BIC Sant Agustí News - Welcome to Term 2

A message from Janice Short, Principal

Happy New Year!

We have started the year 2022 on a very positive note, even though people now want to be negative instead of positive, with a different topic of conversation in mind! We are continuing as normal, as normal as we possibly can be, and it has been lovely to welcome everyone back after the holidays with the children´s stories of where they have been and what they have been doing.

Our assembly this week was about New Year, looking at the different traditions in some countries around the world. The children were fascinated to hear about so many traditions which are mainly connected with “taking out the bad” and “celebrating the new”. Many countries celebrate in similar ways with fireworks, lights, family and food being familiar themes. Other celebrations included special songs, ringing bells, water fights and a cake with a coin hidden inside, as well as racing to eat 12 grapes before the clock strikes midnight! The last one is very well known, I am sure, as it is a Spanish tradition.

We have many traditions here in Mallorca and we have been recognising some of them this week with Sant Antoni Day at the beginning of the week. We have had various “devils” walking around the school as well as learning about Sant Antoni blessing the animals. We celebrate the fiesta of San Sebastian with a holiday and the children have been learning about the local festivities of dragons and bonfires in Palma.

All these traditions are important for our heritage and our culture as they help the children to make sense of the world, giving them a sense of their individuality and diversity as well as a sense of belonging. We will continue to make school a special place for the children by continuing to make memories as they learn.

Next week we will be Times Tables Rock Stars so prepare to be rocking with your air guitars!

Please remember to complete the parents' survey which has been sent to you today. We value the feedback we receive and appreciate you taking the time to complete the survey. Thank you very much.

Have a lovely weekend

Warm regards

Mrs Short

Principal

Baleares International College, Sant Agustí

Dates to remember!

Nursery Starfish Class

We are so happy to be back together after our special Christmas break and as usual we have started the year with a bang and are busy learning all about ``People Who Help Us”. Every day we are surrounded with people who help the world go round and it is great fun to take a closer look and even meet some of these amazing people.

We are really enjoying roleplaying in our new hospital and making sure all the babies have taken their medicine and have bandages on their scrapes.

We have also been exploring all the beautiful colours in the world around us. We have painted rainbows and played games in the garden to make the most of the lovely ‘yellow’ sunshine we are experiencing lately but whatever we do, we always make sure learning is fun.

Reception Seahorses Class

Happy New Year and Welcome back! I hope you all have had a great Christmas and a nice break. Seahorses are back on track, full of energy and very eager to continue our learning journey. As we have entered Winter time, with very cold mornings at the moment, we have taken this opportunity to learn a little bit more about Winter in Mallorca. We are learning all about the changes in our environment, the length of days and nights, how to make paper snowflakes and even about hibernation. Who would have thought that we can also have very low temperatures on this island?

We have also continued our work in Phonics; the children are gradually starting to blend a few words and their letter formation is becoming very clear and neat. One of our ongoing focuses in the classroom is working together as a team and supporting each other; for this reason, we often split the children into small groups for the different activities so they can support each other and learn from the others. It helps them as well to grow in independence and to increase their self-esteem.

This focus will smoothly lead us into our new topic ‘People who help us’. What a great start to the term!

Year 1 Seals Class

Happy New Year to everyone! The children have come back full of talk, ideas and play for their future learning , so we’ve placed some of the ideas up in our class and are going to add them into the curriculum’s topics throughout the term. The children are leading their learning! We have started the new term with a spring in our step and are already busy with our learning on new topics and exciting new adventures.

In Literacy we are covering 'Fairytales and fables’, starting with the books; ‘The House that Jack Built’ and ‘Chicken Licken’, both stories have repetitive phrases and the children are really enjoying them! Watch this space for some drama sessions…….

For Phonics we are carrying on with learning the different ´digraphs´´, there are SO many to learn. The children have been coming up with different ways to make words, they all thought plasticine was the best one so far.

Mental Maths is a big area of focus for us this term, everyday the children have and will complete 5-10 minutes of playing ‘Beat the Timer’-questions of Addition and Subtraction with the introduction of Multiplication. There have been lots of exciting answers so far and everyday we are improving, getting faster and faster! BRING ON THE TIMES TABLE ROCKSTAR COMPETITION NEXT WEEK!!!! Go Seals Go!

In class, Bingo has become a top favourite maths game to play. While having lots of fun and the chance to win prizes, the children are getting used to hearing, seeing and using large numbers!

EYES DOWN SEALS…….BINGO TIME!

For Science and Humanities the topics are linked and go nicely together; Materials and Homes around the world. So far we have looked at and sorted a variety of materials used for everyday objects, held tests to observe its strength and discussed predictions...

We plan to use a variety of these materials to create different homes over the next few weeks e.g. mud huts, tents called Ger’s and sandcastles. Watch out for the amazing photos/models coming your way!

An amazing start to the term……WELL DONE SEALS!

Year 2 Turtles Class

Happy New year to all families and welcome back to school. We have got straight back into our work, building on our learning from last term.

In Literacy, we are continuing to look at poetry - the structure and layout of verse. We all decided we liked the funny poems best! This week we are writing our own poems about ourselves based on the poem - ´Mum´s put me on the transfer list´ a humorous poem identifying our good points and our not so good points! Perhaps we can work on some of those not so good points in our New Year resolutions?! We will get a copy of the poem home once they are complete, for us to share with our parents.

In our Maths lessons we continue to work with numbers but using strategies and previous learning to help us when adding or subtracting 9,10 or 11 from a two digit number. We are getting much quicker at our mental maths now.

We have started our new Humanities topic which is all about Spain, including of course Mallorca!

We are looking at the geography of the country as well as its culture, its foods and not forgetting famous Spanish people.

For Science we are continuing with the theme of living things and are going to be looking at plants, the best conditions for them to grow and then put our ideas to the test. We have predicted what will happen if a plant has no sunlight, water or soil from what we learnt last term, so we will be experimenting to see what actually happens.

This term in art, we are starting with paper craft. Last week, we created 3D hot air balloons. We drew baskets underneath in which we will put pictures of ourselves ‘taking off with our learning in term 2!’ This week we tried paper weaving using different colours to create a pattern .

Year 3 Dolphins Class

Happy New Year everyone and welcome back! It has been great to see Year 3 settled straight back into school life after a wonderful Christmas break. We have been hard at work practising for our assembly about ‘The Chinese New Year’ next Friday and we can’t wait to perform for everyone at school.

In English, we have started looking at our new book ‘Stone Age Boy’. We used the front cover to write predictions about the story before we started reading it. We used lots of conjunctions in our work so we could explain our answers. For the next lesson, we went outside to do some drama. We acted out when the characters met, focusing on our facial expressions and body movements. There are some budding actors and actresses in Year 3!

In Maths, Miss Conway’s group have started looking at fractions, we have been drawing them, writing them and making them using different resources.

Ms Robert’s class have been finding a fraction of an amount and adding pairs of numbers using partitioning.

In Art, we have started making Chinese lanterns to celebrate the Chinese New Year. We practised writing in Mandarin and we have decorated our lanterns beautifully. We are looking forward to using them in our assembly.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Year 4 Jellyfish Class

HAPPY NEW YEAR! And what a fantastic start to 2022 and Term 2 for Year 4. We started straight back in on a Monday and we haven’t slowed down since. We have started new units across the curriculum (the term overview is on Canvas if you haven’t already seen it) and the children are enjoying getting back into the swing of school and our new topic, Modern Europe.

In English we are studying Aesop’s Fables and growing our understanding of the moral of a story. We are really enjoying that the stories are short and feature animals! We have read stories and identified the features and started the term with performances of different fables. We have been reading them independently, in talk partners and as a whole class and then answering questions and discovering more about reported and direct dialogue and the rules to correctly punctuate speech. We have continued our spelling learning by exploring homophones even more, with the help of MC Grammar and a dictionary.

Our new science unit is electrifying!! Well, it’s all about electricity…

We have learnt what electricity is (a form of energy), how electricity is made and renewable and non-renewable sources of electricity, static electricity (fun with balloons and Mrs K-B’s crazy hair!!) and how electricity needs a circuit to ‘flow’. Mrs K-B showed us all the different plugs on different appliances she has from her travels and how they need ‘adapting’ to fit sockets.

In humanities this half term our focus is on the geography of modern Europe so to begin we have been investigating the countries that make up modern Europe and we had a go at a jigsaw puzzle to create a map of Europe. It was tough but we all tried really hard and used our atlas to make sure we didn’t change the location of any European country!

In art we will learn about modern art and artists, we started the term with Gaudi and his amazing architectural designs. The children (and Mrs K-B) really found the trencadis style of mosaic art really relaxing and we have spent some time creating our names and different animals in the trencadis style.

In maths one of our key learning areas is a focus on our multiplication facts and our Canvas page has lots of links to great fun times tables websites and games to help us learn and practice. Well done to Y3 for winning the Y3 vs Y4 TTRockstars competition

over the winter break and we have to say that Y4 are now ready and prepared for the TTRockstars competition next week!

Have a great weekend!

Year 5 Whales Class

Happy New Year! It is great to be back with the Whales and they have had a super start to 2022.

It seems like a while ago now, but before Christmas, Year 5 celebrated Aztec Day. The costumes were great so we started the day with some traditional Aztec dancing!

Our next task was to design an Aztec themed menu using interesting adjectives. The class got their creative juices flowing, creating a menu fit for Montezuma including dishes such as ’Fresh.

Finally it was time to sample some ‘delicious’ Aztec hot chocolate, made with cinnamon and chilli. It definitely warmed us up!

Back to 2022 and we have begun our new Humanities topic - ´”River Deep, Mountain High” by using an atlas to locate some of the major rivers in the world. The children are really developing their map skills and are able to use the index and coordinates to find different places.

We have now finished our Science topic - ‘Earth and Space’ and learnt about night and day. Imagining we were planet earth, we rotated around the sun, thinking about how it causes different parts of the planet to experience day and the other parts night.

Next we learnt about time zones and discovered how a time zone map could help us work out what time it is now in other countries around the world.

Finally we learnt about the moon and worked in groups to take on the role of the sun, the earth and the moon. I am not sure if it was the moon or the earth who became the dizziest?!

Year 6 Sharks Class

Year Six said goodbye to Ancient Greece this week by producing some excellent educational posters on a Greek era of their choice. They drew five images that they felt best illustrated their chosen era and wrote accompanying captions. The finished results not only demonstrate their knowledge of the subject but also show that they have learned how to plan the content and layout of a complicated piece of work.

In maths, Year Six have started to learn about changing fractions into decimals and into percentages before calculating percentages of amounts of numbers and money. They will be shopping in the sales to find discounts very soon!

In P.E., Year Six has begun to learn the basics of basketball: dribbling, passing, shooting, defending and rebounding. We haven't yet mastered the dunk shot, but if there are any Harlem Globe Trotter scouts in the area, stick around as you never know!

Year Six are keen to show off their artistic talent and have begun to emulate the great landscape painters of the past. The budding Constables and Turners have applied paint to canvas in the hope of producing another Haywain or Rain, Steam and Speed to produce their own masterpieces.

Spanish and Catalan with Ainhoa

Este inicio de curso hemos estado terminando nuestro Ciclo del Agua en Ciències Socials y hemos creado una rueda con las diferentes fases del Ciclo del agua para así tener la información de una manera más visual.

Por otro lado, los alumnos de Year 5&6 han estado aprendiendo sobre el uso del gerundio en español. Para ello han aumentado su libro de gramática y han creado diferentes frases creativas utilizando un material para tener una mejor visión sobre la estructura de las frases.

Sports department news

In our PE lessons with Miss Izabela, KS1 students are learning how to control the ball and exploring ways they can move while bouncing the ball. Children have been playing a range of games which involve bouncing skills and most importantly have had lots of fun!