Strange Halloween

 

       No nos hemos podido resistir a tener nuestro día de Halloween, quizás con un repertotio de actividades menos vistosas que años anteriores pero con el espíritu de Jack O´Lantern merodeando las aulas del Tomás Hormigo. 

 

     No story telling by ghostly older students, no horror passageways, no monster-shaped cakes, team-worked carved pumpkins... most of the most horrifying activities programmed for this holiday annually have been avoided because of the reasons we are already sick  of speaking about. 

 

     But the creation of scary facemasks brought some shadows (and also colour) to our school: our students project consisted of the design of a fearful mask which was introduced by a video describing its process of creation and the inspiration for it (legends, movies...); some of the best masks were awarded. Also some of our students were allowed to wear a special dress code on Friday.

    The different areas programmed diverse activities with Halloween as central topic, from O.V. films and series episodes in English, to music according to the day in music or a "dark" gymkhana to make our little monsters sweat during P.E. lessons.

A new beginning

  

    Un nuevo año escolar comienza a pesar de las dificultades de la situación tan especiales que estamos atravesando todos. Desde nuestro centro y el plan de bilingüismo, y con la ayuda de todos, haremos todo lo posible para disfrutar del mejor año escolar posible.

     Facemasks, soap, distance... new normal school life or so they say. Anyway, as Stevie Wonder says, "The world keeps  turnin´ " and so"teachers keep teachin´" and our school life goes on.

    We bilingual program teachers keep working on the activities as we have been doing for the last years and increasing our activity year after year. Some of our "flagship" projects  have not arrived yet but most of them will (other will have to wait until future school  years), but our contests, day's anniversaries, holidays... even though we are afraid that our trips will have to wait.

    The different subject areas keep using English as a language in the classroom in order to learn using our two languages together with the use of activities in English (for instance, have a look at the awesome posters to learn abour cell for a science project).

 

    One of the main supports we get for that purpose is the help of our English languages assistants, this year it seemed very difficult to be helped by such an useful figure. But fortunately Kim has come from London to stay with us this year, we are really pleased with her visit and we welcome her and hope she is enjoying her time with us.

#stayhome

          Nuestra labor desde casa continúa, como bien saben, pero el profesorado no sólo no abandona su trabajo didáctico sino que trabaja iniciativas para respaldar el ánimo de nuestro alumnado. Un abrazo a todos, alumnado y familias.                                                                                                                                                                   
                                                                                                                                 #quédateencasa

       This situation is weird, our feelings strange... sometimes we are concerned about our daily problems and our future and sometimes this is not easier for teenagers; our work as teachers becomes a task more complex than just explaining contents of our subjects, as a measure to help with this state of unease all the teachers are using different devices to make our students feel closer and better. Most teachers use tool such as classroom, webcam meetings, audio diaries (like we said Matty is doing from London), video recordings for this puspose... For instance, this is a try of youtube-recipe-style review video about the main structures seen in ESO1.

      Maybe one of the most remarkable measures taken by the teachers board of our school is the shooting of a lipdubbed video for the tune "Resistiré", one of the resistance anthems for such a season; a kind video where we teachers encourage our guys by singing, dancing and showing what we do to feel better these lockdown days.                                                    
                                                                                                           #stayhome

       To finish this post I show you one of my favourite anthems for days like these (it is the soundtrack of my grammar video). Would you check the lyrics?      #stayhomestaystrong