Primary News - November 2 2020

Dear Parents and Students,

First of all, a huge thank you to all the parents for their good wishes and continued support of our BISL community during the past weeks. The online classes have continued this week with Years 3-6 working from home, while our younger cohorts carried on explorations in school and outdoors. It is wonderful to see a large number of students attending the school. If you are at home and feeling under the weather - we send lots of positive cheers and good wishes.

For next week, please see the Update from the Principal and continue to check your email for any important announcements. There are no changes to the classes on-site or to the after-school supervision. As always, we will continue to review this daily and keep everyone informed.

Today is also Halloween Dress-Down Day and there have been lots of fantastic photos already shared. With the pumpkin carving in Early Years and the Halloween Parade, the celebrations are well underway. Thank you to the PTA for helping with these and all the parents involved. Congratulations to the winners of the Halloween Costume Competition too, organised by the Primary Student Council!

Happy Halloween and Best Wishes,

Katarina Železinger

Head of Primary

Early Years

In Early Years we have been making Journey Sticks showing the autumn colours from our school garden!

Ms Rosa

Year 1

Happy Halloween, what a spooky week it has been!

Canvas logins have now been distributed and more content will be added over the weekend + a video on how to teach phonics at home will be posted (check out my YouTube channel).

In English this week, we have been focusing a lot on reading and how to decode words using our phonics knowledge. We have set up carousel stations in our classroom to keep learning refreshing and fun. Year 1 are making good progress with their reading.

In maths we have been looking at number bonds to 10, 20, 100 and some students even managed number bonds to 1000, going beyond Year 1 expectations. I was very impressed. We took learning outside of the classroom and decorated our school playground in chalked number bonds.

In Topic we focused on Halloween this week, decorating our classroom with arts and crafts, show and tell, developing coordination skills through dance and have been reading scary stories.

A big happy birthday to Izabela!

Well done to our Star of the week - Adrian.

Thank you to our class / parent representative, Mrs Ana D. for the wicked classroom decorations.

Mr Hughes

Year 2

Year 2 had a fantastic week this week. We have participated in so many fun and exciting activities. At the beginning of the week, we had a short nature walk, looking for signs of Autumn, thinking about why leaves fall from the trees. To end our autumnal activities this week, we celebrated Halloween, with some incredible costumes and fun games created for us by our Year 2 class parents.

Thank you Year 2 for a great week! We are looking forward to next week, where we will be writing our own stories in Literacy, so get ready for some amazing reads!

Ms Harris & Ms Miller

Year 3

Year 3 moved to online learning this week and thanks to much effort from parents, students and teachers (specialist teachers included), the transition was a smooth one.

As pictured above, the students made the most of their new virtual classroom environment and carried on with their studies as normal, as could be.

In Maths, the students have been advancing with their addition and subtraction and have now begun adding 2 and 3 digit numbers.

In English, the students wrote an information text on a Pokemon of their choice which threw up some wonderful entries.

And finally, in Topic the students studied Fair Trade and its importance to the lives of the farmers it protects.

Overall, it was a fun first week of online learning and we are looking forward to the next one already.

Mr Mulcahy

Year 4

Year 4 students have made the big change to studying over Zoom and Canvas this week, and I have been very impressed with their patience, hard work, and time organisation, which we have quickly had to adapt to for online learning. It is a big change from in-school learning, but the students have been truly wonderful. A big thanks goes out to parents, who have also assisted in getting over any minor challenges which were faced this week as we got used to using the technology. I would also like to congratulate Evelyn and Marlene for taking the challenge and learning an entire 50 stanza ballad by heart! They were rewarded with 50 house points each!

Mr Bishop

Year 5A

POETRY RECITALS

Year 5 continues with the theme of Poetry this week, which sees our students perform a poem of their choosing to the class. So far, we have heard about ten students perform, with a wide variety of themes. We were enthralled with Darya's recitation of the very long poem by Rudyard Kipling 'If' and were touched by the special memory it holds for her family. Gašper brought melancholy and sweet imagery, with 'Ghost in the Garden' and others laughter, with poems such as 'The Monsters in the closet', 'The Silliest Teacher in school', 'I Saw my Teacher on a Saturday' and 'Smart'.

Darsh's actions for 'Stopping by Woods on a snowy evening' by Robert Frost had us listening super intently. Nika impressed us with writing her own poem with her mum, Antonetta, about her pets, entitled 'My Animals'. We can't wait to hear the others. A special thanks to Lev, for recording all of the performances live during our online Zoom lessons.

Look for them on our FB page.

GAMING IN THE PLAYGROUND

Last Friday saw an exciting PE lesson where the students were placed into their Houses and given the challenge of creating their own game. It was challenging for a number of reasons for the students:

• They had to work in teams of 4, actively listening to one another

• They needed to work in areas of the sport that were perhaps a weakness for them but a strength for their team-mates

• They were only given a few pieces of equipment and the playground space

• Rules and instructions were to be typed up, using only 1 slide so that others would be able to follow their game quickly and easily

• The game was demonstrated to the other Houses sufficiently well enough so that the other students understood how to play the game and win.

As you can see from the photos, we had some difficult moves to make.

Mrs Charlesworth

Year 6

This week, the Year 6 students started working on their History 6 assignment. They had to research the social hierarchy of the Edo Empire in The Ancient Benin Kingdom in Africa.

The students were put in groups to decide how they will present their learning. They were able to choose whether to prepare a presentation online, do roleplay and record an interview or write a diary.

For their final piece, the students will have to imagine that they are showing their information about the role of the person they had researched, to give job advice to people looking for a career change in Benin.

The students spent their Topic time working together by discussing, researching, asking and answering each other's questions and recording their knowledge in different ways.

Mr Kokalj

Comments from students:

"I really like our topic lessons because I enjoy working in groups and researching the Ancient Maya and the Kingdom of Benin civilisations. Working online is ok but hopefully we will be able to return to school soon. Working with friends face to face on this topic would be even better."

By Simon, Muhamed and Robert

EAL

Besides reading and spelling, lower Key Stage 2 students explored animals’ vocabulary and what animals can and can't do. Towards the end of the week, we looked into descriptive words and their opposites. One group of upper Key Stage 2 students continued to work on their vocabulary for houses and furniture, combined with simple prepositions. They had to spot differences between various pictures, taking place in a particular room, and describe the differences in several sentences. The other group focused on gathering information from different sources.

At the end of the week, we all read a Halloween themed story about a young witch and we all loved how the witches changed into numerous different animals by mistake.

Mr Siter

MFL

Slovene basic

This week we were getting to know school premises in Slovene. As a starter, we tried to guess what’s hiding in a green bag. Our keen students were excellent in learning new Slovene words.

Now they can guess what’s on the photo easily in more than one language – Slovene, English and their mother tongue. Zelo dobro učenci!

Miss Košec

Slovene Advanced

As we have been lucky to have quite a warm week, Year 1 students have enjoyed being on the playground and taking down notes on what they could find and see outside.

Year 3 and 4 Advanced Slovene students have been reading Slovene poetry, focusing more on the authors Tone Pavček and Feri Lainšček.

Year 5 and 6 students have been learning about explanation texts and writing their own recipe!

A successful week, in school and online.

Mrs Begić

British Values

At BISL, we model our school values of Respect, Empathy, Excellence and Challenge every day in the way we learn, behave and make decisions. In addition to this, as a British international school, we embody characteristics based on the fundamental British values of Democracy, Fair Play, Tolerance and Civic Duty by being respectful towards others and their opinions, treating each other fairly, looking after each other and the environment, being united and contributing to our wider community. These characteristics are evidenced through the work of our Student Leaders and Student Council, our uniform, C4C Caring for the Community initiatives, regular Student Surveys, and colourful school performances for example.

This display is a wonderful addition to our top floor hallway - we look forward to having our students back on site to enjoy it soon!

Teacher Feature

We stay with Primary school for this week’s Teacher Feature, introducing the lovely Ms Laura Harris, Year 2A Class Teacher and Primary Literacy Coordinator.

Read Ms Harris’ Teacher Feature here.

Halloween Costume Competition

Thanks to Shaun Walker (the Head of Primary Student Council) for coming up with the idea of a Halloween costume competition in Student Council and for encouraging students to join in. It was very well received and online students eagerly sent their photos to their class teachers with bated breath.

Here are the winners:

• EY: Sofia Ana
• Year 1: Valeria & Izabela
• Year 2A: Sunny & Daryus
• Year 2B: Nina
• Year 3: Leon and Adrian
• Year 4: Marlene
• Year 5A: Karolina
• Year 5B: Lucas
• Year 6: Maria T.

Printed Yearbooks

We have been delighted to have received some interest from you to make our 2019-20 Digital BISL Yearbook available for purchase in printed form. As such, we would like to give you the opportunity to express interest by completing this simple form to let us know how many copies you would like to purchase, by Tuesday 20 October at the latest. The price will be €60 per copy.

Once we've collected your requests, we will contact you directly regarding payment and expected timeframe.

Parent Teacher Association

The role of the Parent Teacher Association is invaluable at school, and although at the moment your involvement on the school site may be limited, we continue to believe in the importance of bringing our parents together in enhancing the opportunities for our students, your children.

If you are interested in becoming a member of the BISL PTA Committee, as a Class Rep or a Volunteer, if you haven’t already done so, please complete this interest form.

Dear Parents,

Thank you for such amazing support during the past few weeks, I really appreciate it. I try to see as many parents as possible during drop off and pass on my gratitude for the way in which you have encouraged our school during this very difficult time. We have collected some of the Positive Feedback together in an article here.

As of today (Friday 30th October), there are no planned changes for next week. Same operations, same classes online and the same students in school.

This is reviewed daily as there are no positive cases of students currently on site or with Primary classroom teachers in the building. If this changes, parents will be notified immediately. Anyone tested positive is currently at home resting or engaging with online learning.

Please refer to my Update from the Principal for more general updates and information.

Kind regards,

Paul Walton

Principal