News

The year 4’s have been inspired by the Eisteddfod Art competition. For the competition, their art needs to include the Nautilus of the Blouberg International School crest and the values of BIS:

Dedication
Excellence
Respect
Responsibility
Integrity
Stewardship
Leadership

The lesson was a great opportunity to discuss these values with the students and was thoroughly integrated with our Global Perspectives learning outcomes.

Learners also learned the skill of paper marbling, which linked to our Science lessons, where they learned about states of matter and density. It was so lovely to share the skill with the learners as it is a lesson that I remember doing when I was about 10 years old.

Many learners are still busy completing the project and we can’t wait to see their interpretation of it.

You can try it at home, but be careful as you need to use oil-based paint. See the following link.

https://youtu.be/_-E1ZZpaIKw

Marlize Keyser
Year 4 Teacher

The Year 7’s were given a Science project to create their own “Energy robots”. This fun and integrated project was a means to assess their understanding of the different forms of energy that they had just learnt about in class.

They had to design, draw and then build their own robot that could produce at least three different forms of energy; such as heat, sound or light energy. All of the students really thought “out of the box” and incorporated a range of innovative ideas.

I was extremely impressed by the final products of the year 7’s, they really seemed to enjoy using a bit more of a creative side to learning about energy.

Tayla Shergold-Smith
Year 7 and 8 Mathematics and Natural Science Teacher

In Global Perspectives in Year 1, we have been collaborating and producing work in groups.

Group work is so important for students, providing great opportunities for them to develop and practise their skills such as listening to each other, working with others, helping and thinking of solutions

The students have had a lot of fun planning and producing pictures in their groups over a couple of weeks together.

Here are some of their creations:

Charlotte Cronje
Year 1 Teacher

We have been learning about frogs in Reception Year. The students were excited to find that frogs are amphibians and that they live on the land as well as in water. The students loved listening to a song that explains all about the frog life cycle.

See the link below:
https://youtu.be/wGIc7KitJCA

Did you know… an interesting fact about frogs is that although they breathe using their lungs, they can also take in some oxygen through their skin when swimming for longer periods. They are also able to smell better under water than on land.

The students were fascinated to see how a frog can catch its prey using its sticky tongue. We listened to the story of the Wide Mouthed Frog by Keith Faulkner and made a picture of a wide mouthed frog catching a bug on its tongue for art.

Bronwen Nuthall
Reception Year Teacher

This term in Geography, we have covered a number of topics across the High School dealing with our physical and human environment.

Just as many of us have changed and grown in the last year, so has our planet and the people on it. The earth and processes that shape it, work as part of a system with flows of energy and processes that each have a distinct role. In order to understand ourselves and the world around us better, it helps to be able to identify the factors that influence our actions and habits. We also need to understand how each part of the system affects the whole.

Year 7 and 9 have been studying Plate Tectonics and the resultant earthquakes and volcanoes the movement of the Earth’s plates causes. Mount Nyiragongo in Congo recently erupted, causing people to evacuate, and affecting neighbouring Rwanda with earthquakes due to the volcano.  People that live in tectonically active regions have had to learn how to live with and adapt to these natural disasters.

Weather and Climate has been a topic in the Year 8 and 11 classes. This is often the most challenging section as the changes in the atmosphere and the reasons behind them can often seem to disappear and reappear like the wind, sun, and clouds do in Cape Town every day. There are also many factors that can affect the climate of a location, ranging from its proximity to the ocean, altitude, and latitude. These all work together to govern the weather systems that we experience locally and globally.

In Year 13 we have covered Global Interdependence. This section looks at connectivity in the world in relation to trade and tourism. To what extent do the resources and geographical location of a country determine its economic success? To what degree do the high-income countries that hold the bargaining power in terms of trade agreements shape trade patterns in low-income countries? Does aid play a more important role than trade in the development and success of a country?

Year 10 and 12 classes have been revising and consolidating their knowledge and skills in order to prepare for their Prelims, which they are currently writing. We hope all the hard work pays off!

Ann Donald
High School Geography Teacher

In Art, the Year 6’s have been working on creating their own landscape art pieces.

As a class, we looked at many different images of landscapes, including paintings and photographs. We discussed the following elements of landscape composition: background, foreground, horizon, the source of light, lines that lead the eye, natural features and manmade features.

The students then went on to creating their rough sketches of natural features from some of the paintings and photographs that we looked at. Once this was done, they looked at local landscapes in our beautiful city and sketched the different landscapes, paying close attention to detail.

The final push was picking one local landscape and creating their own variations of a local landscape, using various techniques that they learnt in Term 1 and Term 2.

The Year 6’s really impressed their teachers by creating these familiar landscapes in Cape Town, including Table Mountain, Lion’s Head, the Waterfront, Boulders Beach and many more! We are so proud of the hard work and effort they put into their art pieces and how they have taken what they have learnt and applied it.

“Art is a place for children to learn to trust their ideas, themselves, and to explore what is possible” – Maryann F. Kohl

Brittney Hakime
Year 6 Teacher

Last week, the Year 2 classes were given the task to design and build anything they wanted to… We decided not to be prescriptive, as we were keen to see what ideas they came up with.

They were given the opportunity to plan their designs, identifying items they would need. So on Friday, armed with bags of boxes, glues, empty toilet rolls, decorations and paper, they eagerly waited for their teachers to say, “It’s time for Design and Technology now”.

I was really impressed by how the students worked together, shared decorations and motivated and supported each other.

Some of their projects didn’t come out quite as they had hoped. We discussed the reasons for this and they were able to identify that some glue was not strong enough or some boxes were too floppy.

All in all, it was fun and our students learned some valuable lessons!

Kim Coetzer
Year 2 Teacher

This week Pre-Reception are learning about Frogs! The students are very excited to learn interesting facts about frogs and their life cycle.

Some interesting facts they are learning:

• They are amphibians.
• They typically lay their eggs in the water and a group of eggs is a frogspawn.
• The eggs hatch into tadpoles.
• A group of frogs is called an army.
• Tadpoles have no lungs, they have gills. They grow lungs before they mature into a frog.

The students really enjoyed painting and making their own frogs in their creative activities. They learnt a new rhyme, Five Green Speckled Frogs and had such fun singing together.

In Literacy, the sound of the week is ‘d’. The students eagerly practiced writing the letter in rice with their finger. They excitedly found objects in the class that start with ‘d’. I was very impressed with what they found. A duck, dinosaur, door, a drawing, doll etc. They loved learning the action and song for the letter ‘d’.

In Numeracy this week, they are practicing to recognize numbers 1 – 5 and put them in the correct order.

It has been a very busy learning week; we have also been doing messy sensory activities to strengthen their fine motor muscles. All in all the students have had lots of fun learning through play!

Cindy Nunan
Pre-Reception Teacher