Day of languages at our school

A new school year has just started and once more the European Day of Languages (Sept 26th), an initiative of the European Council, is to be celebrated by the plurilingual community of our instituto Francisco Ayala.

The European Day of Languages (EDL) is a day to encourage language learning across Europe. At the initiative of the Council of Europe, the European Day of Languages has been celebrated every year, on 26 September, since the European Year of Languages in 2001. The specific aims of the Day are to:
 alert the public to the importance of language learning in order to increase plurilingualism and intercultural understanding;
 promote the rich linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe;
 encourage lifelong language learning in and out of school.

 As in previous occasions, students and teachers are going to read poems or extracts of literary texts and sing songs to honour all the languages learnt and spoken in our school. 

Languages build up our identities, our thoughts; languages are bridges to connect people of different backgrounds, to communicate with others, to exchange information, to discuss ideas; above all, languages allow us, if properly taught, to express feelings of friendship, solidarity, love and peace.

Enjoy learning languages, your mind will thank you, try some of these games:
http://edl.ecml.at/LanguageFun/tabid/1516/Default.aspx

Below just a few links to enjoy language as art:

English
http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/country/England/English_poets.html
http://www.english-for-students.com/English-Poems.html


French
http://poesie.webnet.fr/home/index.html
http://www.poemas-del-alma.com/blog/especiales/poesia-francesa


Italian (Petrarch sonnets)
http://caminodemusica.com/horowitz/tres-sonetos-del-petrarca-de-liszt-pace-horowitz-y-berezovsky

Spanish 
http://educacion.practicopedia.lainformacion.com/lengua-y-literatura/como-son-los-10-mejores-poemas-para-celebrar-el-dia-de-la-poesia-16272
http://www.camagueycuba.org/cienpoesias/

Global task: Women who have changed the world.

This entry should have been published before last holidays, but the load of work the last weeks of March for students and teacher made it impossible. As it was planned, a global task about relevant women would be done by our 3º ESO bilingual students and all groups of 1º Bachillerato. However, there would be some differences. Bachillerato students would work mainly about female scientists or Nobel Peace winners, called "Women who have changed the world" whereas ESO students would do it about European suffragists, in an interdisciplinary project with Social Science, which has been called "Mothers of Europe".

Below you can read the indications we gave our Bachillerato students to do their tasks, whose main objective is to help them develop several key competences: digital, social, cultural, learner autonomy and, of course, communicative. Precisely, these research projects or global tasks are considered one of the best type of activities to learn to work in team and develop in an integrated way the skills of reading (investigating, selecting main aspects, summarising), writing (different types of texts: biography, interview, newspaper article...), speaking (oral presentation and interview) and listening (to classmates' presenting their research).

Global Task
As you know on March 8th we commemorate the International Day for Women's Rights, which unfortunately must be still claimed loud and clear as millions of women don't have any in many countries. Besides in western or developed countries, where women have legally the same rights, actually, they can't achieve the same highest social and economic positions of men easily, apart from not being as well known or acknowledged as men or being still abused and killed in hundreds every year.

For that reason, it's still necessary to do serious research about those thousands of women who have worked hard and got important achievements in science, politics, technology, medicine, economics, literature, art, etc. to make this world a better place to live.

In small groups (max. 4 people), you will do a research on one of these women who have contributed to make the world a better place to live. Your research will be presented in a digital presentation including the following parts:
1. Introduction: reason to choose this woman.
2. Her biography (use past tenses and relative clauses whenever possible and do a good personal description with appropriate vocabulary)
3. A fictional interview to her or someone who knew using suitable vocabulary and expressions for this type of dialogues.
4. Her most important achievements.
4. Some quotes from her bibliography or interviews.
5. Your personal opinion after having known her better.
6. You will present your research orally, everyone should speak at least a minute and half.

Final products and results
Here you have links to just a few of the best presentations of our students, but there are many more we will include in a new entry or in the blog of the Co-education Program of our school. 

• Alberto Asenjo (1º D), Iván Donaire y Federico Peña (1ºA)

Hypatia of Alexandria

• Luisa Centeno, María G. Gutiérrez, Lucía Jiménez (1º A) y Pedro J. Aranguez (1ºD)

Clara Campoamor

• Elvira Alcalá, Lourdes Fernández, Andrea Gámez y Pedro Garrido (1º B) 

Malala Yousafaiz

• Marta Alonso, Alicia García y Andrea Redondo

Lise Meitner

CuriosiPics, photography contest

Cambridge University Press and Discovery Education organise the second photography contest for students and teachers of secondary education; it's called CuriosiPics as they want to find out what curiostiy means for teenagers . 

The project is based on the rationale that curiosity is essential to catch students' interest and attention in order to learn or acquire anything, English, too, of course.

As they say, you just need a camera or a mobile phone and a pinch of imagination to take up to five pictures that may symbolise what curiosity means for you.


You can register here: http://www.cambridgediscovery.es/page/registro

Come on, try and show how curious you are!

St. Valentine's Day: Let's talk and express LOVE

Having started to reflect and write about education by a blog called "Educar con co-razón", it may not be so strange that I consider St. Valentine's Day as a great opportunity to talk about our 'heart' connecting 'affect' and 'intellect' as that blog intends.

For many people, perhaps for most, that day is not a holiday for lovers but a commercial one to make people spend money on cards and gifts. However, as we see it, this festivity could be an excellent opportunity to develop several key competences in a lovely way: communicative, social, cultural and autonomy.

 First, It's an opportunity to make our students aware of how in English-speaking countries, this is a day to tell all the people you love, not just your boy/girlfriend, but also your relatives and friends, how much you care for them. In addition, it's a great opportunity to read poetry, to learn about rhyme, to write some and listen to outstanding songs; is there any other topic that has inspired so many good poems and ballads? And are not literature and music two of the greatest arts? Futhermore, it's a great opportunity to let our pupils show their creativity and autonomy to design a card and write a love message, a haiku or another type of poems. Finally, it's an excellent opportunity to show our pupils that, in a world biased by money, corruption and competition, we need at least a day to express our best and most human feeling: LOVE.

And most of them do an extraordinary
lovely job!

Education against fanaticisms; pencils against guns.

Around the world, unfortunately, there are violent actions every day; some of them are criminal terrorist attacks against different types of social organizations, more or less well structured. The one carried out by three islamic integrists in Paris against the magazine Charlie Hebdo last week has caused a deep pain and disarray not just in France but all over Europe and the world.

However, at the same time, it has had the opposite effect those criminal minds expected: not just panic by solidarity and union of all types from people from different social, political or religious backgrounds as it could be seen in the huge anti-terror rally in Paris yesterday's afternoon, showing that pens and pencils can be stronger than weapons, love stronger than hatred.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/11/paris-france-anti-terror-rally-massive-show-unity?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2

On the other hand, we must take conscious, as I said above, that these attacks are taken place all over the world almost daily. The terrible attack in the heart of Europe can't make us forget as the most cruel kidnapping of over 60 teenage girls from their school by the radical islamic group Boko Haram in the north of Nigeria; precisely, to show the world they are against education, particularly against the education of women.  These yihadists are fighting against our civilization which has developed (it still has to go on further, though) to base its laws on the Human Rights, on equality and education. They kill or kidnap women and girls to use them as slaves, in all senses, to the extreme of selling them or using them to carry bombs to kill others as we found out yesterday in horror:

Nigeria: 'Girl bomber' kills 19 people in Maiduguri market

It is so disgusting and painful!
Let us keep learning, contributing to a better informed, more transparent and fairer world as the best solution to so criminal fanatism, as Malala Yousafzai has been claiming since she was so young. Let's listen to her speech when receiving the Nobel Award for Peace in honour to her and to all girls and people who try hard every day to make this world a better place for every human being:

Malala's Nobel Peace Prize speech

Benjamin Franklin scholarship

Let's start the new year with a good news: the USA Embassy in Madrid, Spain, has presented its annual Benjamin Franklin scholarship or grant, which offers the opportunity for one or two students, 16-18 years old, in Spain to spend almost a month in the States, doing a great variety of activities as well as learning about North American values and way of living.

The stay will be in the summer institutes of Benjamin Franklin either in Wake Forest University, North Coroline, or Purdue University, Indiana, from June 27 to July 25, with other 43 students from all over the world, including 10 North-American.

You can find all the information in the following link:

http://spanish.madrid.usembassy.gov/es/educacion/bf2015.html

Deadline: February 27 18:00 hs.

Wake Forest University, North Caroline.

Purdue University, Indiana.