First day of the new school year…

Congratulations…we made it through the first day of the 2020/21 school year. Well done, everyone!

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Mario Rigby, Our Very Own Modern Day Explorer.

We are so excited to celebrate the journey of our very own explorer, Mario Rigby. Mario Rigby attended Provo Primary School before he went on to do such great and adventurous things.

I wonder how many of our current students can imagine themselves walking across Africa.

Well Mario did it, and as a result, he ended up in National Geographic! Mario says “It’s always been my dream to be featured in National Geographic… Here I am now”

We hope that encouraging our children to develop a growth mindset and allowing them to believe that anything is possible has an impact on their ability to realize their dreams. Before the start of this new school year, we encourage all our students to imagine, visualize, create, believe, set challenges and goals, practice frequently, and work towards making your dreams a reality, whatever they may be. Mario visited the school earlier this year to talk with the children – it was truly inspirational to hear about his adventures.

Is anyone else ready be a modern day explorer? Maybe start by exploring your passions and talents, or why not encourage someone else to recognize and realize their abilities during this new school year. You really never know what you can do unless you try! Get to know what others can do too, maybe you can team up to do something together in the future that is as great as Mario’s achievements.
We’d love to hear from our other alumni and about some of the goals you’ve managed to achieve since you left Provo Primary. Please write and let us know.
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel/2020/08/meet-the-adventurer-mario-rigby

Daycare Provision at Provo Primary

Painting a weather scene

Provo Primary re-opened it’s Early Years section of the school when deemed it was safe to do so by The Turks and Caicos Education Department and Ministry of Health, in June.

As soon as our school closed, it was always our intention to offer in school provision for this age group having recognized that online learning was not an option and we were happy to be able to do so.

Although not all of our families took advantage of our in school daycare provision, families who felt their children had really missed the social aspect of being with their peers, were keen for them to return. Parents who needed to return to work were grateful for help looking after their children, after a long period at home.

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Music lessons at Provo Primary and Middle School

We would appreciate it if you could complete a short survey so we can assess interest in the variety of instrumental teaching on offer, from our student body and wider community.

We are excited and look forward to recommencing our private and small group music lessons this year at Provo Primary and Middle School. These will take place after school and at weekends and will be in addition to our music and performing arts classes that take place within school hours.

Thank you for your time and we look forward to hearing from you.

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Education Department DRAFT Guidelines for the Re-Opening of Schools:

Provo Primary and Middle School have received the draft guidelines for the re-opening of schools in September.  The schools’ leadership team have met to discuss these and provide feedback to the Department of Education.

We will attend meetings with the Department of Education over the coming days, alongside local government and private schools, and participate fully in the consultation process.

We will further update our parent body as soon as we have clear guidance on the reopening of our school, the protocols we will be following and the format of the education we will be providing in the first instance.

Please be assured that the received Draft Guidelines match with the planning and staff training that we have in place. This ensures that we will be able to work quickly to make plans ahead of the new school year.

See all our reopening news here.

Preparing to Reopen – September 2020

We have been busy preparing the school for re-opening in September. While we await government advice on the reopening of schools, due in the coming weeks, we want to share some of our planning at this stage.

All staff have worked to prepare classrooms and protocols in order to help us meet a range of scenarios that may face us in September. Our intention is to be ready for all eventualities, so that learning for our students can be seamless during the upcoming term and beyond.

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Congratulations to our 2020 Graduating Year 6

We are all very proud of our Year 6 graduates!

Their graduation had to be conducted individually with restricted gatherings and safety protocols, but the spirit, pride and feel of our usual graduation was evident throughout.

Here is one of our amazing student’s graduation memories – coronavirus style!
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Year 1 Home Learning Maths: Equal Groups and Arrays

More wonderful photos and videos of our Year 1 Maths Home Learning parent/child/teacher teams.  Lots of hand-on activities centred on equal groups, arrays and repeated addition… with home-made playdough and every day things you find around the house.  What great learning we can see in the photos with parents modelling concepts and language in these 1-1 learning opportunities.  The videos show some amazing parent teachers in action, patiently allowing time for their children to demonstrate their learning and encouraging them to explain their understanding as they engage.

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Year 1 Home Learning Maths: Exploring Money


We have been exploring money in Year 1 and our little mathematicians have been fantastic,  immersing themselves in money hunts, money races and designing and creating money flip books.  They have recognised and identified pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters and began to understand the value of each coin through their engagement with practical explorations. They have also been counting crazy in 5s and 10s to strengthen their counting abilities.
I have to to thank parents for your hands-on and one-to-one support with your children. You have scaffolded and shaped their knowledge and understanding and allowed to them to access new learning from your own home. Thank you! I am super proud of my Y1 money masters and how hands-on they were for this unit.

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Pineapple Paradise in the School Garden!

Mrs B’s pineapples are thriving during lockdown in the school garden.

I’m hoping for a slice of one of her infamous pineapple upside-down cakes sometime soon!

Did you know the first upside down cakes were not made with pineapple, but with other seasonal fruits like apples and cherries. The use of pineapple began in 1901 when Jim Dole established the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now known as the Dole Company) and started to produce and market mass quantities of canned pineapple.

Click on to see some upside down cakes being made…

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Check out the Year 3’s Home Learning “Masterpieces”

Year 3 were given a list of criteria of things to find around the house  – such as 6 different circles, a triangle, a pair of glasses, anything that could make a purple hat, something that had an orange bottom, anything that moves, 4 square objects, a chosen object of their own, one of which needed to move, a sign.

Then they used their imaginations and their engineering skills to build some amazing ‘masterpieces’ (that also, had to be 5 feet tall by the way).

Check out how creative they were – AMAZING! Well done Year 3.

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Year 6 Home Learning: Super Scary Horror Stories

During our Home Learning English lessons, via live online teaching, Year 6 have written our very own horror stories.

Our aim was to include a balance of setting description and narrative, incorporating figurative language such as high-level metaphors and personification.

We focused on manipulating grammar and punctuation in order to create variety in our sentence structures and keep the readers engaged. We wanted to create both tension and suspense and we are extremely proud of our final drafts!

Here are just some of our super scary narratives… read our starting paragraphs and continue on if you dare…

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“We Are Turks and Caicos… We’ll See You Soon!” says Year 2 and 4


Inspired by a recent Turks and Caicos Tourist Board destination video, ‘We are Turks and Caicos’, our Year 2 and 4 home learners became creative graphic designers and multimedia creators, designing their own promotional media offerings to promote the very best of our islands to visitors.

The original video was made in an effort to keep the destination of the Turks and Caicos Islands in the forefront of the minds of potential visitors, with the message, ‘We’ll see you soon!’   It promotes wanderlust for paradise with the use of breathtaking imagery that highlights the ‘Beautiful by Nature’ islands and its hospitable people.

Click on to see some individual videos the children made.

All in all, I think you’ll agree that our students efforts equally highlight and promote what makes the TCI such a special place to come and visit.

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Year 6 Home Learning: Optical Illusions and Fractured Art

As we continue with our Home Learning activities, we are mindful of including structured Art lessons that are not overly demanding on resources or complex skills, but that are very engaging and valuable.  As such, the Year 6 students have actively participated in some amazing lessons that have allowed for enjoyment, and artistic creativity and development to thrive.

Year 6 were guided in a Fractured Art lesson which was inspired by the great Picasso. The intricate details and colours used highlighted the element of movement throughout each composition and added great interest. Their creativity could also be seen evolving as they worked on the Optical Illusion piece. Each piece gave a sense of depth and the 3D effect was quite present.
These emerging artists have proven that art is an amazing tool that can be enjoyed whether you are in the classroom or at home with family.

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Year 7 & 8 Explore Lockdown Experience in Art

Students in across the school have been busy with their continuing education at home during the current school closures.

As part of our PSHE and Personal Growth curricula, Years 7 and 8 explored their feeling and thoughts about the current lockdown through artwork.

Children shared their artwork at our assembly time, conducted through video conferencing. Despite the challenges, it was clear that our students were keen to be learning together again back at school soon. The optimism and collective support among peers is something we cannot wait to share in!

Take a look at the children’s beautiful and poignant work, which says so much about the experience of young people during this strange time! [Read more…]

Celebration Assembly – Home Learning Style – Friday 3rd April 2020

This week families have nominated all the teachers to receive ‘Stars of the Week’ certificates as part of our virtual Primary School Celebration Assembly.  What a wonderful way to end an usual spring term of learning.

Teachers have done an amazing job adjusting to distant learning through our Home Learning Programme and happy students sharing their love and appreciation for them is heartwarming to see.  Thank you everyone for all your photos and videos.

If it’s ever been true that it takes a village to raise a child, this is a moment for that village to come together, and Provo Primary and Middle School’s teachers and parents have certainly been a great team and led the way.  School may be closed but our student’s brains have been open for business as usual!

Celebration Assembly – Home Learning Style – Fri 27th March 2020

After a successful week of distant learning through our Home Learning Programme, of course we had to end the week with our usual primary school ‘Celebration Assembly’.  Congratulations to all our students, parents and teachers – through your great teamwork and hard work, learning has continued to flourish at Provo Primary School. It was lovely to celebrate this virtually, imagining we were on the school field as usual.  Thank you everyone for all your participation and for doing the best you can.

Preschoolers experience travel by horse

Through a wide variety of activities this term, the Early Years children have thoroughly enjoyed learning about how we travel by land, air or sea, and even into space!

The Preschool children were fortunate to have a field trip and picnic that involved sitting on a horse, experiencing how people long ago traveled from one part of the island to the other.  On their return, the children enjoyed sharing their experiences with the other early years classes.

Families also created cardboard box models of different types of transport together.  It was lovely to see everyone enjoying these on the stage.  Well done – we were delighted to see that every family participated!

 

 

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Primary School – Science Fair, 2020

The Primary School Science Fair Team have worked extremely hard this term investigating the question ‘Does colour impact memory?’ They have conducted both preliminary tests and final tests to investigate whether or not colour improves memory retention.
The Yr 5/6  students who took part in the investigation were all eager to represent Provo Primary School at the Fortis TCI  Science and Technology Fair, on Thursday 5th of March, to the best of their ability and that’s exactly what they did! We are all super proud of our students and how well they were able to relay their hypothesis, results and conclusion to the judges. Although we did not place this time, we are already looking ahead with ideas for next year’s Science Fair!

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Middle School – Science Fair, 2020

A team of six Provo Middle School scientists have worked for the past 8 weeks to prepare for the 2020 Fortis TCI Science Fair. Linked to our recent exploration of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, we wanted to pick an investigation that could positively impact our world.
Undertaking research in Microbiology, our Science Fair team set out to answer the question “Is boiling an effective means of making water safe to drink?”
Did you know that over two billion people do not have access to clean water? We felt this was a huge issue that deserved attention!

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What’s one of your favourite early reading memories?

The ‘King’s Breakfast’  by ‘AA Milne’ is one of my favourite childhood poems that popped into my head just recently, as a matter of fact.  I loved hearing my parents reading this to me at bedtime. I’m not sure that I appreciated the meaning behind it at the time, but I certainly loved the rhythm and miter!  I imagine it set me off to sleep in a lullaby-like way.

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Today is World Book Day!

A day to celebrate authors, illustrators, books and (most importantly) to celebrate reading across the school.

 

 

 

 

 

Yr 4 Build Rome in a Day!

Rome wasn’t built in a day (as the saying goes) but here at Provo Primary, students in Year 4 have proved differently! They were given the task at the start of an exciting new topic to ‘build Rome’ in their classroom and they were given 24 hours to do it…

First, they had to research the type of buildings and structures still in existence in Rome and then they had to decide who to work with. As you can see from the photos, the children transformed a bare wall into a 3D city complete with written explanations. It was wonderful to see so much team work and so many skills being used across a range of subjects – Research (non-fiction texts using index pages and glossary), the Internet and personal experiences of Rome, Maths (shape, measurement, weight, estimation), DT (design, imagination, creation, joining techniques, evaluation), PSHE (collaboration, compromise, negotiation , respect for others).

This was a great project to kick-start our new topic and parents and friends are warmly invited to come and see this learning at our Open House on Friday afternoon.

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Watch the Magic happen…a flower blog by SK and Year 3.

As part of our topic, ‘New year, new life’, the SK children have been learning about the seasons. They have been talking about how the trees and bushes that lose their leaves over the winter, especially in colder climates, begin to grow new leaves again and start to flower in spring. They have learnt that the temperature of the air and soil starts to warm up as the days get longer with the coming of spring. That’s why spring called the season of flowers.

The process of flowers opening up is part of a flowering plant’s life cycle. Blooming occurs when the petals in a bud start to grow to the point that they fill with enough water that the only place to go is out.

We found a ‘blooming marvellous’ science activity that showed us a simple explanation of how this happens.

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Education Week 2020 Remarks from our Minister for Education

MINISTERIAL STATEMENT

“As we commence a week of activities celebrating Education Week 2020, I am indeed grateful to Almighty God for all he has done for us in the Turks and Caicos Islands.  Every praise is to our God!

This week, is a time that highlights education as the path that leads to a future full of hope, promise and prosperity. The role of education is to nurture, grow and realize every child’s potential, hence this year’s theme ‘Building a Resilient and Inclusive Education System’.

A high quality education system is the heart and vision of our Government. With education being at the core of Turks and Caicos Islands’ mission for social change and development. We must continue to raise our efforts in celebrating our teachers, as teachers are the vanguards of sustained transformation.  My Ministry has made lifelong learning a priority. We are dedicated to providing all our children with good choices for life. We are resolute about our nation’s economic strength, our children’s future.

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