Primary News - January 25 2021

As part of the Primary Student Council initiative, the students celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day this week, through sharing their own dreams and hopes for the future.

For the Language Block activities, students also read their favourite poems and short stories in their mother tongue. The focus of the PSHE lessons this week was friendships: how to form good peer relationships and solve conflicts in a respectful way; recognising when someone is lonely and strategies for inclusion - something that is particularly relevant to the current situations students face working from home, where they may feel isolated from their peers. Respect and empathy are one of the four BISL values and truly important for building positive and healthy relationships in and out of school.

With the latest news of some of the Primary classes returning to schools in Slovenia, we are super excited about welcoming back our Year 2 - Year 4 classes next week. In preparations for a smooth transition, it is important to read the Update from the Principal and our new Reopening Procedures guide with your child at home and review the health and safety measures. Having been on distance learning, students will be eager to see each other again and teachers cannot wait to be back in class too! We will continue to review the guidelines daily and hope to bring more classes back as soon as safely possible.

With best wishes for the weekend, stay safe and healthy.

Katarina Železinger

Head of Primary

Early Years

This week we have been focusing on our counting skills! We have been putting numbers in the right order, finding the missing numbers, writing numbers and even counting all the children present in school during our morning circle time.

Ms Miklavec

Year 1

It was great to meet some new faces recently, I think Miss Tjaša has already truly become part of the Year 1 family, don't you agree? The children sat with her like this without being asked.

We also began putting together our own Dragon story, based on ideas put together last week. Singing, dancing, and puppet performances with drawings. Here is a sneaky peek of the action so far:

This week Year 1 moved on from learning about 2D shapes to learning about and even building 3D shapes, check these out!

Ms Blundell

Year 2

This week Year 2 have been exploring Habitats in their topic 'Living Things'. We started the week exploring a range of habitats, thinking about what animals require. As we have progressed this week, we have created our own animal fact files, exploring what makes them a living thing and which habitats they live in. We have shared our fantastic work with each other during our Topic lesson on Friday. In Maths, we have continued with our unit Multiplication and Division and in Literacy, we have been using adjectives to describe the main characters in our class text 'Beauty and the Beast'. We look forward to another week with lots to learn!

Ms Harris & Ms Miller

Year 3

It was another eventful week this week for Year 3 with the students pushing their boundaries and making many new discoveries right across the subject areas.

None more so than in Topic, where the students made powerp[oint presentations on the daily lives of the Ancient Egyptians, as well as researching the games that were played in those times. Next week, the students will put their research skills to the test before presenting their findings on the Great Pyramids of Giza.

In English, the students 'played' around with Aesop's fables in playscript form, performing some of the fables in groups, before identifying some of the features of playscript in text form. Next week, the students will review a play that they have watched in class before comparing narratives and plays also.

And finally, in Mathematics, the students have been practising various methods of dividing 2 digits by 1 digit, and next week they will practice scaling and 'how many ways' of listing possible combinations when grouping objects.

Thank you to everyone in the Year 3 community for another great week and we wish you a great weekend ahead.

Mr Mulcahy

Year 4

Year 4 are on tenterhooks awaiting news of a possible return to school in the very near future. With better figures being reported in the news, it seems that the long awaited wait for the return to school may finally be on the horizon (fingers and toes crossed everyone!).

In the meantime, students in Year 4 have been honing their coding skills, which they developed earlier in the term, in preparation for the COBIS coding competition, where students need to design and programme their own app, either individually or in small groups. This time, Discovery Education is the platform we are using. I can't wait to see what our students are going to produce for the competition; I have been very impressed with their level of talent thus far in the preparatory stages. This competition is open to all Primary aged students, from 5 onwards, so make sure that you contact your class teacher for details if your child wishes to participate in the challenge.

Mr Bishop

Year 5A

Y5A have had an interesting week discussing, researching, presenting and learning about their home countries' government.

It was brilliant to learn about all the different types of government in the world and how different each one is. The students spent a lot of time and effort on this and their hard work really paid off.

Mr Walker

Year 5B

Year 5B have been reviewing the key features of autobiographies and biographies through looking at the works on Jeremy Strong. They have each chosen a different children's author to investigate, from which they will design their own biographies about these famous people. Yesterday, Year 5B practised the skill of note-taking from a children's author's interview, in preparation for their research.

We were very interested to find out that Bill Martin Junior, the author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? wrote the book in 15 minutes on a train, hearing the title of the book spoken to him and the rest of the sentences out loud in his imagination, so much so that it was still unclear to him whether it was heard out loud or just from his imagination. The author passed away in 2004, so it seems even more special that we are able to see and hear his thoughts about his book writing.

If you are interested in finding out about other authors, take a look here.

Mrs Charlesworth

Year 6

This week the Year 6 students were involved in a Poetry reading. The 25th of January is Burns Night, which is in honour of the famous Scottish poet Robert Burns.

As part of this celebration of language block (as this is written in Scots dialect), they have been asked by our Secondary Head of English Mrs O'Regan to perform the Poem - To a Mouse by Burns.

We recorded their performance in class and published it on Facebook as part of the Burns night article. I am sure you will all agree with me that they sound great.

Mr Kokalj

PE News

This week in Year 1 PE students continued to learn a new skill in ball coordination: catching. Students were also challenged with a warmup and a bodyweight fitness session. Students worked so hard in the lesson and after they had their water break, they were so proud to have learned the proper technique of catching a ball, they continued practising during their lunch break. Well done!

Year 2 are continued with being active every day with Ms Fairchild and have been practising various skills throughout the week, focusing on fitness, and learning basic skills for basketball.

Year 3 and 4 are also continuing everyday PE lessons online and staying active. Every day students do a different style of workout. Our goal in the PE department is, that students stay active and healthy during online learning which assists with the focus for their other subjects.

Year 5 and 6 focused on well being and staying active this week. Students were put into groups and introduced to their new project. Students will need to create a presentation, in which they film themselves doing certain exercises and staying healthy. This is an ongoing project so we look forward to seeing this progress and ultimately what the students can create.

The PE Department would also like to share challenges we are currently doing:

• Keep up with the student Click here
• PE Weekly challenge Click here

Our healthy recipe for this week...

• Healthy Recipe

PE Department

French News

In this block, Primary French classes are working on:

Y3 students are already able to describe what they have in their pencil cases in French. They can also sing the song: "Tourne, tourne petit Moulin"

Y4 students are able to name different types of transport, and they can describe how they go to school. Their song of the week was about a Whale: C'est la baleine qui tourne qui vire...

Y5 students are talking about different clothes and different colours. As we are in the Languages block, we put together all the languages that we have in the class.

I say French .... you say..... Let's see what Year 6 did. They are also learning about the equipment in their class.

Mrs Berden

EAL News

In our monstrous EAL lesson about monstrous body parts and astounding adjectives, the little monsters from our LKS2 group each drew their own monster with its monstrous characteristics.

After the monsters were finished, we described them with as many monstrous body parts and outrageous adjectives as possible. You can see our monstrous masterpieces in the photos.

Mr Siter

Slovene News

Yesss! Years 5 and 6! We almost made it through the interesting presentations of our tasty menus.

We have been working hard on our menus this week. Every pair has created a daily menu and presented it to the class. Meanwhile, we became pretty hungry!

Well done students!

Ms Košec

Year 3 and 4 in their Slovene Advanced lessons are learning how to write a description of a person. Students presented their own descriptions based on pictures.

They like both oral and written presentations and created some creative descriptions!

Odlično!

Ms Drofenik

Parent Survey

Thank you to those who have already taken the time to complete our 2020/21 Parent Survey, it is very much appreciated, as it will provide us with important feedback for us to continue to improve your child’s experience at our school. If you haven’t completed the survey yet, the deadline to do so is Friday 29th January.

Student Art

It is great to see students spending this time working on their interesting and diverse hobbies. In this case we would like to present the brilliant art pieces from Anna Y5.

MEPI News

Well, as they say, 'every cloud has a silver lining'! It was unfortunate that the water shortage meant that we had to all work from home on Monday, but it gave our MEPI participants a chance to 'wrap-up' one part of the expedition training. It was possible to actually show and demonstrate some of the essential equipment (stored off-site) that is needed for a safe and successful 'Adventurous Journey'. Over Zoom, we were able to examine the good and bad points of various items of kit. Strong boots, with ankle support, had already been discussed, but we looked at a range of rucksacks with differing capacities and features. Something approaching 65 litres should be large enough, and padded, adjustable shoulder straps and hip belt are essential.

(70% of the weight of your pack should be carried on your hips!) We covered everything from 'gaiters' to 'gas burners' (The safe use of which, will be fully demonstrated next week.) The full Expedition Kit List is here. It's always satisfying to log onto the Online Record Book and enter a completion date next to an activity!

Mr Irving

Teacher Feature

If you haven’t had a chance to read our recent Teacher Feature profiles, here’s what you may have missed:

• 13.01.2021 - Mrs Tanya Charlesworth
• 16.12.2020 - Ms Sarah Fairchild
• 09.12.2020 -Ms Polly Tušar
• 25.11.2020 - Mr Tobija Siter
• 04.11.2020 - Mr Gary Bradley
• 28.10.2020 - Ms Laura Harris
• 21.10.2020 - Ms Katarina Miklavec
• 14.10.2020 - Mr Nino Kokalj
• 6.10.2020 - Mr Jason Batson

Dear Parents,

We are delighted with the news this week as the schools reopen for younger students, we now plan to safely bring back our students from selected Primary classes in a 'staggered' return to the building. We look forward to seeing the students again soon and are excited that they can return to the classrooms and see their teachers and friends face to face. As previously followed, we will continue to review the Health and Safety and provision at school on a daily basis. A deep clean was completed again this week and we have completed another inspection of the school site prior to this reopening. Daily cleaning has been ongoing and our hygiene checks and standards have been maintained.

With the work continuing on the new building and amazing progress visible now with the completion of the facade, lift and bridge, this promises to be a very important few months for our community. Students now beginning to return to the building is another welcome boost at this time.

We look forward to further classes returning when guidance suggests.

Our plan below includes:

• Communication of the classes to return

• Health and Safety

• Pre-opening procedures

• Mask guidance

• Timetable of classes

• FAQs

For detailed information, please see the BISL January 2021 Reopening Procedure Guidance.

Class teachers will email out further specific instructions to parents for individual classes returning to the building.

Please read my full Update from the Principal here for further information.

Kind regards,

Paul Walton

Principal

January

February