ETwinning project - festivities in Poland

Today we have watched the Polish presentations in class. They are all different and incredible. We cannot do anything but praise them both for their layout and their content. We have learnt a lot about Poland, how similar and how different we are:

• The 1st of May is a holiday here but not many people celebrate it. For most people (unless you're involved in politics) it's just a holiday before the final exams. So it's great for studying a bit. Besides ,the weather is usually good and some years you can already go to the beach. We don't feel identified with the marches and demonstrations. This presentations let us realise that most of us don't really think of it a "workers' day".
• Teachers' Day was my favourite because I'm a teacher. I cannot imagine having a day for being proud of being a teacher, and even less for students giving me a present. My students even laughed at the idea. I told them that I might move to Poland. Definitely my favourite.
• Independence Day. For my students it sounded like the title of a film. We were all surprised to see that yours is such a young country, because Spain was a Roman province and has been a country since the Middle Ages. Many of the students didn't really like the historical part as they don't know much about European history. However, the presentation was very good.
• Women's Day. We also celebrate here as it's an international festivity but nobody knew the exact date. Sometimes we show a film or mention it in class but it isn't as important as it seems to be for Poles. Another reason to move to Poland!!
• New Year's Eve shows a festivity which is very similar in Spain. We don't go to bed that night (we sleep the next morning or afternoon) and eat twelve grapes at midnight but the rest is very similar.  In some cities they also have fireworks, but not here. The presentation was very good.
• The Patron Saint of your school was funny as we don't have patron saints in schools as religion is no longer connected with official society. Villages have patron saints but schools are named after writers or painters (such as ours, Tino Grandío). Besides your patron saint's name is unreadable for us.
• World War II is much more serious and historically interesting. Our history teacher said she might use it in class in June (when ESO-4 students are going to study this historical period). We didn't suffer the war as Spain had just left its own Civil War but we know how much your country suffered at that time. In fact, some Spanish republicans joined the French resistance and died in concentration camps in Poland. Most of our students didn't know about that.

As you can see we worked a lot and probably some of the students in our school will write their own comments in the next few days at the Twinspace. It was also interesting to see that their pen pals were the authors of these presentations.
Congratulations to our Polish partners!

Map competition for students in the Bilingual Section

The English and Social Studies departments have started a competition to draw geographical and historical maps in English. Those who want to take part have to draw an A4 map depicting one historical fact, a country or continent. All the names should be written in English so that they can be used in class. Any student from CPI Tino Grandío is invited to have a try.

Any technique is possible, even the combination of traditional ones and digital retouch but the work should be original.

Ask your teacher for further details and remember to give in your drawings by the 15th of April.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Reading Club

 Today we've had another session at the Reading Club to talk about the last book we've read: Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A lot of students from the school were there to talk about this interesting story. We talked about the characters of Huck and Tom Sawyer, how different they are, the importance of river Mississippi in the story, 19th century America, slavery and many other topics.

Most of us had read the edition in English, abridged or unabridged, but some others weren't so confident and chose a translation into either Galician or Spanish. Despite the differences any edition is good when you want to appreciate a masterpiece like this one.

If you want to know more about this activity you may have a look at the Club de Lectura's blog.

Reading Club meeting-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The school reading Club is going to hold a meeting next Thursday at 12.15 at the school library. We'll talk about the book that we have been reading lately; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. If you have read it, please join us and tell us your opinion about it. If you haven't read it yet, borrow one copy from the school library becuse you still have time to read one of the shortened versions of the book. There are copies in English (in an adapted version or the original one) and translations into Spanish and Galician.

First Post

Hello All,
Welcome to my newly-created spot on the bilingual sections blog. Here I will add information and (perhaps) interesting details concerning my work for the bilingual sections. I hope you enjoy it.

My work for the social studies section has so far consisted of editing texts for the history courses and suggesting added material. Although this work can be tedious, I have often found it very interesting because history is one of my favorite subjects, and many of the historical events studied at Tino Grandio are different than those studied in history classes in America. I particularly learned a lot from the section about Garibaldi and the unification of Italy, as well as the section about the Carlist wars in Spain.

Soon we will begin the work of recording my reading of the history units. I am working on my radio voice, and Ana and Maite are preparing the recording equipment, so with any luck these recordings will turn out well. They will certainly be a great resource for improving your listening and speaking in English. I hope you will make the most of them!

New units for Social Studies

The first 9 units for Social Studies ESO-4 have been already finished by the teachers in Seminario Permanente. All of them, together with a glossary with the most difficult vocabulary and a presentation, have been uploaded at the school's Aula Virtual. You can also download them from this blog. You'll find them at the Social Studies ESO-4 page. If you want to read a bit more about each of the units you can also read or download the text from Wikipedia. To make things easier you have a link to a pdf text from Wikipedia for each of the units. Of course, there are many other interesting pages and you can find some recommeneded books and websites at the end of each unit.

As these units are being used this year for the first time, we'd be grateful if you pointed out any mistakes that you may find so that they can be improved.

Pen pal activity

We are about to start a pen pal exchange with the Polish students in our eTwinning project. Some students from both schools will be in touch and write emails to one another.We hope the activity will be profitable for the students in both schools.

If you want a copy of the Hints sheet on the left, click here.

New eTwinning partner

A new partner has joined our eTwinning project, International Calendar. She's a Polish teacher who seems to be interested in sharing materials, comments and information about festivities in Poland. Therefore a group of Polish students will also read and comment on whatever we upload and we'll also start to learn about Polish festivities.
It's with this teacher's students that we are also going to start a pen pal exchange this week.

Time for ENTROIDO

Several interesting materials

Here you have the links to those useful handouts that we always need when studying English at school.

• The summary of tenses for 3º ESO
• The summary of tenses for 4º ESO
• The summary of tenses for PDC
• And the Graded Readers Sheet for all ESO students

 I hope they are useful for you. And if you need a printed copy ask your teacher.