A unique Primary School, offering a British based, child centred education in the Turks and Caicos Islands
Music was in the air last week as the Kindergarten class were inspired to form a whole-class band by a single student’s rat-tap-tapping!
After a busy morning play filled with running, climbing and hide-and-seek, children could be heard around the garden singing our popular “How green you are?” song. Suddenly, however, their singing was accompanied by improvised percussion from one student. Then two…and, well, the rest was a perfect lesson in how infectious music can be!
Next week is World Osprey Week and we are reminded of our dedicated week of learning connected with this last year. Please take the opportunity to go out with your family to observe our local ospreys over this week and continue to promote the conservation of these majestic birds who live amongst us here in the TCI. There are a number of osprey nests to visit – at The Bight Children’s Park, in Grace Bay, Leeward and at South Bluff.
If you would like to reminisce on the activities we did last year at school then please take a look through our blog posts. You can also find out about WOW 2015 at www.ospreys.org.uk and follow interactive maps that track ospreys as they migrate around the world.
This year, our local week study will focus on Sharks. This will take place next term during 20th-24th April.
Hi Everybody! One of our much love stories in Preschool is The Gruffalo. For World Book Day we had an amazing Gruffalo day!
The children wore their owl head bands and we had 2 very special Year 6 visitors….the ‘mouse’ and the ‘Gruffalo’. We had great fun reading the story together and acting out the parts of the various animals.
Later that day, the children made up their own version of ‘The Gruffalo’, with help from myself drawing their suggestions on the white board. Enjoy and see you again soon!
Join us on Saturday 21st March for an evening of family fun, and support us in raising funds for our scholarship programme.
Enjoy live music with Pat Riel, view children’s art, bounce on our bouncy castle and play family games together.
Door Tickets are $15 per Person or $50 per Family (Mexican buffet included) Cash Bar.
Raffle Tickets $10 (Currently on sale) Prizes include: One Night stay at Parrot Cay, Two night stay at Villa Del Mar, Dinner for 2 at Beach House, Gansevoort, Blue Haven, Blue, Big Blue and Hemingway Gift Vouchers.
Scholarship Pledge Prize: Make a pledge to enter the chance to win a cruise on Addenda, a 40ft Hinckley Luxury Cruiser, for up to 8 guests.
All proceeds will benefit Provo Primary’s Scholarship Fund.
Talk4Writing isn’t only about storytelling. As our Year 5 students can demonstrate, this literacy technique is applicable across the curriculum for teaching language techniques in any written genre.
Year 5 students studied the “I have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr. as part of their “Space and Segregation” topic. They were exploring persuasive writing in their literacy lessons and wanted to understand how this famous speech used powerful language and persuasive techniques to emphasize the aims of the Civil Rights protest of 1963. These techniques were then be adapted and re-invented by students in their own powerful, ‘I have a dream’ persuasive writing texts – read on to see some examples.
In Toddlers, the children learned a shortened version of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen. Children explored the settings of the story through sensory activities and made visual prompts to help them recognise each part of the adventure. As you can see from the video, the combination of visual prompts and actions leads to powerful results in our pupil’s speech. Even at this early age children can sense the excitement and emotions of a story and can vocalise this in their own retelling. Their facial expressions, actions and body language tells just as much of the story as the emerging language that they share!
As part of our World Book Day celebrations, the School Council organised a ‘Book Swap’ event. It was lovely to see everyone from Toddlers to Year 6 browsing through the vast collection of donations and happily going home with new books to entertain themselves. My favourite time had to be seeing the face of one of our youngest children beam with an enormous smile when she chose ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’, a book they had been reading in class as part of our Talk4Writing initiative. She was so happy!
Thank you to everyone who took part and helped to make this event a success. Our older year School Councilors helped to sort and organise the books into different age-group levels and our younger year School Councilors helped run the event by guiding and helping children with their choices and stamping book tokens. A real team effort!
The School Council will meet this week to decide where to donate the books that were left over at the end of the event. Many of them are picture books for younger readers. If you know of a local school that would benefit from them, do let us know.
We hope to set up an area in the library for future book swaps – so once you have finished reading your books, bring them in and swaps them again!
From Paddington Bear, to the Cat in the Hat and Horrid Henry, colourful characters were everywhere to be seen at Provo Primary on World Book Day. All the children were invited to come dressed up as their favourite story book character and take part a day of fun reading activities. The children enjoyed the opportunity to parade in front of each other, and in their classes talked about their book characters and why they chose to dress up as them. Guest storytellers also came to read stories to the children in our garden area and we even had a teddy bear’s picnic!
We believe that encouraging children to role play through dress up and becoming, for example, The Gruffalo or Elsa from Frozen is beneficial in developing imagination from an early age and a love of reading. Dress-up day certainly has made the children more excited about reading, which is already a real strength of our school.
Join us on Saturday 21st March for an evening of family fun, and support us in raising funds for our scholarship programme.
Enjoy live music with Pat Riel, view children’s art, bounce on our bouncy castle and play family games together.
Door Tickets are $15 per Person or $50 per Family (Mexican buffet included) Cash Bar.
Raffle Tickets $10 (Currently on sale) Prizes include: One Night stay at Parrot Cay, Two night stay at Villa Del Mar, Dinner for 2 at Beach House, Gansevoort, Blue Haven, Blue, Big Blue and Hemingway Gift Vouchers.
Scholarship Pledge Prize: Make a pledge to enter the chance to win a cruise on Addenda, a 40ft Hinckley Luxury Cruiser, for up to 8 guests.
All proceeds will benefit Provo Primary’s Scholarship Fund.
On the day before World Book Day, we were lucky enough to have a visit from 19 Year 9 students from British West Indies Collegiate. The whole of Key Stages 1 and 2 were treated to three different dramatic performances carried out by the students. Head of English at the Collegiate, Miss Tessa Rankin, explained that the pupils had used traditional fairy tales as their starting point, but had chosen to intertwine different tales in their own completely independent and individual ways. Each group performed in costume to Years 1 & 2, 3 & 4 and 5 & 6.
The plays were written entirely by the students and were a true delight to watch. Not only were the students incredibly brave to come to a different school and perform, they were also extremely witty and dramatic. Great budding thespians!
Our 4th annual Skate Night was almost a couple of weeks ago, but with all of our recent events, we are only just getting to post these memorable photos. The turnout was amazing with beaming smiles of happy Provo Primary and community families skating the night away!
The evening was definitely an all-round success. We would like to pass on a huge thanks to everyone came along, to the Graceway Sports Center and to Haley and her team who helped to organise and run the event!
Until next year…
This year across the school, we have begun to explore ‘Talk4Writing‘, which is an innovative approach to developing speech and teaching creative and non-fiction writing that is fun, engaging and motivating for children. Following on from our Literacy Week showcase last Friday, we are very excited to share with you, our series of amazing Talking Text videos, which we have recorded across the school. These will be posted weekly on our blog. We hope you enjoy watching them as much as we do!
Our space topic may have been a small step for our Kindergartners, but they have all taken giant leaps in their learning over the past 6 weeks!
The whole class have been excited to share their knowledge of space with parents, siblings, teachers and each other. Everyone has enjoyed learning wonderful facts about space. Our young astronauts were amazed to learn how people eat, sleep, drink, wash, brush teeth or comb their hair while in space! And understanding how spaceships can communicate with earth…well, that blew our minds!
We studied different rockets so that we could design one for ourselves. We compared different rocket shapes and designs, including comparing how different countries have built spaceships. We learned the names of various rocket parts and labelled our own designs so that we, too, could travel to space.
We invite all parents and friends of Provo Primary School to join us today for our fantastic Open House Literacy Talk4Writing Showcases!
Toddlers – Year 1 @ 8:45 – 9:30 AM
Years 2 – 6 @ 2:15 – 2:50 PM
We encourage you to come to both events to learn more about our Literacy curriculum here at Provo Primary School, and to see how children’s learning progresses through the school.
Each class will have a variety of activity stations set up for you to engage in. Discover how speaking and listening,reading and writing skills develop and progress as your child moves through the school. Learn about Talk4Writing – an innovative approach to teaching creative and non-fiction writing that is fun, engaging and motivating for children.
Download a copy of our Literacy Showcase Brochure and see what exciting activities and learning the children will be demonstrating.
The children are all looking forward to sharing and explaining their learning with you! We hope to see everyone there.
Here is our lunch-order-form-mar-2015 for the month of March.
Lunches are available for full-time children.
If you would like your child to have lunch, please click on the image, and download and complete the lunch form. Forms are also available in the office. Please note that payment should be made in ADVANCE.
Year 6 students have enjoyed studying the human body; which has been the main focus of our learning in science this term. They made an impressive start to this topic by relaying facts that they already knew about the human body and the questions that they wanted to explore about bodily functions as the topic progressed.
They have carried out a number of investigations such as monitoring our BPM during various activities; breathing rates during different activities and how different fluids increase the rate of tooth decay. They have been able to apply their understanding of the human body to these experiments in order to draw conclusions.
The students examined in great detail: the digestive system; the respiratory system; the circulatory system; the skeletal system and healthy lifestyles.
The students were exposed to extensive scientific vocabulary throughout this topic and worked extremely hard in gaining an increased understanding of how the main organ systems work.
“We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day. We’re not scared! Oh no, what’s that? Two big, goggly eyes, two big, furry ears, one wet, shiny nose. It’s… a… bear! Aaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
The toddlers experienced their own bear hunt last week, acting out different parts of the story as we went along. Using picture clues and their binoculars, the children had to look for the bears that were hiding in five areas of the school. Following our pictorial maps, our hunt took us to the stage, dome, green field, chicken coop and our playground. On the way we discovered an animal that had two big, furry ears and one wet, shiny nose, but it wasn’t a bear, it was only Mishka the dog!
Miss Sian thought she heard a bear in her office so we went to search. We looked carefully through our binoculars, but all was okay; we did find lots of flamingos in her office though!
Come and join in the fun at our family beach day with the Sailing Club at The Bight Beach Park on Sunday 8th March from 3-6PM. The Sailing Club activities will start from 1PM.
Meet new friends as you relax and mingle, dig in the sand and splash in the waves. Feeling energetic? Then why not join in with the Sailing Club family activities and work up an appetite and thirst for their BBQ and refreshments playing volleyball, sailing and displaying your strength in the Tug’O’War!
An afternoon of opportunities to relax, enjoy team building activities and to have lots of family fun; a winning combination.
We hope to see you there!
Our Year 5 and 6 School Councils Reps were lucky enough to attend a special Education Week ‘Living History’ activity afternoon at another local school yesterday.
Our visit was both informative and entertaining; a fun afternoon of learning – that truly brought our TCI history and culture to life!
Through this blog post we hope that teachers, classes and families will share in our experiences. The children also hope to report back to all of our students about their visit in an assembly time, too.
Our thanks to the staff and students of the International School of the Turks and Caicos who gave us such a warm welcome.
So read on to see all the activities we got to do…
Created especially for the upcoming World Book Day on Thursday 5th March, the EXCITING BIGGEST BOOK SHOW ON EARTH is a series of SHORT VIDEOS starring popular children’s authors, like Chris Riddell, Rachel Renee Russell and Michael Morpurgo.
‘Virtually’ welcome each author into your home and classroom to hear them talk about different aspects of writing, illustrating and creating.
Each video is no more than 10 MINUTES long. Which video will you watch first?
Chess club has been a growing success. With quite a few beginner players, it’s great to see how they are now starting their games with clear opening moves, more carefully thought-out game play and a clearer idea on how to position their pieces to check mate their opponent.
Alongside learning and developing their knowledge and strategies, they have also been working in partners to create their very own chess sets – using only paper, glue and tape!
A big thank you goes out to our volunteer chess coach, Mr Mark Pankhurst, and Miss Mani for their teaching skills and guidance.
As part of our Tuesday and Thursday Spanish Immersion mornings, Mrs. Yorka has been exploring our new topic, Growing and Changes. The children have learned all about girasoles (sunflowers) and the different parts of the plant, as well as planting and exploring our school garden.
Recently, Mrs. Yorka has started to explore parts of the body. During our Open House next week, please look out for the video taken of the children labeling the parts of the body in Spanish.
The Ministry of Education, Youth, Sports & Library Services cordially invites the general public to celebrate this year’s Education Week: March 1st -6th, under the theme “Unite for Quality Education: Better Education for a Better World”.
This year’s theme song for Education Week 2015 is written by Clement Howell High School Music Department and performed by the staff and students of the schools.
Education Week was established more than 26 years ago to call attention to the importance of education and to showcase the talents of TCI teachers and students.
Each year, during our TCI National Education Week, we have a themed week in school – this year our theme will focus on Literacy. During this week, we will be celebrating World Book Day on Thursday 5th March and we invite all children to participate in our Book Character Dress-up Day by wearing a costume that represents a favourite character from the world of books!
Children should bring along a copy of their character’s book, if possible, which they will share with their class and friends. Older children should come prepared to join in with ‘hot seating’ activities, wherein they are asked to answer questions, in the role of their character.
So let’s get creative with our costumes and bring the world of books alive on World Book Day.
Need help with costume ideas…? Then click on ‘read more’ below for some helpful links.