Secondary Newsletter - 10th December

Block 3 Week 4

Peter Pan is here!

Primary and Secondary students have been treated to an acting and musical masterclass this week, with an early pantomime performance worthy of a Tony Award! Quintessentially British, modern pantomime was developed in the 18th century as a new form of entertainment, performed especially during the Christmas and New Year period. Modern pantomime includes songs, gags, slapstick comedy and dancing. Peter Pan certainly delivered, bringing laughter, dancing and singing, together with some brilliant comedy routines, plenty of audience participation and traditional panto fun. Parents beware, on Monday you may be asked to walk the plank!

Congratulations to the Creative Arts Team - Ms Kenealy for her leadership, Ms Hawkins for her set design, Ms Predan and Mr Hulse for their choreography and music, as well as all the behind-the-scenes student crew who made the show a success. To the unsung heroes, we salute you!

Amidst all the joy and laughter of Peter Pan, Parent-Teacher interviews have been ongoing all week. It has been wonderful to hear teachers engaging with parents, offering specific targets for improvement and celebrating work achieved so far this year. Hopefully live parents evenings will resume soon!

Thanks also to Mr Hayes for launching our whole school House competition! Students have been challenged with producing a creative piece of work (painting, photograph, collage for example) that links to our BISL Values (Excellence, Respect, Compassion, Integrity and Responsibility). There is also a big bumper Christmas Quiz to add to the festive merriment.

Mr Jonathan Travis, Head of Secondary

This week all Secondary classes gathered in the performance theatre to record their parts for the Christmas cover song ”I wish it could be Christmas everyday” by Wizard. The final video will be premiered next week. Keep watching for the link.

English News:

Year 8 explored Willy Russell’s “Blood brothers” and looked at growing up in Liverpool in the 1960s and examined different forms of Dramatic Convention.

Year 9 continued to examine “DNA” and paused to reflect on the events of July 30th, 1966 when England won its first Football World Cup and the impact it had on life in the UK.

Year 10 began their analysis of an Anthology of Poetry, beginning with W.H.Auden’s beautiful “Funeral Blues” and watched a moving reading of it from the movie “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

Year 11 worked on revising their descriptive writing skills.

PE news:

Throughout secondary PE this week, students continued to develop their understanding and awareness of invasion games. Year 7 looked at the importance of possession when playing football, whilst Year 8 looked to be progressive in possession when playing basketball, in order to create scoring chances. Year 9 developed their tactical understanding when playing handball, whilst Year 10 also focused on the importance of possession when playing floor hockey and Year 11 continued with their rugby league skill development.

Mr Hayes, PE Department

Maths news

Key stage 3 students learnt about geometrical constructions with a protractor and compass this week. The students worked collaboratively and taught each other how to construct triangles, rectangles, perpendicular bisectors of a straight line, angle bisectors, as well as polygons and other patterns inscribed in circles. They also learnt how to use the wobbly whiteboard compass to make a perfect circle.

Year 10 students revised simultaneous equations and learnt how to systematically construct linear equations from harder geometrical and word problems.

Year 11 students practised plotting graphs and using them to solve equations. They also learnt that curves do not have the same gradient throughout and that differentiating the curve gives them its gradient function.

Year 13 students reversed the process of adding and subtracting algebraic fractions and decomposed a given fraction into partial fractions.

Maths challenge wall Do not miss the final challenges this December in front of room 316!

Ms Zupanc, Maths Department

Science News:

Year 13 students created poster presentations on the classification of species as part of their unit on classification, biodiversity and conservation. They presented their posters to the class and talked about their poster for 15 minutes then answered questions. This is useful practice for universities where poster presentations are a common form of assessment in undergraduate degree courses.

MFL News: This week Y8 students ofY8 Slovene Advanced lessons were working on steps of procedure. They worked hard and on Friday after the lesson we were all very hungry due to all the deserts we have seen on slides.

Ms Kotnik, Slovene teacher

Dear parents,

We are only one week from a fantastic family event at our school - the Christmas Fayre!

BISL staff and PTA volunteers are organising a raffle at the event and want to thank everyone that has donated goods for the occasion, we really couldn’t have done it without you!!!

If you would still like to donate goods for the prizes please do so by Monday (you can bring them to school anytime and ask the security guard to take them to the Admissions office). On the 15th during the Christmas fair itself PTA volunteers will be selling the raffle tickets for 1 euro per ticket. All the money collected will go to the PTA funds for future events.

If you’d like to help at the Christmas Fayre don’t forget to contact us on pta@britishschool.si. Thank you in advance for your involvement.

Your PTA