Developing listening, speaking, reading, comprehension and writing skills in the Spanish class
The general objective in the Spanish Class this year is to develop the intellectual, personal, and professional abilities of the students. They need to acquire basic language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) to be able to communicate with speakers of the target language: Spanish.
One of the most relevant aspects in my opinion is to create active listeners: The students will acquire necessary listening skills to follow and comprehend discourse such as lectures, conversations, interviews and discussions.
They will produce a written response based on the information listening texts and they will learn to use strategies to listen actively: taking notes, preparing questions and providing feedback.
Regarding speaking skills, the objective is to develop adequate speaking skills to communicate effectively in different situations about different and relevant topics in real life situations: at the restaurant, shopping for clothes, at the travel agency, booking a flight or reserve a hotel room or introducing ourselves for the first time.
For their writing skills, the idea is to develop important writing skills that will enable them to produce academic texts required in their respective year groups. Use the correct linguistic structures and grammar when expressing their thoughts.
The students will be able to write grammatically accurate basic and complex sentences using the subject’s pronouns, verbs and adjectives correctly. Also promoting creative writing for example: the script of the role-plays or writing the lyrics for the introducing myself rap project in year 6.
Creating habits and improving their confidence: In every lesson, the year 3 to year 5 students are writing and then reading to the class information about the date, the time, how they are feeling, the season of the year, the weather, clothes that they are wearing and school subjects for the day.
Reading and comprehension exercises: The students will analyse and synthesize information presented in different sources: stories, comics, articles and news. The students will identify words and/or phrases related to the topic.
To improve in their reading and comprehension skills they must learn the question words or interrogative questions: what, where, when, why, how, how much/many, who and which, to be capable of understanding what they need to answer.
After answering all the questions about the text, the class will participate in discussions about their own experiences, to increase their knowledge and vocabulary about the specific topic they need to participate in these conversations.
The role plays help them to develop collaboration and interaction skills and creative writing and thinking. The students also prepare questions for the class to increase their interaction and participation.
Javier Vidal
Spanish Teacher
PHOTOS: Travel agency orals: Promoting one of the Spanish Speaking Capitals. Students were even encouraged to dress up for the role-play activity.
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PLAYDOUGH FUN WITH THE YEAR 2’S
“Play is the highest form of research” – Albert Einstein
Our Year 2’s had some fun experiment with playdough, discovering new ways to use it. There are many benefits of children playing with playdough including developing fine motor skills, creativity, vocabulary, literacy and numeracy and much more.
Playdough also:
- Motivates children to explore its sensory qualities.
- Strengthens small fingers, hands and wrists.
- Builds children’s imagination as they play with it, creating as they wish.
- Developing self-esteem – no right or wrong to play.
- It’s calming and helps children relieve stress through their hands.
- Involving them in making the dough and discussing things like colour and texture, and what happens when liquids are added.
The students experimented with moulding their playdough into different types of animals as well as various shapes like hearts and stars. Some even created small board games to play on like noughts and crosses. So much fun was had!
Siobhan Hendry
Year 2 Teacher
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Live Sketching in Arts and Craft Club
“Art has the role in education for helping children to become more like themselves instead of more like everyone else. “ – Sydney Gurewitz Clemens
The Year 1 and Year 2 students in the Arts and Craft club thoroughly enjoyed a quiet lesson on Monday, completing a live sketch of a plant. They had the choice between an orchid and a bonsai tree. This took a lot of concentration and visual analysis of the different parts of a plants structure which the Year 1 students mastered in Term 3.
A live sketch is also known as a life drawing which is the drawing of an object through observation. We found this form of art something new and different for the students to try which completely blew the teachers away by the interest, concentration and beautiful sketches that were completed.
We found this form of sketching encourages students to make use of visual analysis, a lot of concentration, aids in creative problem solving and helps hand-eye coordination as well as fine motor skills.
We are grateful to have such talented students in our Arts and Craft club and look forward to watching them continue to grow more skills over this last term.
“The arts can help students become tenacious, team orientated problem solvers who are confident and able to think creatively.”- Arne Duncan
Erin Hierse
Year 1 Teacher
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Creating community in the Spanish class
Building community is one of the most important aspects in the Spanish class.
Personally, I have the feeling that I have failed in the past to build a more positive environment with certain year groups that would have improved the quality of my Spanish lessons and the learning experience of my students.
For that reason, my main objective for this last term and for the whole 2023 is to improve that relationship with my students, focusing on making genuine connections.
This aspect based on my experience is key to creating a better dynamic in the class, a class where the students can find a safe place with low levels of stress and zero anxiety.
My first step to achieve this goal will be to give them the opportunity during this last term of asking me questions in Spanish through an activity that I have called: Interviewing the Spanish teacher.
I think that by giving them certain details about my family, pets, travels, favourite things, and memorable moments will help me to build better connections with them.
Generating an excuse to start a conversation
Secondly, I am planning to have more conversations with the students about things and topics that interest them, of course they must be able to understand the message to start a conversation and the teacher must be the facilitator of the language acquisition.
Introduce more projects that interest them and topics that would like to talk about.
Some of the Term 4 projects:
Year 5 and 6 – Interviewing the teacher. Every student can ask me one question in Spanish.
Year 5 – This is me: the students are going to introduce themselves in groups of two having little conversations asking each other’s names, ages, nationalities, place of residence and grade.
Year 6 – Interviewing a classmate: Asking questions about his or her favourite food, music and sport.
Other little thing on my list that helps to connect and establish better relationships with them:
· What would my students like to be called? Are they using other names rather than the ones on your class list?
· How much do I know about them? Hobbies; sports that they practice; siblings…
Learning about each other
The students can also learn about each other to create bonds with other classmates over common interest they may not have discovered yet
From little conversations to great conversations
Engage them in a follow-up conversation, simplest way is by using WHY? so, they can express themselves further.
Making learning fun, useful and interactive
In this article’s featured photographs you will find some special moments of the Year 5 and 6 students performing their role-play activities: At the restaurant and at the clothing shop.
At the end of each role-play, the group has been asking questions in Spanish to their classmates about their stories promoting their interaction.
I look forward to a wonderful term of building a strong community in the Spanish class.
Javier Vidal
Spanish Teacher Primary School
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Welcome back to school!
There was much excitement in the Year 2 classes as they returned to school this week! Watching the different facial expressions as they walked into class, one could definitely see that, most of them were very happy to be back.
Within the first hour, however, questions like: When is it break? Can we eat yet? Do we have to do more work? Or statements like I’m tired, made me realise that it was going to take a while for the students to get back into their normal routine.
When asked what they missed about school, answers like, break time, playing with my friends, free time in class, or we missed you, were quite openly shared. Obviously school work did not rank high in the popularity poll!
However, given a few days to settle in, the students were soon eager and ready to start learning again. I was reminded that, especially, with younger children, their minds absorb information like sponges.
As we enter the final term of 2022, one looks back at the beginning of the year and appreciates just how much they have grown, academically, emotionally and socially.
Kim Coetzer
Year 2 Teacher
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Adventures In Space
In English this week in Year 1. we have been working on our creative writing skills as we dramatised stories of our adventures in Space. Turning our desks upside down in class, we pretended they were our ‘spaceships.’ The students worked in groups and had a lot of fun acting and narrating out their space adventure stories. We then used the ipads to video their stories before writing about them. The class has a lot of fun working together and creating their own space adventures!
Clara Chassungo wrote: “I am going to space, I’m taking my brother, Geraldo and am also taking my mum and dad. We are going to look at all the different planets and we are landing on the moon! We will land at 3 o’ clock in the morning and we see aliens and footprints. We will jump in the sky…”
Buhle Sibiya writes: “ I am going to space so I can see the 8 planets in the galaxy and I am taking Ozzie, she is my friend. We landed on the moon and we saw aliens and we are going to land…”
Charlotte Cronje
Year 1 Teacher
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Saving Water
The students in Year 1 have been studying the topic Earth and Space in their science lessons. They have learnt about the planet Earth and how it is made up of mostly water and that there is not much fresh water on our planet.
We looked at ways we use water at home and how best we can save water. Although they are too young to remember how close we came to ‘Day Zero’, many of the students have learnt to use water sparingly. They were able to come up with a number of ways to save water as well as spot the places where people waste water.
The water saving game was a big hit with the students.
Ann Cordner
Year 1 Teacher
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The Aim Of PE
Our weekly programme that is derived from the Cambridge curriculum helps us perform different exercises and play games that are skill based and always motivate teamwork rather than focusing on individual skills only.
We learn about our bodies and how we can use them to the best of our abilities within the sports fields.
The curriculum is based on the sporting codes we provide at BIS, thus, it is important for students to participate and enjoy the different skill sets taught throughout the year as per the curriculum requirements.
As coaches we want our students to participate in different activities and expose them to different types of sports within our lessons, hence we provide the support that is needed to achieve this goal.
We cannot achieve all of this without the help of our lovely parents, so we ask that our lunch boxes are filled with health conscious nutritious food on a daily basis.
Promoting good eating habits is vital to a child’s development physically and mentally, It is said that eating healthier 80% of the time and doing 20% exercise compliment each other.
What Experts Say
“The 80/20 rule approaches healthy eating with a message of moderation-80 percent healthy choices and 20 percent flexibility for less healthy option. Nutrition professionals back this approach, as it is feasible for all, allows for variety of foods, and avoids deprivation.” – Chrissy Carrol,RD,MPH
Let’s try and pack a healthy lunch box.
We are most certainly improving and setting the tone at our PE lessons every week and I (Coach Mpho), am getting the greatest joy seeing the improvement and the strides that our students are making, getting the idea of how to move the body over a game of dodgeball, soccer, handball and more.
Also knowing the amount of power needed to make a short or long pass, throwing skills, learning new games and most of all having fun with your peers and improving your game.
Week 6 – Handball skills, teamwork, accuracy and movement.
Class – 5HK
ATL skills observed – Listening and communication skills, self-awareness and sense of urgency – teamwork
Planning
The students warm up by taking a jog around the 5 aside court ,do shuttles that incorporate push ups, sits, lunges, jumping jacks/body weighted squats to get the blood flowing and the heart rate going.
They then go into stretches from neck to toes, whilst illustrating and explaining to them which parts of the muscles they are stretching and the importance thereof.
In this case, a class is split into 2 teams that verse each other etc. (red vs orange team)
Instructions are as follows:
- No one is allowed to keep the ball for more than 3 seconds creating a sense of urgency in their play.
- Teams have to pass to everyone in their team to have a legitimate goal awarded, which creates a team effort where everybody participates, teams are not allowed to run with the ball which forces them to work together – teamwork.
- Teams are allowed to pass the ball by either bouncing or no bounce, two-handed passes for more accurate passes.
Objective
The objective of the lesson is to establish and develop good communication skills, passing accuracy and most importantly following the rules of the game and applying all the skills taught throughout the curriculum.
Assessing
Can a student apply themselves through the activity that is focused and based on team building?
Can they pass, throw and catch the ball?
Can they be creative in terms of movement and creating space on the field?
Are they calling for the ball, communicating to their teammates?
Do they understand the rules of the game abide by them?
The students attitude, enthusiasm and the will to do better is as important as his performance.
In Closing
As the winter season slowly drags on to its end, we welcome Spring and the sunshine. I am grateful for the support that has been shown by our BIS family, parents, teachers, ground staff and all who make our school united and warm throughout the soccer and netball season by rooting for our students.
I also wish congratulate all our junior and senior Tennis teams that represented BIS in Sun City last week as well as all our soccer and netball boys and girls who participated with much courage and enthusiasm in all their matches this season.
Well done to you all, we are all very proud to be part of the winning mindset.
Mpho Mahlangu
PE Teacher
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Litter Challenge
“Educating our children is a key ingredient in the recipe to save our Earth!”
This week our Year 2’s did a school litter pick-up! Before we went out we had a small class discussion where we reminded ourselves about what litter was and chatted a bit about what a good strategy would be in order to cover the area we were going to cover and pick up as much litter as possible. The students were excited at the idea of helping to make their school a cleaner place!
We made a plan to tackle the field and the surrounding areas, a few students carrying some plastic bags for any rubbish to go straight into, all of us walking in our smaller groups across the field making sure to keep a look out for any litter that may be laying around.
All of the students took their role in this clean-up very seriously and seemed to enjoy themselves as they went. Well done Year 2’s, you are making a difference!
Siobhan Hendry
Year 2 Teacher
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Spring Has Sprung In Arts And Craft This Week
“Reuse the past. recycle the present, save the future” – Unknown
In KS1 Arts and Crafts Club, the students have been making use of recycled goods to create a beautiful flower to welcome the start of Spring.
Teaching students about spring helps to develop life skills, observation skills and promotes a love for learning and nature. Helping children notice and celebrate the signs of spring is a wonderful way to sharpen their observation skills. This helps students to learn how to focus, to be present, and live in the moment. Observation skills help people become better writers, scientists, and global citizens. Using nature to teach these skills can shake children and parents alike out of the rut of the normal day-to-day life.
Using recycled goods such as bubble wrap and bottle tops help students realise that these items are goods and not waste. We can reuse them for Arts and Crafts activities, not allowing them to be thrown into bins or left lying around on the floor around us. Teaching students to reduce, reuse and recycle (the three R’s) can create a ripple effect on the lives of their loved ones around them.
We encourage students and parents to continue trying to follow the three R’s.
Year 1 Teacher
Erin Hierse
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