, we spoke about what we could do to send kindness out into the world. Leila said ‘Asking if someone is ok if they have fallen down’. Leo mentioned ‘Looking after someone if they are unwell’. Elia thought ‘saying nice things to people’ sent a ripple of kindness. There were some really thoughtful ideas. Over the weekend, Dolphins class would like you to have a think about this question…

How do you send out ripples of kindness?

The jungle drums are beating to the sound of the Jellyfish Class. Excitement is rising in the classroom as the children start to prepare their Rainforest display. This is a whole team effort and we would like to thank the children who have bought in materials for the display so far. If you are out and about this weekend, see what natural materials would fit well in the rainforest.

We had a real ‘lightbulb’ moment in the class this week!

Our scientists blew our minds as they followed instructions on how to construct an electrical circuit board. Building on their knowledge from a previous lesson, they worked out which materials conduct electricity, resulting in a full electrical circuit. They worked incredibly hard, trying and testing different materials to complete their circuit. There was much excitement when they got their reward, as the lightbulb lit up brightly! The whole class showed outstanding teamwork and problem solving skills, we are so proud of them!

Where do we start?

Impressive problem solving skills!

Incredible teamwork!

Well done Jellyfish for an incredible week of hard work. Now it’s time to ‘switch off’ and enjoy the sunshine! Have a wonderful weekend!

We have had another busy week in Year 5 with lots of learning taking place. In maths we have been working on 3 digit multiplication and division and the class is flying, they have earned so many house points with their great maths this week our chart is almost full! Next week we will be moving onto shapes - 2D and 3D including the ones with lots of sides!

In our PSHE lessons we are learning all about ourselves- we are all unique and must accept that others have different ideas and opinions that we must respect. This week we focused on talking about our feelings, how we can deal with problems and who we can talk to. We talked about strategies we all use to deal with those odd occasions we get angry and came up with lots of ideas such as:- deep breaths, closing our eyes and imagining ourselves on the beach, ripping up paper and exercise. All great ideas for anyone to try!

For last week´s homework the class enjoyed making their paper helicopters and seeing if they could make them fly with varying success. It was great to hear them so enthusiastic about what they had learnt from this. We have discussed the experiment in class and it made them all realise that for a design to be successful it will often take many attempts and design changes. This week in class we are learning about friction and air resistance. We designed parachutes with limited variants to test air resistance. Our playmobil men landed with varying success……..some can still be found stuck in the bushes waiting to be rescued and one has gone missing in action!

In PE we are having yoga and tennis this term and are enjoying our sports outdoors.

Times table Rockstars...our champion for number of questions answered is…VALENTINA, 3rd week in a row! Well done Valentina! In second place is Eugenia and Haris in 3rd place. Sofia also managed to collect the highest number of coins during her session. Well done everyone, keep it up!!

It was another fun Art lesson for Sharks this week, as we learnt about how symbols, pictographs and petroglyphs have been used throughout history as a means of communication. The children used emojis to create a message and then had to decode each other’s messages to try and work out what each other was trying to say.

Can you guess which emojis the Sharks are pretending to be?

In our Humanities lessons we have been learning about the history of transportation and this week we focused on the railways. We learnt how the development of the railways in the United Kingdom had a huge impact on tourism, especially for those wanting to travel to coastal towns. We looked at vintage posters advertising seaside resorts during the Victorian era and the children had a go at creating their own posters in the same style.

Despite feeling a little out of their comfort zones, Year 5 and 6 are doing great in their yoga activities as part of Thursday Sports lessons. We are working on building flexibility and strength through moves such as the tree pose where you can see the children are making progress with their balance and coordination!

En las clases de español con Year 3 & 4 hemos estado trabajando, durante casi tres semanas, en un proyecto en el que los alumnos se han implicado mucho “De viaje por España”. En primer lugar llevaron a cabo una búsqueda de información sobre algunos aspectos de España, para después crear nuestros “lapbooks”. Hemos aprendido las comunidades autónomas y provincias del país, la diferencia entre ambos conceptos y, además, las lenguas y dialectos y la diferencia entre los conceptos.

Por otro lado, en catalan hemos llevado a cabo también el proyecto “Descobrim l’art”, donde hemos aprendido a realizar descripciones de obras de arte haciendo uso de nuestra imaginación y, por unas semanas, convertirnos en pintores famosos.

En clase de español hemos empezado un nuevo tema, la ropa. Con él, hemos hecho una nueva actividad para descubrir palabras nuevas. Una de las hojas tenía todas las letras de la palabra mezcladas y con las letras de scrabble tenían que buscar la forma correcta. También hicimos un dictado de estas palabras en el cual casi todas las palabras las escribieron bien.

Last Wednesday in PE, Y5 students have been working hard to develop our racket skills whilst enjoying the game of badminton. Great work everyone!

Having only recently started working at BIC Sant Agustí, Mr. Hodson has enjoyed getting to know Year 4 and all the interesting characters that make it up. Being an experienced teacher, Mr. Hodson has been very impressed with the high standard of work that Year 4 has produced so far this year and how welcoming all his pupils have been.

Mr. Hodson really enjoys the children´s love for learning and the interesting and challenging questions they ask. In fact, he finds that hearing their views makes him think in more depth about these subjects himself. He also feels that the key to a good education is to emphasise the positive aspects of what a child can do and then build on this, as once children see the results of their hard work, they start to feel a sense of pride in their abilities, which makes them want to learn more.

Prior to working at BIC, Mr Hodson worked in schools based in Cornwall, England. His last school, Tretherras Community College, was located in Newquay, which has some of the best surfing beaches in the world. Unfortunately, Mr. Hodson´s surfing is as good as his Spanish, so instead of grabbing a board and running in slow motion along the beach, he ran in slow motion on the squash and basketball courts at the local sports centre. He and his wife moved to Mallorca last September and having moved to their new home in Ariany, they are both busy in their new jobs and with a mountain of DIY tasks.