Our LRC Clubs Are Back!

This week, our Learning Resource Centre (LRC) came alive with the start of our clubs, giving students the opportunity to explore their interests, develop new skills, be creative and learn through meaningful experiences. 

Sewing Club, students are creating felt dolls for the children supported by the “Ayúdame a Vivir” Foundation at Hospital Bloom, combining creativity, teamwork and service to the community. 

Cooking Club, students are learning how to prepare a variety of savoury dishes and desserts while developing practical skills and enjoying the experience of creating together. 

Our Coding Club introduces students to coding and computational thinking, encouraging problem-solving, creativity and perseverance. On Thursdays, Technical Drawing gives students the opportunity to explore drawing and design, developing accuracy and visual communication skills. Through Club ReciLectura, students promote a love of reading while also raising awareness about the importance of caring for our environment. 

Meanwhile, the Collective Bestiary  Mythology, History & Science invites students to investigate mythological creatures, cryptids, and specimens from folklore around the world. Through research, students explore these fascinating subjects from historical, anthropological, biological and literary perspectives, developing international mindedness, inquiry and critical thinking skills, together with creativity, artistic expression and writing. Their goal is to create an illustrated and researched bestiary, bringing together their discoveries and ideas.

LRC clubs are spaces where students can inquire, create, collaborate, take action, and discover new passions. We are excited to see all the wonderful ideas and projects our students will develop throughout the year.

More photos on Flickr

Sewing Club

Coding Club

Cooking Club

Sweet Celebrations in the LRC: Cookie Fun for 4th & 5th Grade! 🍪

Over the past two weeks, the LRC  cooking area has turned into a joyful, flour-dusted hub of creativity and celebration as our 4th and 5th grade students visited on separate days for a very special treat — cookie baking! 

This hands-on activity was a well-earned reward from our wonderful primary librarians, recognizing the students’ efforts, enthusiasm and great behaviour throughout the year.

The kids, led by Miss Gaby and members of the LRC, scrubbed their hands and took their places at our rolling maker trollies, which were temporarily repositioned in the cooking area. Rolling Trollies are such useful additions to any makerspace.  The kids got a tad messy as they dove hands-first into cooking dough prep, and they loved every moment of it. 

 From mixing the dough to adding their favourite toppings, every step was filled with laughter and teamwork. 

Of course, the best part was enjoying the warm, delicious cookies they made with their own hands!It was a fantastic way to wrap up a year of learning, reading, and growing together. 

A huge thanks goes out to the LRC and Jubilee teams for organizing such a memorable event.

📸 Want to see more smiles and sprinkles? 

Click here to view our Flickr gallery of the cookie-baking fun!

Celebrating Student Creativity: Highlights from the 15th Annual ABC DVA 2025!

The screens lit up and the creativity flowed on Thursday, 29th, 2025, as ABC School proudly hosted our 15th annual Digital Video Awards (DVA)! This milestone event is a cornerstone of our school calendar, dedicated to celebrating and spotlighting the incredible excellence in student digital video work from across our primary and secondary schools.

For fifteen years, the DVA has provided a platform for our talented students to showcase their skills in filmmaking, animation, storytelling, and technical production. This year was no exception, with students from both primary and secondary levels submitting an impressive array of projects.

The competition was fierce as students vied for recognition in a wide range of categories, including:

• Best Animation

• Best English/Design IDU

• Best Advertisement

• Best Short Film

• Best Documentary

• Best Minecraft Walkthrough

• Best Director

• Movie of the Year

The DVA committee would like to extend our sincerest congratulations to all of the students who were nominated for an award this year. The standard of entries was incredibly high, and simply making it onto the nomination list is a testament to your hard work, creativity, and skill. Everyone who was nominated is truly a winner!

The top prizes for many categories were decided by enthusiastic voting from the ABC community, highlighting the videos that resonated most with our audience.

Two special awards, however, were the final picks of the ABC Committee: the VHS Best Director Award—named in honour of Victor Hugo Salazar, an outstanding ex-student and director—celebrating exceptional directorial vision, and the award for Best Minecraft Walkthrough, recognizing creative and engaging gameplay footage.

Congratulations again to all the nominated students and to the talented winners who took home the top honours! Your dedication to crafting compelling digital stories is inspiring

The 15th Annual ABC DVA was a fantastic celebration of student talent and creativity. We are immensely proud of all the participants and look forward to seeing the amazing digital video projects our students will create next year for the 16th DVA!

A big thank you goes out to Profe Alvin Silva for being such a wonderful MC and Profe Rodrigo Alfaro for producing the show.

Please take a moment to view the images from the event.

 

Visit with the Maquilishuat School

 Today we were honoured with a special visit by the sub-director and librarian of Maquilishuat School here in El Salvador. During the visit, we were able to show our visitors around the physical and digital LRC as well as share good practices in the running and development of school libraries as resources centres for learning. Our primary focus was on educational provisions for the school community, collection access, and development, community service projects, and digital equipment and resources.  

The visit would not have been complete without an opportunity to explore experiential learning ideas featuring some of our favourite digital learning tools including Ozobot, Sphero Mini and Bolt, and Lego Robots, our beloved 3D printers and pens. We also had an opportunity to share our current VR and AR provisions including Oculus Quest, Google Cardboard, and Merge Cubes.  These technologies while used by students from 6th-12th grade in certain subjects will soon form the backbone of our proposed LRC Mixed Reality Lab or MR Lab for short.  

The MR Lab is an internal project which the LRC Team has begun to develop in conjunction with the ICT department. Through this project, we endeavor to insert AR and VR experiences more predominantly into student learning across disciplines both within and outside of lessons, in a safe, dedicated space, within the LRC.  It will provide opportunities to explore both virtual and augmented reality through preexisting experiences across platforms,  as well as provide the resources for students to view and interact with their own design projects in 3D and 360-degree formats.  We will share more on this in future blog posts, as the project develops further.

As educators, we believe it is vital for schools to work together as part of the larger educational community. This is a vision we share with many of the educational organisations in the country including La Escuela Maquilishuat. Communication,  shared initiatives, and support between centres of learning and their libraries are fundamental to meeting the current and projected needs of our school communities and it is important that we explore ways in which to address the challenges facing institutions, together.  Our meeting, therefore, would not have been complete without a discussion of the concerns facing libraries today and strategies for further improvement and outreach within our educational communities. As a result, we have also identified further opportunities through which to further extend the relationships that currently exist between our two schools and have planned to meet up again in the new year to discuss additional collaborative initiatives and events between the two schools. 

One such opportunity was that of the Sleeping Mat Club in which students work together outside of normal lessons to create sleeping mats out of plastic bags for those less fortunate than themselves.

Here is the link to our Flickr Album of photos of the visit.

Secondary Book Week-Announcement 2!

The LRC Team would like to thank everyone who participated in Book Week 2021 and made it the amazing event it was. You may remember from our earlier post that this year's Book Week was very unique in that it was planned and organised as a collaborative project between IB school libraries and local organisations in El Salvador.  You can read more about that here or scroll down to the previous post.

It is now time to report on some of the highlights which arose from the participation strand.

Calligram Competition

The LRC team would like to congratulate Nadine Salume in 7th grade for taking part in and winning the Book Week Calligram Competition with her rendition in the representation of the Hunger Games Novel, which she designed using text arranged to depict an image.  Well done Nadine for your hard work on this initiative!  We look forward to your participation in future activities as well. 

9th Grade Assembly

We also have a winner from 9th grade Michael Romero for leading with student responses during the Book Week Assembly. Well done and a huge thank you to Michael for sharing his ideas with staff members and students during assembly.

Creative Writing Exhibition 

Catalina Portillo in 11th grade won the Creative Writing Exhibition piece for her video submission in which she reads to us from her piece entitled Omaha Beach, which focuses on the power of courage. We would like to thank Catalina as well as all of the participants in this challenge for their exemplary written pieces. We look forward to more creative works from these students and would like to encourage them and others to continue sharing their literary endeavors with us. 

You can view all the submissions here.

(Please be aware that some of the student content is only accessible with ABC login credentials)

Finally, Challenge #3

Read 2 Books per Month, is a student initiative being run by Juan Santos and Sofia Tapias, which as the name states, is a challenge to read 2 or more books each month. This initiative will continue to run until the end of the school year.  Do please consider taking part.