Secondary News - April 24 2020

This week, all students were back in Virtual classes, either sitting exams or receiving feedback for exams so that students understand how to progress further in their subjects. The key to successful virtual learning is excellent communication. I encourage all students to please communicate with teachers as much as possible should there perhaps be a task or topic that is unclear, because in school, teachers utilise non-verbal cues just as much as verbal cues to read their learners. This means that teachers can understand immediately that there is confusion or even a lack of understanding, just by looking at a student who perhaps momentarily frowns or taps their pen repeatedly. This allows teachers to approach students to rectify the issue immediately, talking through what students are unsure of. As such with distance learning, the importance of a working camera is crucial, so that teachers can have some sense of this. This form of communication can even impact an entire lesson, with teachers, at times, having to completely reorganise the lesson the moment that the students step into it, gauging that their mood and readiness for the lesson perhaps isn’t quite where it needs to be. Teachers do not have the luxury of a wide range of flexibility and non-verbal communication when it comes to setting work from a distance. With constructive communication from both sides, the learning will be more effective which will lead to higher chances of success. Click here for further information: an interesting article that discusses the research around this topic.

This week, Mr Walton released another Principal’s update. Please refer to this for further information regarding current successes and some challenges that are being faced currently.

Next week are Virtual Interviews for Parents and Teachers. Please ensure that you have read the guidance for these carefully as emailed by me on Tuesday, 21^st April. All the best for these sessions and I hope they go smoothly. I wish everyone a safe and relaxing weekend..

Ms Andronikos

Head of Secondary

In addition to the Daily workout, Weekly challenge and trying to achieve as many points in the House competition as possible, students also started to learn about the history of the Olympic Games.The students received a LINK to a presentation about all the interesting facts about The Olympic games in antiquity and a Quiz challenge to test their knowledge about this topic.

STAR OF THE WEEK

The PE Department will also share Weekly sportsman certificates, which will go to a student in recognition of their dedication to PE Live Streams, homework and House competition. This week the PE Department is proud to present this award to Leeloo in Y7 who showed amazing work and excellent attendance in our morning Live sessions.

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

HOUSE COMPETITION

We have received some amazing weekly scores from different challenges. Here are the weekly high scores:

• Balance challenge: 16 sec
• Wall ball toss: 17 passes
• Marathon: 4200 meters
• Push up: 60 push ups
• Soccer juggling: 24 times
• The plank: 2 minutes and 20 seconds

Please keep on posting your scores and help your House win the competition. (CLICK HERE)

PE LIVE SESSIONS

Just to invite all of the students again to join us in the morning PE Live session and to share with you the schedule of the lessons.

SCHEDULE

Here are some pictures of some of our students and parents getting involved in the PE lessons

Mr Damjan

Head of PE

Thank you for all submitted answers and congratulations to Aleksander Z. (Y8A), Martin (Y8A), Begum (Y8B), Divyansh (Y8B), Georgi (Y8B), Jernej (Y9), Asia (Y9), Ana (Y9), Uma (Y9) and Oriol (Y10A) who guessed correctly. Well done!

I am pleased to announce that whoever guesses the Math question of the week will receive 5 house points! The points for this and last week's answers have already been awarded.

Maths question of this week is:

Eva added the lengths of three sides of a rectangle and obtained 44 cm. Ulli also added the lengths of three sides of the same rectangle and obtained 40 cm. What is the perimeter of the rectangle?

Students who solve the question can send their answer to my email by Wednesday next week (29th April).

Good luck!

Ms Zupanc

Maths Department

Year 7 completed their study of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by submitting a Book Report on the book. They also continued to submit some wonderful creative writing.

Year 8 students completed further pieces of Descriptive writing or answered an essay question on the Anne Frank - Diary of a young girl. Like 7 they were also given the challenge of completing some Microfiction stories (50 words long)

Year 9 were given their first essay question on Shakespeare’s Macbeth while Year 10 answered questions on the analysis of Poetry.

Mr Eve and Mr Kirwan

Here are some examples of the Microfiction stories (maximum 50 words) our Year 7 and Year 8s wrote this week.

Taking one look Pandora knew she wanted it open. Her hands itching closer to the box, until... it was open. screams of pain and darkly coloured wisps of air commenced their way from the box, hopelessly trying to grasp the air, she knew her mistake was now irreversible.

Elise Year 7

Back a long time ago a boy had an English lesson on his computer. But he was not doing his work, he was eating a cupcake. It was a sprinkle filled with strawberry jam inside. As the boy took a big fat juicy bite some jam fell on the new floor!!!!

Julijan Yr 8B

Writing competition.

A final reminder that we are continuing the English block writing competition through the whole of April

The task is to write a poem, short story, description, or essay on the topic of 'Transformation'. This is a very broad and all-encompassing theme: we are looking for those with original, creative, relevant and/or entertaining interpretations of this theme! You might wish to write a poem about the transformation of the seasons, write an essay about scientific, mathematical, or historical transformations, or write a short story about a character's transformation. The more original, the better!

Short stories, descriptions, and essays should be around 500 words (no more than 550!). There is no word limit on poems, so if you wish to write a one-hundred page epic, please go ahead! The new deadline is April 30th.

Anyone that still wants to enter can sent them by email to your English teacher with the subject heading: 'Writing Contest Entry'.

Best of luck!

Mr Newsham

Head of English

Year 7 Slovene Advanced group continued focusing on relative and interrogative pronouns.

Year 8 completed some reading tasks and searched for information,

Year 9 worked on a short story by Ciril Kosmač, called “Gosenica”

Y10 worked on how to have a successful speech.

Non native classes had different tasks according to their level of knowledge.

In the Slovene non-natives group the students were working on projects and presentations.

Well done, everybody!

Ms Kotnik

MFL Coordinator

Year 7 focused on the topic of the city. They already had strong foundation knowledge from Year 6 and have been stretching their speaking and listening skills by learning a new grammatical structure. Well done!

Year 10 students continue their IGCSE preparation and focused on leisure activities this week. We discussed invitations and explored the different ways to accept or decline one.

Year 11s have been reflecting on their previous assessment and focused on the upcoming writing assessment. We analysed students' productions in order to establish targets to focus on when writing. Their progress is commendable.

Ms Poulet

French teacher

MFL Department

Year 11 students are on their final approach to completing the practical work for GCSE Music. At the moment their listening studies are focused on two movements from Rodeo by Aaron Copland. One of those is the ballet suite Billy the Kid, the notorious outlaw and gunfighter shot by Pat Garrett in a darkened room in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

Y12 have begun submitting their practical work and are focused on listening to the baroque solo concerto. Their practice piece is Vivaldi's Flute Concerto in D called 'Il Gondolino'. Vivaldi was a prolific composer who wrote over 500 concerti, or according to some musicologists , wrote the same concerto 500 times.

Our Year 8 EAL Students learned a collection of idioms such as “caught red-handed”, “the final straw” and “to see red” while studying a unit on Graffiti.

Our Year 10 EAL students worked on a piece written 20 years ago about the future of education and if it would all be done on computers! They also worked on techniques to change from the Active to the Passive Voice.

EAL Department

Dear BISL community,

C4C WE'RE GOING ON A BEAR HUNT

We've got teddy bears from Krajnska Gora to Vrhnika and we'd love to see more. A big thank you to all of the students and parents who have already contributed to this project with wonderful messages for our community. Please continue to put out your teddy bears where people walking past can see them and share them either:

• In our Facebook “We’re going on a bear hunt post” (in comments) - and please feel free to share the initiative by sharing our original Facebook post:https://www.facebook.com/britishschool/posts/3210277485670904
• By email to tanya.charlesworth@britishschool.si

And enjoy your bear hunt when out walking.

Happy Hunting!

Mrs Charlesworth & the C4C Team plus our excited teddy bears.