British International School of Cracow

From the Head of School recall good memories. It is time to strengthen our
family bonds again.
Dear All,
“I need new wings, new paths...”- this quote from I would like to remind you of
Juliusz Slowacki – the Polish poet is the motto of the opportunity to sign up for
this year’s 25th International Book Fair in Krakow. the Ski Camp, the deadline for
From the Book Fair website one may read: ”Love, the first payment is 10th of
freedom, youth, rebellion against canons and November and the places are
conventions, the flourishing of individualism, the filling up quickly.
primacy of spirit over matter, mystery, fantasy, I must mention the ‘Kiss and
imagination, the idea of nature as a living and Goodbye Zone’ located on the ground floor. We
sensing whole, references to folklore – these are need to ask any primary parent not to cross the
some of the romantic ideals we continue to swear glass door and let the kids go upstairs to their
by 200 years later. 2022 has been declared the classrooms by themselves. Due to health and
year of Romanticism. Safety Rules and to avoid potential traffic on our
Meetings with authors, discussion panels and live- narrow staircase families must obey this rule. The
streamed debates, books, albums, magazines at only exception is given to Foundation Stage 1 and
very affordable prices and lots more Foundation Stage 2 Parents.
Please find some time during a weekend to join Last but not least not least , I would like to express
the biggest book event in Poland, held on my gratitude to the PTA and cohort of Indian ladies
Galicyjska 9 from 27th till 30th October. More who made a fabulous Divali Bake’a’cake sale. The
information can be found here https:// taste of all cokies, both the spicy and sweet ones,
www.ksiazka.krakow.pl/pl/ was wonderful and the whole BISC
Whether you are a book connoisseur or not, we community enjoyed it
will all enjoy the season which is called the Golden enourmously
Polish Autumn. The variety and the intensity of
I wish you a great mid-term break
colours is breathtaking. Find a few moments a take
holiday
your family for a walk in any of the Cracow’s Parks.
Remaining sincerely yours
Great costumes, spooky masks, hundreds of
spiders, noisy skeletons and beautiful orange Dr Stanislaw Kwiecinski
pumpkins will make the Friday of 28th an
unforgettable Halloween event. Ms Eva Malaga INSIDE THIS ISSUE
THE HEAD OF SCHOOL MESSAGE
with the assistance of IB students will arrange Page 1
Altar of the The Dead exhibition (Exposicion Altar PRIMARY NEWS
de Muesrtos) – the Mexican way of celebrating Pages 2 - 6
“Day of the Dead” (Dia de los Muertos). SECONDARY NEWS
Page 6
At that point I would like to mention !st November IB NEWS
– All Saints Day and 2nd November – All Souls Day – Pages 6 - 9
UNIVERSITY NEWS
two very special day in Poland, where our
Page 10
thoughts and prayers are with those who have SCHOOL CALENDAR
passed away. We light candles on their graves and Page 11

BISC NEWSLETTER - 28th October, 2022 Pg 1

 Primary News
From the Primary Head vegetables grow.
We went to the
As we come to the end of the first half term of this shop to buy some
school year I am so happy to have seen such a apples and also
huge variety of teaching and following on from we dig out some
that, a great deal of learning. carrots. After we
This week comes to an end on Friday with BISC’s washed them, we
Halloween celebrations, perfect timing leading up put them in our
to the holiday. We will see pictures of the Harvest shop
costumes, pumpkins and all the fun in the next made in our role
edition of the newsletter. play corner. The
Have a wonderful holiday, stay safe and I look children loved
forward to seeing you all on Monday 7th playing shop
November. keepers and
customers, they
Parents and visitors entering the explored different shapes that some fruits have
school and also how heavy they were.
BISC is a British Government compliant school Last week we also learnt about Diwali – The
which means that we meet certain standards. One Festival of Lights. We celebrated it together with
of the standards deals with access to the school the FS2 class and some of the parents who told us
building and safeguarding our children. As a result interesting things about this festival
of this, parents of children Year 1 and above will
not be allowed to enter the building past the glass
door near to the reception area at the start or end
of the day. This will start immediately after the
half term break. Please don’t make it difficult for
anyone to have to ask you to leave.
If you need to come into the school during the day
to visit the office or a class, you MUST sign in at
the desk in the reception area.
We care about the safety of your children so
please help us in the implementation of this new
process.
Mr. Hugo

FS1 News FS2 News

Last week’s
theme in FS1 This week the FS2 children have been reading the
was all about story ‘Look Out’ . We have discussed the feelings
the harvest of the characters and sequencing the story using
season. pictures. We all agreed that cycling is great fun and
Children were fantastic exercise and it's vital to stay as safe as
learning how possible. We promised to wear cycle helmets to
different fruits protect our heads if we fall off.
and This week we also have been learning about
Diwali, a five day long festival, that symbolises the

BISC NEWSLETTER - 28th October, 2022 Pg 2

spiritual “victory of They made
light over darkness, their own
good over evil and water gauges
knowledge over using plastic
ignorance”. The bottles for their
children had the rainfall
opportunity to: experiment
-look at the story where they
about Diwali collected data
-create the diva and made predictions about how much it will rain
lamps using clay, during Autumn.
-decorate rangoli
patterns,
-make Diwali cards
-try Indian food.

Last week Dimitrios was in

the Golden Book for
learning to write numbers
and remembering the
number formation
rhymes!
This week Adeline has
been awarded for being
able to spot the different Year 2 News
types of patterns!
Well done ! In Topic, Year
2 have been
continuing
their learning
of famous
ships
throughout
Year 1 News history. This
week, we
focused on
HMS Beagle
and its 1835
voyage to the
Galapagos
Islands,
where Charles
Darwin
observed and illustrated many unknown animals
and plants. We then
became naturalists
ourselves and drew
colourful plants. We
then aged the paper
Year 1 have been learning about Rama and Sita’s using tea bags to give
story - they made their own Diva lamps for Diwali. it a 19th century

BISC NEWSLETTER - 28th October, 2022 Pg 3

look; just like Darwin’s notebooks.
Year 4 News

Diwali, Sloth Day and

fractions in action

Year 2 being botanists

in the garden.

Year 3 News
In year 3 English we have been working on
describing food. How does it look, smell, taste and
feel? The only way we could work this out was to
try some different foods by looking, smelling and
tasting it. Some like it and others thought it was
disgusting but everyone tried some of the food.

Year 5 News
Year 5 have been busy writing procedural texts.
Last week we wrote an instructional piece before
seeing how well it
works :) The Energy
Bites went down a
treat with everyone!

BISC NEWSLETTER - 28th October, 2022 Pg 4

We celebrated Diwali in class with the help of our
Indian children and parents. The children learned
about King Ravana and we played Indian games,
and even had mehendi’s drawn on our hands!
of the background, add a frame and a water mark.
All the documents are saved and can be put on a
memory stick to show parents. The
teachers are Miss Beata, Miss Isia and Miss Miriam
The Year 4 students are working on a
similar project to the Year 3 students, but are
more focused on writing for an audience.
The layout looks very good as they reorganise the
text to make its meaning clearer.
These are some of the projects from this half term:
 Golden Rules using the TAB key, so alignmen
t is perfect
 producing working sheets for EAL students, a
s a filling gap exercise
 illustrations with pictures
The Year 4 students all work independently.
Ms. Miriam

Nativity Scene Project

This week we started
the Krakow Nativity
Scene project. The
work is quite
complicated and
requires the creation
of flat as well as
ICT in Primary spatial elements. The
first stage is to build a
The main focus for Year 3 in ICT this half has structure on which all
been the application MS WORD. Some of the the details and
students come twice a week and some come only decorations will be
once a week due to Polish school. Most of the
students are at the point of working
independently. placed later. The students
They can type in a number of words and they can became very actively
use font editing features, such as how to change: involved in building the
• font type, various parts of the model.
• size and We continue to collect the
• colour materials needed to build the
They can add a picture as well, change the colour project;

BISC NEWSLETTER - 28th October, 2022 Pg 5

* colored papers (candy by using chopsticks which was a real challenge and
wrappers). most managed to eat their entire meal with the
* cardboard boxes (small sticks.
ones, such as those for candy The trip was a huge success and as was the
or medicine). research and learning that took place in the
Please bring the collected classroom.
materials to the artroom.
Ms Marta & Ms Jowita

Wadim became the official class photographer as

he wandered around taking many wonderful
pictures. Here are just a few of his pictures.

Year 6 News
Last week, Year 6 completed their Unit on China by
visiting the
JinLing Chinese
restaurant for
lunch.
In one of the
dishes, the chef
used the mung
bean sprouts hat
we had been
growing in the
classroom.

Everyone
started off

Date Event Time Location

Mon 31st Oct - Mon 7th SCHOOL CLOSED HOLIDAY
Nov
Mon 14th November Parent Teacher Conferences 16:00 - 18:00 Classrooms

Tues 15th November Parent Teacher Conferences 17:00 - 19:00 Classrooms

Fri 18th November Anti Bullying Day - Wear Odd Socks All Day Classrooms and School

BISC NEWSLETTER - 28th October, 2022 Pg 6

 Secondary News
International Student Mobility
Lucas returns to BISC
Although many students stay at BISC for a
long period of time It is not uncommon
for students to return for a short visit
whilst they are adapting to a new life in
another country and in another school.
Lucas who is currently studying in
Denmark returned to Y10 and spent two
days with his peers who were very happy
to see him and to catch up with what he
is doing right now. Cooking still seems to
be his passion.
We wish him and his family all the best.

IB News
World Animal Day
A massive thank you for everybody who took part
in the collection for the shelter. All the items have
been already brought to the shelter and put to a
good use.
In the second part of the project the CAS students
will be helping the local cat rescue Stawiamy na
łapy to raise funds for food and veterinary care
during their charity flea market on Sunday the 6th
of November in Hala Lipowa (ul. Lipowa 4D)
between 11.00 and 19:00, so please come and join The pet food that was
us to help the cats. You can buy there books, donated by BISC parents and
students.
clothes, jewellery, pet accessories, things for home
and many more.

SKI CAMP in Civetta - get ready! See the school office or website for more details.

BISC NEWSLETTER - 28th October, 2022 Pg 7

 Students visit Mr. Rana’s farm goats and a campfire in
the forest. It was great to
On 12th Oct, spend a day outside and
IB1 and some integrating different
IB2 students aspects of the IB
spent a curriculum. A big thank
beautiful you to Mr. Rana for
autumn day on
Mr. Rana's farm
with Ms. Aneta,
Ms. Ula and Dr.
Twigg. CAS (Creativity, Activity, Service), Physics opening up his
and Biology activities included building catapults, home to us
measuring distance with echoes, learning about again.
the forest ecosystem, planting trees, meeting the

BISC NEWSLETTER - 28th October, 2022 Pg 8

Farm Visit Continued ……. In

IB Collaboration with the Jagellonian

University Institute of environmental
sciences

IB1 TOK students attended a seminar at the

Jagellonian University on Thursday October 13th.
The professor was Virpi Lummaa whose research
interests include contemporary selection, life
history traits, ageing, behavioural ecology, sex
differences and socio-economic differences in their next TOK lesson they will have the
human populations. During her career she won opportunity to reflect on the seminar and the
two ERC grants. Her most recent research evidence provided by Prof. Virpi Lummaa from the
questions include how life-long disease patters, University of Turku in Finland. Discussions will
stress and investment in reproduction affect how follow.
we age at cellular level.

Students were accompanied by their TOK teacher,

Mrs Fran Marchadour Tunstall, and their biology
teacher, Mrs Asia Peplinska. Teachers and
students were welcome by Izabela Wierzbowska
who teaches at BISC and at the Jagellonian
Theory of Knowledge gives students the
University.
opportunity to reflect on themselves as knowers
and thinkers and of different communities of
thinkers and knowers to which we belong.
After the lecture students
were offered cakes and
tea/coffee and they were
able to look at posters
presented by
researchers. They chatted and then returned to
BISC.

BISC NEWSLETTER - 28th October, 2022 Pg 9


University News
University Colleges in the Netherlands
The university college (UC) programme in the
Netherlands has been around since 1998 when
Utrecht University founded the first UC. Since
then, UCs have blossomed in the Netherlands:
now, ten universities offer the programme, from
Leiden to Maastricht.
UCs are essentially self-contained faculties that
offer a liberal arts & sciences programme,
modelled on Scottish and North American
universities. There are a number of reasons why
the Netherlands have started to offer these: the
wish to offer competitive English-language
education to foreign students; the undestanding
that some students do not know what they wish to
specialise in when they enter university; the
holistic nature of the programme that seeks to
address contemporary issues across disciplines;
the movement from summative to more formative
assessment.
While each university
draws on its own
areas of expertise to
inform its programme
(Erasmus in
Rotterdam, for
example, also offers
an Economics &
BISC NEWSLETTER - 28th October, 2022
Business major), all programmes have the
following elements in common: compulsory
courses in study skills; a wide choice of electives
ranging from the Humanities to the Sciences;
academic tutors to guide student choice; a self-
contained building which includes lecture halls,
common areas; a library, and a canteen;
guaranteed accommodation (in some cases, for
the duration of the programme); and free
language courses.
Aside from the
above there are two main differences between the
UC programme and ’normal’ research programmes
at Dutch universities: one, the cost (programmes
typically cost twice what research programmes
do); and two, entry requirements (IB students
normally require a minimum of 30 points to be
considered, though universities stress that the
application is ’holistic’ and will take into account
different aspects such as extra-curricular activities
and positions
of
responsibility.
For more on the programmes please see Mr
Patrick Lagendijk or contact him via Schoology.
Don’t forget that
there is no school
next week.
School is closed for
the Half Term Break.
Pg 10
School Calendar

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