UP Team and the Extreme Survivors!

It’s that time of the year again, Christmas Holidays! The last period went by so quickly. We only had 5,5 weeks between the Autumn Holidays and the Christmas Holidays, but we are happy to say that we managed to do a lot. There has always been a good spirit in Upper Primary, and with Christmas coming closer, it got only better. Pupils are supportive of each other, they are hardworking and they are happy! That’s how we like it!!

In those 5,5 weeks we managed to wrap up an entire IPC-unit. There are so many extreme places in the world, that we only had one choice: one extreme habitat per week. In this way pupils have studied deserts, the poles, deep seas, dark caves and high mountains. And, most importantly, they have studies the ‘extreme survivors’, the amazing animals that live in this world. Whether it was about the Saharan ant or the mountain leopard, the stoat or the Arctic fox, pupils carefully completed their research, wrote an explanatory texts and even drew detailed sketches of all these beautiful creatures on our planet.

In those 5,5 weeks, of course, we also continued learning Numeracy. Year 5 pupils have for example had fun with divisibility rules and they have started looking at prime and square numbers. Year 6 pupils have focused on keeping track of all the different rules and strategies they have learnt so far, sometimes even writing posters to keep track of how to multiply a fraction by a whole number, and how to find a fraction of a fraction. There are many things to learn still, but we are on our way!

What else did we do? Pupils in the bilingual program continued their weekly spelling, reading, numeracy and IPC lesson in Dutch. We are happy to see all the progress and that children are motivated to learn the native language of Belgium. They still love to play a language game at the end of class and, to the growing frustration of their teacher, they cannot stop saying the children’s word of the year, ‘Ma.. stoppeuuhh’. They have also written a text about ‘overlevers in extreme omstandigheden’ in Dutch, which they have added to their little booklet. And they promised to keep reading Dutch during the holiday!

The English group have enjoyed even more challenging verbal and non-verbal reasoning tasks, they have designed and produced posters of some of our IPC personal goals, ‘resilience’ and ‘enquiry’. They read, write, and collect words. They are supportive and kind to each other during both language lessons, numeracy lessons and IPC lessons. They also love to play a good board game every now and then, and they are starting to understand how all these different activities combined help them build knowledge, skills and understanding – and help their language evolve even more!

That will surely be everything for those 5,5 weeks, you say. Well, we also went on two trips, to the botanical garden and to Sea-Life. We celebrated Pedro’s birthday and Sarah threw a pizza party to celebrate her birthday back in August, we got a treat from Sinterklaas and we went to the swimming pool every two weeks. We recorded our Christmas songs and dances and we delivered Christmas cards to the school’s neighbours. We got to meet Emmalien, Mr Francis’ baby, something which everyone was looking forward to. And also, we managed to keep Covid out of the door, without it letting affect our positive vibe! Well done, everyone!

Before we end we would like to say a very warm ‘see you again’ (not a goodbye!) to three special people. Mirei and Yumiri have now safely arrived in Japan, but it feels as if they are still part of our group, and always will be… And Ms Laura has been such a fantastic teacher assistant. We really want to thank her for her contribution, her patience and her dedication, which has inspired us.

We wish everyone a special end 2021 and we are looking forward to more good moments together in 2022. Team Upper Primary!!