Primary News - May 5 2021

Along with various activities to get involved in within the school life, students are invited to contribute to the upcoming editions of the Student BISL Magazine. This is a fantastic opportunity for students to work together, put their writing skills to the test or get involved in fun and creative activities in various categories and subjects of interest. Primary students will also be designing the front cover of the next edition, so make sure that you send your contributions to your teacher!

In this week’s PSHE and Assembly, students talked about ways to reduce food wastage. TheInternational Stop Food Waste Day on 28th April aims to raise awareness and ignite the change regarding the global food waste issue. Well done to the C4C team for getting into action, cleaning the surrounding woodland area around the school as part of the Earth Day initiative.

The PTE and PTM progress tests for Primary students in Y2-Y6 will take place in week 5 (3^rd May - 7^th May). Please refer to the information sent out to parents via email today.

If you would like to get involved in the International Day event activities, please contact the PTA. Parents can also organise activities with the Class Teachers, which celebrate your country, such as reading a story in different languages, singing traditional songs or cooking your favourite dish.

Students have already started with the practice for various musical performances and the Student Council with planning activities.

Another huge thank you to all who have donated to the MEPI led initiative.

Please continue to read the latest Update from the Principal. Along with the May Day celebrations tomorrow, I wish you a lovely weekend.

Kind regards,

Katarina Železinger

Head of Primary

Early Years

After three weeks of hard work, the children have painted and added various features to the cheetah we have been making as part of our Animal topic.

At the last moment, we added a unicorn horn and the children discussed whether we invented a new animal or we just had a cheetah with a horn. Some of the reception children suggested names for the cheetah which were Rainbow Dash or Cheetah Cheetah Bang Bang!

Ms Rosa

Year 1

This week in Maths we began, for the first time, to talk about time! What time is it Mr Wolf? Year 1 will tell you…

In topic lessons, we continued with the theme of Myths and prepared to act out traditional stories of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses.

Ms Blundell

Year 2

This week in Year 2 we have come to the end of our time unit in Maths. Year 2 has been working so hard to tell the time to the nearest 5-minute intervals, we have been very impressed by their perseverance and hard work. In Literacy, we have been looking at letter writing and thinking about the purpose of writing letters. As a class, we have decided we would like to write our own letters to create a class book, based on `The Day the Crayons Quit´.

We look forward to sharing this with you in the coming weeks. Year 2 has also been preparing for International day and we have been painting flags from around the world, we have some budding artists in our classes. Well done Year 2, another fantastic week!

Ms Harris & Ms Miller

Year 3

This week in Year 3 the students investigated the force of magnetism by testing the strength of different magnets.

They did so by seeing how many paper clips would stick to various magnets and also complete reports with their predictions and conclusions. The students also carried out tests to determine what makes an object magnetic or not and discovered some very peculiar anomalies, like the certain types of metals that are magnetic and those that aren't.

Well done to the students for their tremendous work and we look forward to many more exciting experiments like this next week.

Mr Mulcahy

Year 4

This week, students have started filming their movies. We are looking forward to premiering them at the end of the block to the students in the primary school, where we will also take votes for our own BISL Oscars.

Additionally, students have taken part in a live times tables competition over the past weeks, and today it came down to the finals, between Nina and Marlene. It was a nail-biting battle, but Marlene managed to pip Nina at the post, winning 15-11. Alisa came up from the ashes to win the second chance round.

A big congratulations to all students, who showed some very impressive automatic recall speeds over the course of the competition.

Mr Bishop

Year 5A

Year 5A have been planning, drawing and creating their islands week. They have been using contour lines to show the height of their islands while using carefully thought out plans to design this dream destination. Their plans came to life using dough which they crafted into different human and physical features.

Mr Walker

Year 5B

EARTH AS AN ISLAND

Having learnt about lots of different islands and geographical features, students have begun to create their own islands.

Today's lesson saw the students use the dough to create the outline of their island, this proved much more challenging than they expected. Some then moved onto creating physical features such as mountains, cliff faces, hills and volcanoes for their islands. They then cut these horizontally using fishing line and traced around the pieces they chopped off to create contour lines on topographical maps. These lines then became templates for their 3D island models. The photographs begin to explain all...

Mrs Charlesworth

Year 6

This week the Year 6s looked at some news reports of extreme weather events such as tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods, and so on. They used a map to identify the affected areas mentioned in the reports. We looked at further examples of environmental events around the world. Hailstorms in Pakistan, monsoon floods in India, the erosion/sinking of the Maldives, the drying up of lakes such as Lake Superior (United States) and Lake Chad (Africa).

Many scientists believe that these extreme weather changes are the result of global warming. The students debated this in class and shared what they know about this term and its possible causes. We deliberated whether they think that society and the products that we use contribute to the problem? If so, how? Later, the students explored more about the factors that might be adding to the problem of global warming, such as deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels.

After completing the research part of this activity, the children will choose one aspect that they have studied and write a newspaper/magazine article reporting on the problem, its causes, and its possible effect on the world’s climate. We are looking forward to sharing stories that the students will produce.

Mr Kokalj

PE News

In primary PE, students focused on the skills and sports they have missed during distance learning. Students were challenged with pivot handball, where they had to find an open space and catch the ball, without the other team interfering with the pass and score as many goals as possible.

Students in Year 1 focused on the relay races with different challenges on the way with also different locomotive skills used for moving around and practising ball shooting precision.

Overall, the week was really successful and students got a lot of exercise and skills developed in a sport setting.

PE Department

EAL News

While studying the structure and characters of an old Roman myth, our Year 5&6 EAL group did some role-playing by creating still frames from the story. In order to explore the character's emotions and thoughts, two students pretended they are a still image of two characters, while the third student had to say what they were thinking.

The Year 3 and 4 EAL students took a break from arduous activities by reading a book outside in our woodland area.

Our main aim of the day was to train our brain without straining to the point of pain and delay the rain by catching some stray sun rays.

Can you guess what sound we talked about in our phonics lesson?

Mr Siter

Slovene News

Our Year 1s and 2s have been learning professions through diverse activities. The most engaging activity was to draw a particular profession on the whiteboard. Then peers had to try to guess the right professions. Students were very creative indeed. They even chose their parents' professions or random professions and expressed them on paper. Of course, we didn't forget about our favourite game Dan – noč at the end.

Let's see a few photos of our engaged students.

Ms Košec

MEPI News

Recently, our participants tested their abilities in map reading and execution of route planning in Škofja Loka. We weren't quite a full team, but it was encouraging to see that all who were able to make it, did so. The team found their bearings and started off well. Once or twice they erred from the planned route but mostly recognised their deviation. The route taken was actually more pleasant than that planned! The weather was ideal, and the team displayed some real skills, and we also indulged in a little campanology and encountered some 'wildlife' along the way. Our MEPI participants have a great attitude, and we had a fun and informative experience.

Mr Irving, MEPI Coordinator

Appreciation Days

We have two appreciation days coming up in June. Student Appreciation Day will take place on Friday June 4, while Parent Appreciation Day has been set for Friday June 18. More details to follow.

Teacher Feature

We head into Primary School for our next Teacher Feature, bringing you a delightful interview with Ms Katherine Blundell, our Year 1 Class Teacher and Primary Art Coordinator.

Read Ms Blundell’s Teacher Feature here.

Enrichment Days

Following on from the success of our Enrichment Saturdays at the beginning of the academic year, we are offering a further 2 Days of Free Saturday School (occurring on consecutive Saturdays, 12th and 19th June) for BISL students, which will include a range of supervised activities from a published calendar so that our students can have further opportunities to enjoy learning together.

To register for these Enrichment Days, please complete the sign-up form here.

Summer School

With the summer holidays just around the corner, find out how your child can join this two-week summer adventure with the British International School of Ljubljana - details here.

To make up for some of the lost face-to-face interactions with friends due to the period of remote learning, we are happy to be able to offer 5 Days of Free Summer School for BISL students in the first week of the summer, starting Monday 5th July.

Dear Parents,

A very exciting time this week with our after-school activities continuing, examination support sessions running daily and a wonderful finish to the week seeing our MEPI Second-hand clothes drive project wrap up. Thank you to everyone involved in the clubs, activities and exam revision sessions, I really appreciate this and the students have been wonderful.

A special mention to the overwhelming response to our Second-hand clothes drive, the amount of donations from our families has been incredible. This is such a worthwhile project and working with MEPI, teachers and parents, this has been a huge success. Thank you for your generosity, time and care in participating in this project, at one point last week I thought we would run out of space as the bags of clothes just kept arriving!

A really good feeling around the school as the national Covid restrictions took another step towards 'normality' and many of our staff, parents and students can start to enjoy additional services, retailers, hospitality etc. I hope everyone can find the time to relax, recharge and unwind with families this weekend. It has been very well deserved.

This week our school grew further with additional families, and I would like to extend my warm welcome to all new parents into our community. We hope to see everyone soon at our International Days and finish our Term 3 with some fantastic events, details of which are included in my full Update from the Principal here.

Kind regards,

Paul Walton

Principal