BIC Sant Agustí News (09/30/22)

A message from Janice Short, Principal

Dear families

The newsletter is full of settling in, teaching, learning, children having fun while learning and team building; there are some super photographs which demonstrate all of this too!

This year we have organised some early trips which have been based around team building, the children and teachers getting to know each other better at the beginning of the school year and sometimes allowing children to take themselves out of their comfort zone.

Year 1 and 2 went to the local beach for team games and competitions, including sand castle building which produced some excellent results. I can imagine the faces of those people spending time on the beach when a group of children suddenly arrived to interrupt the peace, but after the initial shock they were very impressed with the behaviour of the children and congratulated the teachers - well done everyone!

Y3 and 4 went to BonaOna, and participated in paddleboarding, kayaking and team building activities which was enjoyed by everyone, even those who were a little reluctant initially. It is always special to see a child overcoming their apprehension and then achieving something they thought they couldn't do. Well done all!

For their team building, next week Y5 and 6 are spending the night with sharks in a sleepover at the aquarium, so I am sure we will have some exciting stories to tell.

Working as a team is very important in all aspects of life and it is something that we always work towards in school. Although it is almost impossible to get on with everyone we meet, it is important to learn to tolerate, be accepting and have patience with others. It is easy to build teams with our friends but not as easy with people we don´t know so well. Through the activities we do at school we encourage the children to make different friends, accept different people into their groups and to celebrate our diversity as well as our similarities. We have many new parents this year, so I am sure everyone is making the most of the opportunities to make new acquaintances and find new friendships, sharing advice and knowledge about the school and the island. A warm welcome to all!

Have a lovely weekend

Warm regards

Mrs Short

Principal

Baleares International College, Sant Agustí

Nursery Starfish Class

Sunny days, Windy days, Rainy days and Cloudy days… In Starfish class we really enjoy the start of Autumn as we speak about the weather on a daily basis and the children love seeing different kinds of weather each day. When asked if it's snowing, many giggles and laughs erupt in class, nooo Miss Jaimy it's not! All the Starfish class children have now settled in well and we have been able to build circle time into our daily routine. A classhelper is being appointed daily to help us with the daily tasks and a lot of effort goes into getting a straight line when it's time to line up. We´ve had a great time learning about our classroom routines, each other and ourselves.

Reception Seahorses Class

We have had a very busy time in Reception Class! We have been learning all about the children these last two weeks, discovering their favourite toys, what they look like and where they are from. Seahorses had lots of fun making self portraits and measuring their heights, which has linked nicely with our maths lessons, where we have been looking at different forms of measurement. Hopefully all of the children will be able to tell you who is the tallest and shortest in your household, as well as who has the longest hair or feet!

In Seahorse Class, we are continuing to look at different emotions, making our own “Bottles of Happiness”, like the ones we have seen in the book ‘The Colour Monster.’ And of course, we have just enjoyed being ourselves, exploring and having fun. Everyone has settled well into the class and into our routines and it seems like we have been back at school for much longer than a month!

Year 1 Seals Class

The last 2 weeks have flown by, which means we are having SO MUCH fun in class! The children have now settled and used to the classroom setting, they´re beginning to really show each other what they like and dislike about things. Work is being put into books , as well as placed up in the classroom for everyone to see.

For English we have been reading a story about a mischievous rabbit and a good fairy, the children have really enjoyed bringing the story alive and acting out the different characters and joining in with the repeating phrases. Many activities have been completed, some have painted pictures of their favourite character, some have made storyboard hats and others have begun to write sentences.

We have also sequenced the story, talking about what happens at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. Ask them all about the story and what happens to Little Rabbit Foo Foo. This is the funniest part of the story!

During Maths we have been learning about addition and what happens to numbers when they get added together. The children have worked really hard, as the answers to our sums have been beyond 10. They are beginning to learn how to use a number line correctly, with the help of Freddy Frog and applying the answer correctly within a number sentence. I still think our favourite Maths activity though, is BINGO……There have been many lucky winners already, who have had the chance to choose a prize from the bingo bag. Well Done!

Over the last 2 weeks for Humanities the children have been learning about direction and how to read and create simple maps of our local environment. We have linked this to the story about Rosie the hen and her walk. After completing many fun outdoor activities with Rosie's Walk, we all individually made a map of the classroom and all the objects in it. Tomorrow we are going to use a compass to move around the room to find hidden treasure.

The photos below show the great group work the children have done putting the story on to a large floor map. They all did this before actually getting to act the story and using the maps for real. The playground became a bustle of activity…

Rosie's Walk being acted out on a large floor map - The children had to listen to directional instructions to follow the map created in the playground. This was read beautifully by Sienna and of course supported by the whole class.

Science has also been action packed and the children are learning about the 5 SENSES. This week we've concentrated on ´SOUND´and ´TOUCH´. After going around the school listening to all the different sounds we could hear and taking notes, we did a small activity in class where we could only use our hands to describe and guess what was in the bag. This was a funny activity as I´d hidden very random but googy, squishy, soft, hard, rough, tickly, bumpy, lumpy (all the children´s words) items into a bag! The children seemed to enjoy the Unicorn Slime the best.

Last week we finished our week with a ´Team Building´activity trip to the park and beach. The children worked really well together making and creating sandcastles of all different forms, we had some with moats, tunnels, towers, doors, flags, ponds and even a road. The whole class were very well behaved and received a clap for being so from the other people on the beach.

WELL DONE SEALS!

Phil's famous huge silver bucket made the BIGGEST sandcastle. Can you spot it in the photo?

Have a super fun weekend everyone!

Year 2 Turtles Class

Another couple of busy weeks in Year 2 and the children are all making great progress. Class routines are now established and a lot of hard work is taking place!

In literacy we are now starting to look at traditional tales and fables, focusing on how they can change slightly each time we hear them as they are often retold. With each one we look for the moral or hidden message in each. We enjoyed the stories of The Little Red Hen and the Lion and The Mouse which are both based on being kind to others. We are now reading The Tortoise and the Hare where several of the class knew that ´slow and steady wins the race!´ We have been looking at the structure of the story and the characters and will be continuing this for the next couple of weeks. We are also recapping some of our phonics work to include our new spelling words every week.

In maths we have been working hard with our number work and are getting much quicker with our number bonds to 20. We are now moving onto 2D shape and will have lots of active learning sessions looking for lines of symmetry, shapes all around us in school, and properties of different shapes.

We have enjoyed looking at toys in the past and toys now and comparing them. We have shared our parent questionnaires and compared the toys our mums and dads played with to what we play with now. We have looked at the materials used in the past - wood, metal, glass and other materials, whereas now a lot of toys are plastic. Over the next couple of weeks we are going to design and make our own toys using a range of recycled materials - I am sure we will have some budding designers amongst us!

Science lessons have been looking at food chains this week and how food products are animal or plant based. Next week we will be looking at our own favourite foods and exercise. Following on from this we will imagine being deserted on a desert island and have to design a new diet and exercise plan for ourselves.

We can’t of course forget our great morning at the beach on Friday enjoying some team sandcastle building and games. It was lovely to see the children all working together and there were great ideas around! We had stone doors, drawbridges and lovely decorations!

Have a lovely weekend everyone!

Year 3 Dolphins Class

We have had a busy two weeks as the children are beginning to settle into school routines and are working hard in our lessons.

Our Year 3 outdoor team building activities with BonaOna in Can Pastilla was a great success and a wonderful experience for our children, Miss Jacqui and I. It was delightful to see the children filled with such enthusiasm and excitement. The instructors also commented on the children's behaviour and good manners.

In Maths, we have been focusing on adding near multiples of ten by either partitioning or rounding using number squares as required.

In table groups, the class were also given a number and asked to write two 2-digit numbers that would total their given number.

We have continued adding decorative detail to our Asian elephants and have been using oil pastels to add depth and tone to our work. We will finish our beautiful artwork this week and share some pictures in our next newsletter.

This week, we have participated in some fantastic group work in which we have worked together as small teams to develop our vocabulary further by finding adjectives that will make our writing more interesting. We have also been using adjectives to describe an noun to add more detail.

Year 4 Jellyfish Class

Collaboratio maximi momenti is the Latin phrase for Teamwork and it is fair to say that the Year 4 group have shown that in abundance both inside and outside the classroom. We began this past fortnight with a trip to BonaOna Surf School in Can Pastilla where both 4T and 4MG came together for a morning of paddleboarding, kayaking and general splish splashing in the morning sun. The children were divided into three groups and had a wonderful time together. It was interesting to see the amount of communication needed between three or four children in order to get their kayak or board to go in the same direction- they did a great job and learned some valuable lessons about going outside our comfort zones and helping each other along. Being part of a team takes patience, acceptance of differing personalities and of course a shared goal -in this case to stay afloat! Thanks very much to all involved in organising this morning for us and we look forward to more of the same soon.

Back in the learning spaces of BIC San Agusti, Year 4 are now almost a month into the curriculum and it's showing with lots of great work - collectively and individually coming to the fore. We have moved onto our next book in our English unit called ¨” Can you catch a mermaid”, a book we can now review and compare to our first book Seal Children. The students then got together in groups to work on a big blue dazzling display. It is wonderful to see how we can interpret these stories, make them their own, and represent them through the mediums of drama, art and much more. We are already looking forward to next week´s book. We hope the sea theme continues!

In Science both classes have been studying human digestion. Ms. Thorpe´s class took to the playground to draw an ENORMOUS diagram of the human digestion tract. The class had great fun bringing this fascinating process alive with some children even getting swallowed up in the belly of the beast! A sure way to help them remember all the new words and vocab associated with the human body. This lesson is a typical example of how modern teaching and fun teachers can take themselves outside of the textbook, away from the desks and can make the learning literally come alive. Sometimes when I see these types of innovative and high spirited lessons I wish I was back in school myself as a student! Inside the classroom experiments were also taking place with Ms. Martinez to further show how digestion works with Mrs Short being told the science lesson was about “making poo” - which was correct as the children were designing and using a model of the digestive system!

Ancient Egyptians knew a thing or two about internal organs as we found out this week! The last unit was spent looking at daily life in Ancient Egypt and how it differs from now. We also zoned in on The River Nile where we had to memorise as many facts as possible in preparation for a game of Beat the Teacher- another enjoyable way to learn in a somewhat competitive game! So far it stands as Ms. Golden- 1 4MG- 0. Maybe next week they will catch me out on their facts about mummification! The children decorated their exercise books beautifully with images of Ancient Egypt and have inserted their timelines. We look forward to displaying some of our Humanities work in the classroom next week.

In Maths we are working on multiplication and division facts, including our 3, 6 and 9 times tables. We saw how to use these facts to solve more advanced problems. We continued with many mental maths strategies on how to spot patterns within calculations. Next week we move onto Telling the Time, an important life skill that needs to be practised daily. I have always found that studying both an analogue and digital clock together and to use simultaneously helps especially in this era of iphones and digital clocks. Please practise telling the time at home with your children this weekend as pre- learning for next week!

In Sport - we continued with another cooperative game called elbow tag which proved a right hoot! Trying to work in a team of 3 and 4 against a runner and a catcher made for some head spinning laughs last Monday afternoon. This game was a great warm up activity for our Gymnastics lesson, where we practised lands, jumps, rolls, ¼ turns, ½ turns, and taking weight on both hands. Not too unlike kayaking and paddle boarding, gymnastics is often another area where we go out of our comfort zone. They call the area just outside the comfort zone the stretch zone - Well done Jellyfish , you are definitely extending those tentacles to see what you can do!

One can add spellings, oral language games, homework, art, music, PSHE, German, Catalan, French and IT to the above and it's plain to see that the learning and doing has started in earnest throughout the Year 4 cohort. What an AMAZING team we make!

Year 5 Whales Class

The Year 5 Class are in full swing now and are settling into life back at school. As well as new children, we have also welcomed some smaller additions to the class! As part of our Science topic on lifecycles, we are having a front row seat on the life cycle of butterflies. When they arrived, four of our caterpillars had already entered into the third stage and were already chrysalis. Colin, the only caterpillar, ate and wriggled around for about a week until he also became a pupa! The children have been fascinated watching, feeding and observing the changes each day. Stay tuned as we are hoping Colin will transform into a butterfly soon!

Linking to our Science topic, our art lessons this term are looking at and creating botanical illustrations. In the first lesson, we looked at different botanical illustrations to try and understand what they are and how they show different parts of plants at different stages in their life cycles.

In Computer Science lessons we are learning about systems. We found out what is meant by the term ‘system’ and then explored systems all before thinking about how computer systems help jobs to get done. Here we looked at the different systems on a bicycle and how they work.

In English the children continued their learning of imaginary world stories as we designed imaginary worlds and then used drama to explore those worlds. Finally we wrote stories where our character travels through a portal to the imaginary world and then encounters a monster!

Year 6 Sharks Class

In English, Year 6 produced some wonderfully written descriptions of a very mundane object - a banana!

Year 6 also began to build their own human body this week and we started with the skeleton, naming 15 of the more than 206 individual bones.

In ICT, we looked at why it is so hard to remember Internet Protocols.

While in Art, we continued with our Ancient Greece theme and drew some formidable Greek hoplite warriors.

Finally, Year 6 continued to practise for their first school assembly of the year.

Spanish and Catalan with Miss Maria

¡Hola a todos/as! Esta semana es el turno de nuestros adorables niños y niñas de Starfish. Hemos estado leyendo y aprendiendo sobre EL PEZ ARCOIRIS, una historia maravillosa sobre un pez de colores con unas preciosas escamas brillantes, las cuales al final acaba compartiendo y dándose cuenta de que esa es la verdader felicidad, compartir aquello que nos hace especiales para que los demas lo disfruten tambien y no nos sintamos solos. Los alumnos/as se han divertido también interpretando el cuento y haciendo divertidas actividades relacionadas.

Spanish and Catalan with Miss Ainhoa

En la clase de español con 5&6 hemos estado aprendiendo el vocabulario relacionado con la familia. Pues lo hemos trabajado a partir de algunos árboles genealógicos de diferentes tipos de familia. ¡Y cómo no! Nos han entrado muchas ganas de crear nuestro propio árbol genealógico y dar a conocer a nuestros compañeros de qué miembros se componen nuestras familias.

El resultado ha sido muy interesante...

Spanish and Catalan with Miss Marina

¡Hola a todos! Durante estas dos semanas, con los niños de Year 1&2, seguimos trabajando y conociendo muchas cosas nuevas sobre África. Ya sabemos dónde está África, los diferentes animales viven en el desierto y en la sabana… y ahora sabemos cómo son las casas de las familias africanas. Por ello, hemos creado nuestra propia casa. ¡Nos ha gustado mucho realizar esta actividad!.

Sports with Miss Izabela

Fresh air, sunshine and happiness- our youngest learners during their PE session!

In our last PE lesson our Year 1 students were focused on developing their ball skills such as rolling and bouncing the ball.

Children were talking about how their body feels before, during and after exercise and staying safe during physical activities by following the rules.

Well done to everyone!

JUNIOR CHALLENGE MALLORCA RUN RACE

The Junior Challenge Mallorca run race is for children from 0 to 13 years old. The event is part of the Challenge Peguera Mallorca triathlon side events program.

Start: 14th of october 2022 (Friday)

Hour: 17.30 h

Place: Torà Square, Finish line

Registration fee: 1 € (fAll money raised from registration fees for this race will be donated to a local organisation that carries out community development projects.)

Categories (Boys and girls)

The Junior Challenge Mallorca running courses lead around the boulevard of Peguera with start and finish near the CHMALLORCA finish line, on the Plaza de Torà. The circuit will be completely closed to traffic.

14TH OF OCTOBER (FRIDAY)

14TH OF OCTOBER (FRIDAY)