Belfast Model
School for Girls

¡Hola! Este año estaba en las Islas Galápagos para mis vacaciones. Fueron unas vacaciones estupendas. El país es tranquillo y bonita con muchas tortugas. Las tortugas son muy grandes. Las Islas Galápagos son famosas para las tortugas.

Me gustan mucho las islas.

Hello! If you are studying Spanish at school you will have read above that I was in the Galapagos Islands for my holidays this year. The islands are famous and often appear on nature programmes on the television.

I first found out about the Galapagos Islands many years ago when I was 15 years old and working for my GCE O-levels (GCSE). An English man called Charles Darwin visited these Islands in the 1830's to study plants and animals. When I was in Year 12 at school, I was told about this man and his observations of giant tortoises and small birds called finches. When he visited the islands Darwin could see that the tortoises on each island were slightly different to each other. When he looked closely at the finches he saw that they had different shaped beaks. Different shapes of beak could eat different types of food so that the finches were not competing for food. From these observations Darwin put forward his Theory of Natural Selection.

All those years ago when I was doing my O-levels I thought Darwin was so lucky. His job was to look at the wildlife in all the countries visited by a ship called the Beagle. I dreamed that one day I might go to the Galapagos Islands and see the giant tortoises and the finches for myself. This summer I WAS THERE! When the plane touched down in Baltra airport I was so excited that I was on the Galapagos Islands. As I walked off the plane into the small wooden airport a huge black iguana was basking in the sun beside the runway. I had arrived!

As soon as we had cleared passport control and customs, a bus took us to the highlands of Santa Cruz Island to see the tortoises. Magic! There were two very large male tortoises and many females which are a bit smaller. Unfortunately the tortoises are endangered and some of the islands no longer have tortoises on them because humans have killed them. When Darwin visited the islands sailors and pirates killed the tortoises for their meat, sometimes as many as 200 were killed in a day. The shells were used for ornaments and jewellery. Today the tortoises are protected and there are breeding programmes to try to increase the number of tortoises on the islands.

When I'm on holiday I love taking photographs of nature. This year I had a new digital camera and I took 900 photos! The beaches were beautiful. The sand was golden and the sea a gorgeous turquoise blue and the skies a deep blue. As well as the tortoises I saw the Darwin finches, iguanas, flamingos, sea lions, pelicans, mocking birds, blue footed bobbies, albatross and dolphins. Wow....I was lucky!

The Galapagos islands are volcanic islands which have risen up from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. They sit on the equator about 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. Some of the volcanoes are still active. I took a horse ride one morning to the edge of the crater of one of these active volcanoes. I could see the most recent flow of black lava from Sierra Negra. Fortunately, there were no eruptions when I was visiting.

The people of the Galapagos speak Spanish so as well as having a great time looking at nature I was also able to try out some of the Spanish I had learnt this year.

Hasta luego!

Welcome back to another busy Model school year! Hopefully you had a very relaxing summer and return refreshed for the exciting terms ahead.

What has happened since school ended in June? The Full Service Extended School Summer Scheme was very successful and I was privileged to be invited to the awards presentation at the end of the scheme. Exam results were very pleasing too, with the achievements of Nicola McTaggart, Robyn Beattie and Lynsey Harrison putting the icing on the cake!! They were placed in the top 5 out of 1622 candidates, across the whole of the UK sitting AQA A-Level ICT!

I am really looking forward to this new school year when we enter the second year of our Specialist School and Full Service School Programmes and await with great anticipation the performances of our school production "The Sound of Music" next April. Also, we should see the beginning of construction of our new school, just after Christmas, which will give us all a boost as we prepare to move into a purpose-built community learning facility.

Another exciting prospect is our Virtual Learning Environment which will be rolled out this year, allowing far more online interaction throughout the wider school community. This, along with our redesigned website, will be a major benefit to both learning and communication and I hope everyone will make use of this additional resource.

I would like to thank all those involved in these activities and ask everyone to play a positive part in ensuring 2007/2008 is not just as good as the last school year but even more successful and enjoyable.