BIC Sant Agustí News (02/04/22)

A message from Janice Short, Principal

Dear parents

During the last couple of weeks the children have really enjoyed some of the extracurricular events which are such a large part of the BIC Sant Agusti education and experience. We teach the children using the curriculum of the UK but adapt it when necessary as we have such a diverse international school community. In addition we have our special days and events which complement our curriculum and normal lessons.

The multiplication tables are the basis of so many concepts in maths and we encourage the children to learn them in many different ways. One of these ways is by using the Times Tables Rock Stars program and to celebrate our Times Tables Rock Stars house competition, the school was recently host to many up and coming rock stars. The children looked absolutely amazing …it was actually difficult to see who was under the disguise at times! Congratulations to Wolves who were the overall winners of the competition and to all the children who took part. Well done!

Continuing with the maths theme, the children in Year 3 to 6 have also been competing in the Mangahigh Maths competition, in which they are set challenges by their teachers linked to the work they have been doing in class. By linking class work and the challenge of a world wide competition, the children consolidated their learning while having fun….and some competition! Well done to Eva, MInu and Lia for coming top of our Leaderboard!

During Peace Day the children learnt about the School Day of Non Violence and Peace around the world and our garden area now has small windmills as a lovely reminder of this day.

Storytelling has been the theme of this last week and the children have been involved in listening to stories and telling stories in different ways. Storytelling is such a vital part of both oral and written work and it is how cultures and histories are passed on from one generation to another. I am confident that the Sant Agusti children will definitely be able to tell their stories!

We also said “Goodbye” to Miss Conway as she has returned to her family in the UK and we wish her all the best for the future. She has been a part of BIC for 3 and a half years and we will all miss her very much!

We are currently advertising for an Operations Manager who will work across both schools, Sa Porrassa and here at Sant Agusti. If you know anyone who may be interested, please refer them to the advertisement for the role which can be found on our school website. Thank you.

Have a lovely weekend and enjoy telling a story!

Warm regards

Mrs Short

Principal

Baleares International College, Sant Agustí

Dates to remember!

Nursery Starfish Class

We are Superheroes, so we can save the day! Whenever you're in trouble we are on our way!

Yes, you've guessed it, in Starfish class we are learning everything there is to know about Superheroes. We have explored the world of fiction superheroes and their superpowers and we have also looked at our own superpowers. So one of the very important questions we asked Starfish class was “What makes you a superhero?” The answers varied widely; flying, being a unicorn or being extremely strong but as we progressed with this conversation some more human answers came to light… being kind, helping, caring for others, being a friend, being brave and being yourself. Safe to say that there are 10 superheroes in our class!

¨There is a superhero in us all, you just have to be brave and put on the cape!¨

Have a great weekend everyone.

Reception Seahorses Class

For the past weeks and the next weeks to come, Seahorses are learning all about ‘People who help us’ in and out of school. We have toured around the school finding out who are the people we can see every day and how they help the children and teachers and what they do. We asked them lots of questions and we can now remember all of their names. But we are also learning about people that help us out of school; we have had a few visitors who have come to talk to us about their jobs and they are all BIC mums. We’ve had a dentist, a nurse and a doctor. The children learned lots of things and they had a great time recreating those roles with their friends and the baby dolls at the home corner. A huge thanks to these mummies!

Emaya, the council’s cleaning service, has also come to visit us to talk to the children about recycling and the importance of water. The children really enjoyed it.

Last but not least, a few days ago we celebrated the whole school Peace Day. We discussed a few ideas that the children had on how to be peaceful and stay calm with others, especially during challenging situations. They had lots of good ideas! We also decorated peace symbols and made nice pendants with them. They were full of colour and very creative!

Year 1 Seals Class

We are all finally back together again…thanks to the help of Miss Charlotte for holding it all together last week and keeping the action and learning fun!

Over the last few weeks, Seals have been busy rocking with mental maths, creating mud huts and houses from paper and finishing the week’s learning with an amazing science experiment with magnets….IT’S ALL HAPPENING IN YEAR ONE!

Maths - We continue with the Mental Maths challenges; every day new challenges are set where we use only our brains, strategies and knowledge to answer addition and subtraction sums. On Wednesday most of us dressed up to participate in the TTRockstar whole school challenge. All the points/coins collected in class by individuals were exchanged into House Points.

Well Done Wolves! The photos below show the fun and enjoyment the children had in class completing the challenges.

English - Classic fairy tales is the topic this term. It didn’t surprise me to hear the children’s favourite stories were the same stories I remember having read to me as a little girl; Rapunzel, Goldilocks and the Three Bears and The Three Little Pigs etc. This all ties in rather nicely with this week being National Story Week. The children have been bringing in their favourite stories from home to share with the class. Aidan’s story was a big hit, bringing smiles to everyone's faces.

Humanities - We are carrying on with the topic of ´Homes´, the children are studying all the different variations of homes around the world from mud huts to caravans, tower blocks to thatched cottages. It has proven very interesting. Our favourite style of home so far is the mud hut, so we put our aprons on and made some of our own. See the photos below.

Science - Carrying on the topic of Materials, Seals this week have been working with magnets both big and small. The children enjoyed being able to explore for themselves what a magnet is and what it can do, using the magnet to help sort through a random variety of materials and discussing with each other what they’d discovered.

As a whole class we went through a few items together, predicting and testing, then individually we went to our tables to predict and test a few other objects and items from the classroom.

To extend the fun and new knowledge of magnets, we then went to the Science Room and completed an experiment using magnets, water and a paperclip. The experiment was for the children to get the paperclip out of the water without getting their hands wet….

Do you think we did it?

Take a look at the photos below and see for yourselves!

Art - We always enjoy getting our hands busy with some creative learning. We all decided that our classroom door needed a room sign, so people visiting or other children then know where our classroom is. Everybody made wonderful door signs using bubble writing, textured wallpaper and straws. 

So overall, another eventful few weeks in Seal Class. Remember Seals, to read at home and enjoy books, make everyday learning fun and be helpful to one another. HAPPY WEEKEND!

Year 2 Turtles Class

It's been another couple of busy weeks in Year 2. We are learning all about traditional tales in Literacy and have enjoyed the story of scary Babba Yagga, Hansel and Gretel and many more.

The class is really enjoying the variety of stories and discussing them as a group. Later this week we will be writing our own. Look out for a copy in the children's school bags soon for them to read at home! We are reading The Abominables as our class novel and enjoying their adventures every day - this week it was even set in Spain!

In Maths we have moved on from our 2 digit addition and subtraction now to Time and shape. We will be looking at a range of 3D shapes and their properties using maths vocabulary - faces, corners and edges. We will be looking for 3D shapes around the home that match the shapes we have been learning about.

In Humanities we are continuing to learn about Spain - this week we have been looking at the geographical features of the area - focusing on the mountain ranges, rivers and lakes - there are certainly a lot of beautiful places to go and visit. We will be moving onto tourism next and what brings so many people to Spain and its islands.

Plants and seed dispersal are still our focus in Science - we have looked at the life cycle of a plant and what it needs to survive and we enjoyed looking at a range of different seeds that Ms Karen bought in to show us. We discussed their size and shape and tried to work out how they would be dispersed.

We got a bit messy in art the last two weeks as we have enjoyed working with clay. Last week, we moulded and shaped the clay to make pinch bowls and then used a range of tools and shapes to decorate them. This week we used cutters to create a special decoration for a certain day in February but it's a surprise…!!

Well done to all of the children in the class who have received their Bronze House points certificates!

Year 3 Dolphins Class

In English, we have started to read and enjoy ‘ The Stone Age Boy’ and used this as a stimulus for some drama activities in the playground making the most of the glorious sunshine in January!

This week in maths, we have been focusing on measuring. We now know our conversion facts and how to measure accurately in centimetres and millimetres. We had great fun making estimations and measuring a variety of different objects including ourselves.

Our Year 3 Assembly for Chinese New Year waa a great success and the children all worked extremely hard learning their different parts, lyrics to the song and their fantastic dance moves.

As a whole school, we celebrated Peace Day last Friday and loved making pinwheels and decorating them with images and words that we associate with peace .

With a very mature understanding and caring attitude from all the children, we said a very fond farewell to the wonderful Miss Conway and wished her every future happiness with her family in the UK.

Year 4 Jellyfish Class

The past couple of weeks have been very busy in the Y4 classroom. We have continued to explore Aesop’s fables. We have explored clauses, subordinate and coordinating conjunctions, letter writing and character development as well as more speech punctuation. We also entered the COBIS ‘Looking Ahead’ poetry competition. All the children worked really hard to produce poems that reflected their thoughts and feelings about their future, some blank verse poems to acrostic poems.

It’s been Storytelling Week this week and the theme has been ‘Your story - My story’. We have shared our life stories and we have read and told stories based on fables and artists. It has been a great adventure learning that stories are for everyone and everyone has a story to tell.

Science lessons have been practical hands-on electrifying experiences. We have created complete electrical circuits using a switch to turn on a light bulb and make a buzzer buzz. We have been learning about how to draw an electrical circuit using the correct symbols.

Geographical features have been the focus in geography lessons, human and physical features of modern Europe. Specifically, we have been across Europe, learning many facts about the mountain ranges and the 5 primary rivers which weave across Europe.

In art we have looked at another European artist, Anselm Kiefer and his broken buildings art. We sketched buildings from photos of local buildings and the buildings around us, really looking at the detail of the architecture and building structures. We also made peace spinners to celebrate Peace Day, which was a design challenge but bought us all great joy when we saw the finished designs.

In maths the Wolves in Y4 helped the Wolves become the overall House winner of the TTRockstars competition, but I wanted to say a MASSIVE well done to all of Y4, regardless of the house they are in, as every single child was a real Times Table Rockstar during the competition. Y4 have also competed in the Mangahigh maths competition with the whole of the school. I am so proud of how the class showed such positivity and enthusiasm to play, learn and compete.

As the weather has been warming up we have been heading outside and practising yoga. We have been learning calming and energising breathing, seated and standing poses and working with a partner to create dynamic yoga poses like the double dragon and the sailboat.

Have a great couple of weeks, we can't wait to tell you all about what we will have been doing…

Year 5 Whales Class

It’s been another busy two weeks and the Whales have gone from ‘Rocking out’ for Times Tables rock stars day to ´Peacing-out’ for Peace day! On the first, the children had great fun dressing up in their rockiest costumes and working hard to practice their times tables.

Check out this video of our Whales rockin’ out!

Just a few days later on Peace day, the class learnt about what peace means and thought about how they could carry out acts of peace at home and school. We then created pinwheels for peace showing our ideas and artistic creations and then planted them in the school garden on the terrace.

In our PE lessons this term we have started yoga and the Whales have enjoyed blissing out and enjoying the zen of meditating and develpìng our focus and core strength. The sun has been shining as we have been learning positions and moves such as tree pose, warrior and downward facing dog. I think the favourite part of the lesson had by all was the total body relaxation at the end of the class!

Art lessons are centered around landscapes this term to tie in with our Humanities topic on rivers and mountains. After exploring the features of landscape art we learnt about points of perspective as well as creating colour and shade scales.

Poetry has been the focus of our English lessons and we have learnt more about the features including figurative language and sound devices.

We then used different pictures of the river for inspiration to create our own phrases to describe it using onomatopoeia, personification and similes and metaphors. Check back next time to read some of our amazing final poems!

Year 6 Sharks Class

In English we have almost reached the climax of War Horse and we have also been revising the use of commas and the semicolons. Using these mundane little marks, the pupils have produced some very long and descriptive sentences that show that although punctuation isn´t the most exciting topic in the world, it is very useful.

In maths, we have been learning about percentages, interest and discounts in sales, including using credit and debit cards. We have now moved onto multiplying and dividing fractions, which is actually much easier than adding and subtracting them!

In Art, the parents finally completed their homework with varying degrees of success. As expected, most parents were able to name the pictures and artists from their own nations and a few managed to complete all the questions, although Constable's Haywain left many confused. Meanwhile, the artists in Year Six have continued to create their individual masterpieces and completed the second phase of their landscape paintings.

In geography, the pupils have been using their skills in reading four figure and six figure grid references to find buried treasure.

In science the pupils are continuing to look at the Theory of Evolution and the concept of natural selection. They have been designing their own land-dwelling creatures to see which ones would survive in four different habitats. The results have been extreme, with some creatures faring well in each scenario while others have become extinct wherever they have tried to survive.

Spanish and Catalan with Miss Ainhoa and Miss Maria

Como sabemos, acabamos de terminar dos de las celebraciones más importantes en Mallorca: Sant Antoni y Sant Sebastià. Gracias a ellas hemos descubierto los significados de cada una y hemos sido testigos de las diferentes formas de festejar Sant Antoni en los diferentes pueblos de Mallorca, además de su gran competitividad en el diseño de “Els dimonis”.

Con ello, los alumnos han estado creando y diseñando sus propios “dimonis” además de una máscara (algunas terroríficas y otras adorables).

¡Ha sido una semana de descubrimiento y creación!

Sports with Miss Izabela

Last Saturday our BIC volleyball players were helping out during the Super league Volleyball match. Our pupils and their parents together with BIC volleyball coach Miss Izabela Zborzynska went to see volleyball at the highest level on the island.

The purpose of the trip was to give the dedicated volleyball club members the opportunity to see how the game is played at the highest level, encouraging the young people to spend their free time actively and above all, group integration. The match ended with the score 3:1 for the team from Mallorca.

During the match, our students had the opportunity to be at the centre court and after the match to take a picture with the players. There was an extraordinary sports atmosphere at the match, and we had a great time.

Massive thanks to the parents of our young athletes for their support and great cheering during the match!

Thank you @clubvoleypalma for giving us the opportunity to see and enjoy the best Balearic volleyball.