BIC Sant Agustí News (3/25/22)

A message from Janice Short, Principal

Dear parents

Thankfully last weekend was not a wonderful sunny weekend as unusually I spent most of it indoors in front of a television as it was a weekend full of some of my favourite sports - rugby, motogp and Fl!

The 6 Nations rugby tournament reached its conclusion, all resting on the last game of England versus France. After a very disappointing game for my home country of Wales, who lost to Italy, Ireland then beat Scotland, before France held their nerve to become the champions, playing really well to beat England. France have not won this tournament since 2010 so the celebrations were huge and well deserved!

The motogp was the first ever race in Indonesia with thousands of fans attending, but torrential rain put the race into question. However after a delayed start a shortened race was won by KTM’s Oliveira. The delayed start and a wet race meant the starting grid was full of nerves and concern, but skills, concentration and resilience …and some good luck….decided the podium places.

The Bahrain F1 was the first race of the season after a controversial end to last season with new regulations for cars, drivers in different teams and people with points to prove. The final few laps saw cars failing, teams frantically working to solve problems and race points disappearing but for others determination, skills and strategy saw successes, with Ferrari finishing 1st and 2nd.

So how does my weekend of sport relate to school? These sporting events reflect how we work with the children and each other in school. To succeed in anything, you need skills but you also need a team behind you to support and advise. To improve you need to dedicate time and effort to practise, while learning to overcome difficulties, showing resilience and learning from mistakes. Unless you are lucky, you need to work hard to achieve success, not giving up. You need to celebrate achievements but think about what is coming in the future.

Through our curriculum and style of teaching, our children get such a good grounding in all these skills at BIC Sant Agusti. Although they may not win F1 races in the future, I am confident that they will all learn and apply these necessary important skills, giving them a super platform from which to grow and do whatever they want to do, both now and in the future.

A final note….in the Wales v Italy match, the Player of the Match medal was given to a Welsh player, Adams. After the match, Adams showed tremendous sportsmanship in giving the medal to an Italian player, Capuozzo for his remarkable performance.

I would like to think that our children would also display acts of sportsmanship like this, as they learn how to react and respond to others, celebrating the success and achievements of everyone as well as their own.

Welcome back to Ms Martinez who has returned from her maternity leave!

Have a lovely weekend!

Warm wishes

Mrs Short

Principal

Baleares International College, Sant Agustí

Dates to remember!

Nursery Starfish Class

Well, haven't we been busy since the last newsletter?!
The Nursery class has been learning about different modes of transport, which led us to take a walk through Sant Agustin down to the port of Calanova to see all the different types of boats moored in this port. The children had a great time and it was fun to be out of the classroom. On our way back up to school, we stopped in the park for a little play, where a fun time was had by all!

Last Friday we celebrated Maths day and learnt how many fun numbers can be! The children in Starfish class are currently getting confident in working with numbers 0 - 10 in and out of sequence in many varied ways. This includes counting, forming and recognising all our numbers in our direct environment, through songs, in puzzles, books and on paper!

Making similar progress with letter sounds, the Starfish children now all recognise their own names, as well as their friends’ names, and we, are now getting familiar with over 16 different letter sounds already!

We are all looking forward to the weather improving so we can start to welcome Spring into class, have a great weekend everyone.

Reception Seahorses Class

Another busy fortnight in Seahorse class; time is flying!... although it seems that we are going backwards again with this weather twist, with cloudy skies and wintry winds. However, that hasn’t stopped us in our learning journey! We sadly finished our ‘Superheroes’ topic but not before creating our own superhero model. I think they looked great!

Transport is our new topic and we are already so engaged with it. First, we started by looking at ‘Road safety’ and I was impressed with how much the children already knew about it. We have been exploring how to be safe when we are travelling and the different traffic signs we can see around; we have also started to design our own. We looked at how we come to school in the morning and we learned how to make our first tally. We were surprised to see how many children come to school by car!

We have also had a very special visitor this week; one of our Seahorses’ dads came to tell us all about his job. He is a pilot and he taught us so many things, including secret tricks. He also showed us lots of pictures from his job and the aeroplane he flies. We had a great time! In the classroom, we have continued role modelling what he showed us as we now have our own travel agency and aeroplane area to play. The children are doing well; you can see how much these children have travelled already.

Just as we were closing the last newsletter, in school we celebrated World Maths Day. The children participated all day long in different games and activities; they really enjoyed this day and it proves to us one thing: “Maths is fun and we can find it everywhere!”

Last but not least, I would like to welcome our new Seahorse friend, and his family, who has just joined our class! I know we are all going to have a great time together.

Year 1 Seals Class

What a busy couple of weeks we´ve had in class, here are some of the activities we´ve done.

Just for a bit of added fun in class, (and of course educational!) I brought into school a microscope for the children to use. They had a wonderful time experimenting with it. Looking around the classroom for small objects to make them larger, looking at the finer detail in certain objects and placing odd bits of fabric under the lens to see the patterns etc…

These children were the first to use the microscope, they could be seen and heard working together to study objects closely and to find out what they looked like up close. One child particularly enjoyed looking at the inside of the bone and finding the cells that are there. Another liked looking at the fibres in materials, especially the cotton wool and piece of string.

One boy enjoyed looking at objects under the microscope too. He was able to use the magnifying button and the zoom lens to view the objects in larger form. He created a model using the lego before placing it under the scope to see it in great detail. Excellent scoping!

Max used the microscope to magnify small objects and to look at them in greater detail. Max is also capable of using the zoom scope and the zoom lens button to help support his findings.

“You can see all the writing on the coin now” he said while observing it under the microscope.

This activity led to a whole wonderful afternoon of discoveries, findings and language. If you have anything at home worth scoping, then please bring it in, we will have the microscope in class for the next few weeks.

English - In Year 1, we love to listen to stories and what´s better than having a friend read to you!

Reading has become a big thing in class and everyone gets an opportunity to read with either myself or Miss Charlotte but today Mika asked to read to the class, so I was able to sit back and enjoy listening to the story too!

During focused English lessons we have been reading the storybook, The Jolly Postman. The children have been looking closely at the different types of mail a post person can deliver. We have made cards, postcards and are working towards writing letters to a school in England. The children have made postcards to send to their families, so keep an eye out in your mail/post boxes for these postcards.

Science - Well who would have thought learning about materials could be such fun! This week Seal class completed an experiment with eggs. We called it an EGGsperiment!

The idea was to choose from a variety of materials, with the idea kept in mind, to keep the egg safe and from breaking. We linked the activity to a famous English nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty. The experiment was interesting and made us all really think about the choices we´d made. It was also great fun!

SEAL CLASS WITH THEIR HUMPTY DUMPTY EGGS SAFELY IN THEIR CHOICE OF MATERIALS. And thankfully in a zipped bag!

Everybody enjoyed creating their very own Humpty Dumpty before putting them to the test.

Then, just like true scientists, we predicted the outcome of all our friends' eggs.

Then It was time for the EGGsperiment!

5,4,3,2,1……DROP THAT EGG!

The outcome was tragic for most of the eggs, but ask your children whose eggs smashed or whose just cracked……????

Next week we´re going to complete an umbrella experiment. Intrigued, then watch this space!

Maths - The children have been working SUPER hard over the last 2 weeks, not only with the 2´s, 5´s,  and 10´s time's tables but with FRACTIONS too!

We have been using our learned knowledge of odd and even numbers, times tables, and placing it together to grasp the concept of halves (½) and quarters (¼). Of course, a simple bar of chocolate helped with the understanding! (Yummy too!)

I think you'd agree, it has been fun. LEARNING IS FUN!

Year 2 Turtles Class

Another busy couple of weeks in the Year 2 classroom with lots of learning taking place. We have had some new children join our class and it has been lovely seeing the other children welcome them, take them under their wings and help them settle in.

We have been continuing our work in Literacy with “The Diary of a Wombat” and have started working on writing diary entries of our own. We have then been using our knowledge of sentence writing to help us record information in our Humanities lessons on some famous Spanish artists. We have so far looked at the work of Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miro. We study the artists’ history and backgrounds and then during our art lessons we look and try to replicate their unique styles.

Above are our Kookie birds in the style of Salvador Dali using a watercolour wash background and black pens. 3D heads in the style of Pablo Picasso using black pens and pastel chalks and Cubism pictures in the style of Picasso and Dali using cubed paper and coloured pencils. Our Juan Miro-inspired sculptures are not quite finished yet so will appear in the next newsletter!

In Science, we have been learning all about food chains and how all living things have a place in our world. We have learned about how everything fits into the category of producer, consumer or decomposer and look forward to our visit to Fresolpolis this week to find out more!

Maths lessons have been full of times tables, fractions and learning the time. Everyone had a great day on Maths Day using maths knowledge to solve bigger problems and working together as teams to earn house points on a special maths quiz. We played outdoor games and took part in a maths treasure hunt on the Lemontree Terrace.

This week we celebrated World Poetry Day in school. Year 2 enjoyed sharing lots of different poems and rhymes together and then performed Dr Seuss’s ABC to Year 1 and Early Years.

The class performed really well and got their tongues around some of Dr Seuss’s famous tongue twisters!

We wish everyone a very happy weekend and hope we finally see some sunshine!

Year 3 Dolphins Class

In Art, we have been learning all about Stonehenge, its geographical features, how it was built and possible suggestions for what it was used for in the past. We then created our own beautiful silhouette by drawing pieces of stone onto black card and sticking them onto our painted skylines.

On Monday 21st March, the whole school celebrated World Poetry. Year 3 performed- For words-Thank you by Benjamin Zepheniah. We did a fantastic job!! We have also been learning about Benjamin’s life and what inspired him to become a writer.

Year 4 Jellyfish Class

We’ve had a super busy couple of weeks in Year 4. We had our assembly, celebrated World Poetry Day, Diversity Week as well as welcomed Ms Martinez back to school…

Our class assembly celebrated how different we all are and how amazing and wonderful that makes our world. It was Ms. Martinez’s introduction to our class and what a wonderful way to show her what an amazing class we are! Ms Martinez will be teaching us on a Monday, Tuesday and a Wednesday, and Mrs K-B will still be teaching us on a Thursday and a Friday.

In English, we have been working on a unit of learning called ‘Performance Poetry’. It has been a really fun unit as we have all tried performing all sorts of different poems with all sorts of different features from short rhyming poems to storytelling free verse poems, from poems written this year to poems written hundreds of years ago…! On Monday the 21st the whole school celebrated World Poetry Day and the beginning of raising awareness about diversity. World Poetry Day and the diversity in school was celebrated by the poetry SLAM! Every class shared, presented, and performed a different poem or more and did it in a different way. In Year 4 we celebrated Walter de la Mare and performed three of his poems, The Listener, Some One, and The Huntsmen. Each poem is very different, but all three had the 3 R’s - repetition, rhythm, and rhyme - and we used those similar features to make each performance different.

In maths, we have dived into division! Mrs K-B introduced us to the ‘bus stop method’, but no we didn’t have to go down the road and wait for a bus to help us! We recapped and explored the many different ways of thinking about dividing from sharing, grouping, using our place value knowledge and, of course as Mrs K-B always says, what we already know - our multiplication facts! We have also been using the ‘formal’ written method for addition and subtraction calculations - the column method - and again we used what we already know… and, of course, playing maths games and fun with numbers!

In Science, we have started our new unit of learning and have begun to think about the states of matter. We have sorted materials using the properties of their state of matter and explored the particle differences in a solid, liquid, and gas. We even created dramatic representations of each state!

In ICT we have continued to learn about animation and made flick books and thaumatropes… a little bit of art, design technology and digital technology all rolled up together has resulted in some amazing animations.

We hope you have a fabulous couple of weeks and have as much fun as we will.

Year 5 Whales Class

It's been another jam packed two weeks and it is great to see how much the children are learning! As part of our English lessons, we have started ‘Soapbox’ presentations to help develop our speaking and listening skills. Each child will have an opportunity to create their presentation about anything they choose and then they do a short talk to the class with visual aids. Our first two presentations have been fantastic and set the bar! From cakes to aeroplanes, the pupils showed so much enthusiasm and knowledge in their interesting and engaging presentations! Well done Finn and Eva!

The Whales has great fun during World Poetry Day when we read and performed the poem ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll. Once we had got our heads around the nonsense words, we managed to make some sense of the poem and then had fun performing it with actions and expression! Check out the Whales practising for the poetry slam.

In our PE lessons, we are focusing on rugby this term. In our first lesson, we had great fun developing our passing skills and learning how to hold the ball correctly as well as taking part in relay races.

In Maths, we have learnt the different types of triangles. We cut up pieces of paper and labelled each triangle as either scalene, isosceles or equilateral. We also learnt that there are right-angled isosceles and right-angled scalenes!

In another lesson, we learned about reading scales and measuring weight. We compared 100g of different carbohydrates and then measured one cup of each carbohydrate to see how much they weighed.

The class also had great fun on Maths morning when they created sculptures using 2D shapes as well as taking part in a carousel of competitive tasks to win house points.

In our last Science lesson, we learned about the different processes to separate materials. The children had four bowls of different mixtures and had to choose the best process to separate them. We then had a go at sieving, filtering, and using magnets and found out which one worked the best!

Year 6 Sharks Class

Last week in English, Year Six tried their hands at persuasive writing by advertising a new brand of chocolate bar. They had to practise their ability to use a strawman, with some very persuasive examples.

Year Six took part in Poetry Day on Monday and recited Blake's Tyger Tyger to the pupils of San Augustin. They also analysed the poem to form their own reading of the text and came up with some excellent interpretations of the poem, some of which even made Mr. Hodson reconsider his view of the text.

In science, we have finally evolved to the point where the pupils have adapted to the stage where they were able to complete their end of unit assessment. Darwin would have been pleased with the results as all did very well.

In PE, Year Six practised their three-man weave, with some impressive results. The ball was moved up the court with great speed and precision leaving Mr. Hodson speechless!

Spanish and Catalan with Miss Ainhoa

Esta semana hemos estado trabajando con la historia de “El rei Carnestoltes i la Vella Quaresma” en las clases de catalán y, en concreto, la clase de Year 3&4 ha conseguido representar de manera gráfica esta historia tan divertida.

Cada grupo de alumnos trabajó a partir de un fragmento de la historia y así, entre toda la clase y trabajando de manera cooperativa, han conseguido plasmar la leyenda de una forma muy correcta y ordenada.

Spanish and Catalan with Miss Maria

Aquesta setmana a la classe de Year 2 hem conegut qui és la Jaia Corema i per què té set cames. També hem après la seva cançó i hem dibuixat la nostra pròpia jaia. El més divertit és que les alumnes li han llevat una cama a la Jaia, així que ara ja només li queden tres, tantes cames com setmanes queden per les vacances de Setmana Santa.

Sports with Miss Izabela

What a fun day it was on Saturday!

Last Saturday 19th March, our BIC Sa Porrassa and San Agusti Year 5 and 6 volleyball players took part in the Volleyball Tournament in Son Moix organised by Consell de Mallorca.

There was an extraordinary sports atmosphere at the volleyball event, and we had a great time.

After the matches, our students had the opportunity to enter the centre court and take a picture with the professional players.

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

We would like to say thank you to Fenie Energia Voley Palma for the invitation to the match.