Secondary Newsletter - 7th January

Block 4 week 1

A very Happy New Year to all the students and families in the BISL community. I hope you had a wonderful winter holiday and return to school feeling rejuvenated and ready to restart your learning journey. A plethora of opportunities and activities await you in Term 2, not least the Winter Adventure Days! It promises to be an action-packed and fun-filled term. Block 4 sees a focus on the Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) department. With trips, activities and assemblies planned, it promises to be a true celebration of the cultural diversity that exists at BISL!

Of course, for our older students, they return to mock examinations at a crucial point in the academic year. Mocks give students a genuine, real-life experience of formal examination procedures - precisely what to expect in the real thing this summer. This is an invaluable experience for our learners. The most important element of the mocks is not the result, on the contrary, it is what the students do with the result. It is vital they reflect deeply on the experience, interrogating the effectiveness of their revision strategy. This is the moment to recognise changes needed to their learning approach. It is also important for teachers to analyse the results and tailor their tuition for the term ahead accordingly. I do hope parents will encourage students to give their best both during and after the mock examination period.

New Year is often a time that people across the world decide to make resolutions - to exercise more, to sleep better, to learn a new skill. While success in their pursuit is common in January, the overwhelming majority of people have forgotten their resolution by February! In my assembly next week I will be talking to students about the power of marginal gains in order to develop new habits. Tiny 1% improvements each day can, over time, lead to significant learning gains. I hope they feel inspired! I will also be discussing with them some changes to the homework policy here at BISL and I will write to parents to inform them also.

Please be sure to read the latest Update from the Principal and I wish everyone an enjoyable year ahead.

Mr Jonathan Travis, Head of Secondary

Slovene news:

As a part of our previous topic in Y8 Slovene Advanced Lessons, Enya presented a description of a procedure. She presented all the steps in how to make paper and how to make it at home. She even showed us an example of it where we could see and compare it with the regular ones.

An excellent job.

Ms Kotnik

Y7-10 in Slovene Intermediate groups shared their holiday adventures and wrote interesting recounts. We also did some revision of the topics from term 1 and started preparing for the upcoming assessments.

We can see progress from the beginning of the school year to now - in the shape of student`s vocabulary and sentence formation ... which is positive feedback and motivation to keep reaching for excellence.

Ms Jakup

English News:

Year 7 continued their exploration of Shakespeare through “The Tempest.”

Year 8 moved further into the story of “Blood brothers” where Mickey and Edward first met and how their friendship develops. We examined the use of foreshadowing as a story telling technique.

Year 9 compared some of the issues facing modern teenagers in the UK with those encountered in Dennis Kelly’s play “DNA.”

Year 10 focused on W.H.Auden’s use of metaphor and hyperbole in expanding the sense of grief of the narrator in the poem “Funeral Blues.”

Year 11 sat their English Mock exams and are eagerly awaiting to see how they performed.

PE news

Students were introduced to their new sporting blocks in the first week of Block 4, with Year 7 commencing their basketball unit and Year 8 focusing on handball. In Year 9, students began their floor hockey scheme, Year 10 began their football unit and Year 11 got their ultimate frisbee unit underway.

Mr Hayes, PE Department

Maths news

Year 7 students used a choice board activity to recall Term 1 concepts. Some students created a Kahoot quiz about decimals to challenge their peers. Then they engaged in group work and studied various diagrams to represent statistical data. We are looking forward to hear their presentations on Monday next week.

Year 8 students recalled statistical concepts from earlier this year. They learnt how to draw frequency diagrams for both discrete and continuous data.

Year 9 students participated in a hot seat game, where one student sat in the hot seat and their peers asked them questions about statistics. The student did not even raise a sweat and answered almost all questions correctly. Then they learnt how to plot and interpret scatter diagrams and back to back stem-and-leaf diagrams.

Year 10 students recalled how to find the nth term of an arithmetic, quadratic and cubic sequences through student demonstrations.

Year 11, 12 and 13 students prepared for their mock exam next week.

Maths challenge wall

All secondary students are invited to solve the problems published every week in front of 316. Do not miss your chance to earn House points!

Ms Zupanc, Maths Department

Science News:

This week Y10 students have been learning about the electrolysis of solutions. They performed a practical to test what products form at electrodes. When electrolysing sodium chloride solution, chlorine and oxygen were formed which we saw as bubbles at both electrodes. We also noticed that our classroom started smelling like the pool. When electrolysing a solution of copper chloride we made copper, which we saw as a reddish layer on one of the rods.

Ms Tušar, Head of Science Department