First Lego League: Hydrodynamics

Here we go again!
We are getting ready for the new challenge...

Stick Man.

Students in their second year of High School Education have worked on the creation of different versions of STICK MAN and used them to tell the story to primary pupils. We share one of those creations. Enjoy it, because it's superb!

By  Mª Soledad González. 

Hallelujah.

Our twelve-year old students proudly share with you their own version of the famous song by Leonard Cohen  and wish you a MERRY CHRISTMAS.

by Lucía Rodríguez and Soledad González

Quantity

My 13 year-old students have been working with QUANTITY this week and  have fully enjoyed transforming GRAMMAR into a real thing.

They have created  posters using authentic  COUNTABLE and UNCOUNTABLE products to show quantity.

Here I leave you some of them

FLOUR / PEN CAPS

SOIL / LEAVES

RICE / SWEETS

By Soledad González

Disovering Leonardo

A modern version of Vitruvian man .

With great  pleasure walking up and down in Milan I noticed these  two  wonderful

 wallpaintings. I showed them to  students.  Leonardo  is a neverending  genius,still admired by young and not so young. The students worked in groups  to find out information about this great inventor ,scientist , artist  and much more.

They  tried to draw  as Leonardo. 

People and animals. 

They  analized the studies about  water  and flying machines. 

 They  visited the museum of Tech and Science  in Milan. 

Moreover  they admired   wonderful paintings ,especially  "The Lady with The hermelin.

This is a modern copy of it. 

The students found out that the character of this painting was a young lady of Saronno. Her name was Cecilia Gallerani.  They  write  down information

drew her.

After- school activity: Theatre

Secondary students have recorded a video of the after-school activity where they learn to dramatize, improvise, playmaking and rehearsal techniques with their teacher Andrés Torijano.

They wanted to show what they do there and how much they enjoy it.

               

School Surveys

This project has been a great experience and i will do it again with different topics and different objectives. it can be adapted to any age or any topic and makes students  really learn by doing.

My secondary 12 year-old students have enjoyed being journalists for a few days. In groups of four they wrote  questionaires on Lifestyle (diet, physical exercise and free time mainly). It took them a couple of sessions to elaborate them under my supervisión. Structures like How often do you..? How much  or how many? and frequency were the basic grammar structures and they provided options to answer. A great amount of vocabulary was also used.   

I took them to different clases of Primary to complete their questionaires. They were very well organized in order to obtain the most accurate results. Everybody had a role ;one of the members in the group made the questions, another gave the options, a third one counted…It really felt like DOING SOMETHING important.

Now it was time to deal with stats. How to transform the typical 3 out of 25 eat fast food everyday or 23 out of 25 practise sport outside school..into percentages or other ways of saying. They did Mathematics calculating percentages. They learnt that 50% of students is the same as” half of the class” or that 95% is the same as “almost everyone”, 100% is “the whole class” and 20% is “just a few”. After calculating they created a Writing organizing the information in different paragraphs.

Then the it was timeto be creative  and they had to put all this information in graphics and make it the most attractive posible for a future presentation.

Last  step:

Teams presented their work to students of 2nd year secondary. They showed their posters and talked about primary students Lifestyle. It was challenging for them to speak in front of other students older tan them.The audience was given a short questinaire to fullfil after the presentation so that they also would get involved.

 It also would be perfect if their works could be published  in a school magazine or similar.

By Mª Soledad González

Board Games to learn Verbs

We all know how hard it is to learn the verbal conjugation in Spanish. To make it easier and funnier, our students have created games to practice the verb tenses. They have taken popular board games as a model and have designed their own ones with their own instructions.

It has been also a very good way of practising the instructive type of text. How do we give instructions or orders in our language? Then we did the same in English. The result was spectacular and everybody was practising without noticing they were doing grammar or writing. This activity was done with students of 2nd ESO and the best thing is that I could use it with my 1st of ESO students too and they were really delighted.

                                                                               By Soledad González

Word Rainbow

Students of 2nd ESO have created posters of types of words using a “Colour Code” that we have called "Word Rainbow". I took this idea from the Reading Rods by Learning Resources 

http://creatingtomorrowschoolstoday.blogspot.com.es/2014/11/reading-rods-by-learning-resources.html

Then, they presented the posters to the 1st ESO students. We have also used this code to compare the four different languages that are learnt at school : German, French, English and Spanish. 

Among other things, students could notice the differences in word and sentence order.  For this activity we have chosen the same text translated into the four languages that they study. It was taken from the novel Momo, by Michael Ende.

The best thing of this activity is that it can be adapted to any level. We have decided to use this colour code for Spanish syntax too, as students have really enjoyed all the activities.

                                                                                     By Soledad González

Animal Circus

During our conversation class we discussed how animals are treated in the circus. We had a debate if treating animals as entertainment should be banned. After waching the following film:

Students felt deeply touched and showed how they felt about that cruelty working with our Story Starter sets.