After-reading activity

After reading The Waxwork in 3ºESO A, two students shot a short film as a follow-up activity. The Waxwork is about a reporter who wants  to write an article about the Wax Museum. For that purpose, he decides to spend the night in the Murderers' Room, alone...or is he?

New eTwinning project

Students of 3ºA and 4ºA are taking part in the eTwinning project called WE AND THE ENVIRONMENT AROUND US,
with a school in Locri, Italy, and a school in Kalamata, Greece.

Last Christmas, our students sent these hand-made cards to our Italian and Greek partners.

Parsippany Students Exchange - Second Week

School life at Parsippany High.

The cafeteria, where students have lunch every day.

One of the big corridors. There is a custodian in each corridor. Students move from one class to the other after each period.

The library. Students can come here to read, study, play chess or relax in between lessons.

We've had some lectures on British/American English, American music and Spanish Colonial America. Here the Spanish students attending one of the lectures and doing some work about it.

All the students participating in the exchange received this T-shirt as a souvenir.

At the Town Hall

The meeting with the Mayor. Our students made him some questions about the town and he gave us a little gift.

Trips to New York

We spent Tuesday again in New York. This time we visited some landmarks in mid-town Manhattan, such as The Empire State Building, Times Square, Central Park and The National Museum of Natural History. Here we also went to the planetarium for a show about the expanding universe, the black holes and the big bang theory.

Lower Manhattan from the top of Empire State Building

           





           Times Square

 

 Walking in Central Park.

       
                                                                                                            John Lennon Memorial

Visiting the dinosaur section at the Natural History Musem.

And finally here we are in the pedestal of

THE STATUE OF LIBERTY.

We made it!

Parsippany Students Exchange - Weekend in Washington

Last weekend in Washington DC was really awesome.

We set off at 6.00 am (!!)and got to Washington DC at about 11.00.
Once there, we visited Arlington Cemetery, United States soldiers' national cemetery. It was impressive to see all the graves lined up all over the fields. 

  Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

Our hotel was next to the Pentagon and we could have a good overview of the five-side building as we drove along. 
First thing next morning we went to visit all the important landmarks in Washington, conveniently situated along The Mall - the long avenue in downtown Washington where all the museums and memorials are. 

We visited The Capitol and the Library of Congress and had lunch at Union Station.

        Walking along The Mall


In the afternoon we visited two Smithsonian Museums: The Indian Americans and The Air and Space Museum. The African American Museum was being officially opened on that day by president Obama.

Believe it or not, this is Apollo 11, the first spacecraft to land on the Moon!!

Our driver Benny took us for a night tour

On Sunday morning we finished our walk along The Mall and ended up at Lincoln Memorial.

  

                 Washington Monument seen from Lincoln Memorial

 On the way back to Parsippany, we stopped for lunch in Baltimore, a seaport city in Maryland, with a superb inner harbour full of old ships.



Now we are back at school, ready to start our second week in Parsippany.

Parsippany Students Exchange - First Week

For 31 students and two teachers - Lurdes Asensio and Henar Marchesi -  at IES Jorge Manrique, the beginning of this course is being a little unusual. We are spending two weeks in Parsippany, New Jersey, where our students are attending regular classes at Parsippany High School and staying with local families. Not only are they practising their English everyday, but also they are experiencing the American culture from within.

The School buses

One of the classes at Parsippany High School

We had a school dinner with the families, the mayor and the education authorities.

This exchange between IES Jorge Manrique and Palencia has been going on for 20 years now. We think it's a wonderful opportunity for both schools, as they get to learn a new culture, so different from their own.

The mascot of PHS is the red hawk

The first day, Sunday September 18, our students spent the day with their families. Next morning they went to school with their American partners where they attended all the lessons and that's what they've been doing for all this week. They've had two special lessons for them - one on British/American English, and another on American music. 
Yesterday we went to New York, where we walked along Brooklyn bridge, visited the Stock Exchange and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, got emotional at Ground Zero, had lunch and went shopping in Chinatown and wandered in Central Park to finish with.

Crossing Brooklys Bridge

At Groung Zero

Tomorrow we're going to Washington for the weekend.

Proyecto eTwinning premiado

OBSERVA ACTION

Pedro Delgado, Sara González, Ruth Esteban and Diego Melgosa (4ºA) interviewed a teacher that took part in the project OBSERVA ACTION.

First we asked her about her personal life and her personal experiences;

She told us her name was Julia and that she was from León but that nowadays she lived in Palencia. She is an English teacher of Trinidad Arroyo high school,where she teaches students of 1ºESO and 3ºESO.

She explained us that she had gone to Salamanca university and that she had studied a translation and interpretation degree. She had studied a Science Baccalaureate in Juan del Enzima school, but she had decided to study English because around ten years before, she had met French children, but she couldn’t communicate with them so she didn’t want to be blind (she literally said that). In that moment she understood that she needed a tool to communicate with the others, the English. She said she had travelled to the UK, Ireland and the United States.When she was a child she didn’t know she was going to be a teacher, she liked English but she didn’t see it as her job. Nowadays she loves her job. She told us that English is very important to communicate, to join people. Sometimes we think that other people are very far from us only for the reason that we don’t speak the same language.

She declared that she loves working with teenagers. She has met people from a very different culture, for example she made a Vietnamese friend.  

Then we asked her some interesting and deep questions. We inquired what English was for her, and she answered us with an amazing affirmation. She said that English was an open window, an opportunity, a bridge between cultures. We also asked her about the best thing she had learnt in this project, and she told us that she had learnt to love her work, all the expert teachers she has known love their job.She has been staying in the USA during 3 months as an exchange student. She’s really happy with her job, she wouldn’t change it. She had a lot of jobs while she was in Portugal. She lived during 4 years in Portugal where she  was a Spanish teacher. This was the first time she worked as a teacher.

Then we asked her about the project;

We asked her what the name of the project was and what  its objective was, she told us the name of the project was OBSERVA ACTION.

It was about getting in touch with other teachers that wanted to share their knowledge about teaching English or other languages.

She also told us that the project had advantages for her students because she learned new and probably better teaching techniques to teach them.She said that this project was very common in the United States. She told us that the best part of the project was getting in touch with other teachers to search experiences.

The project’s main objective is to interchange experience with other teachers. They do this going to other classes so they see how other teachers teach. The program is 3 months long.

At the beginning of the program (February) all the teachers that participate in the program went to Valladolid, in a training session. There they met the other teachers. She didn’t choose this high school, the centres were selected by a raffle.

She commented us that there were 2 observants and 2 expert teachers here in Palencia, because this was an experimental project. This project doesn’t consist of an exchange of teachers, the observants go to another teacher’s classes but not vice versa, there is not feedback. She told us that she hasn’t had any bad experiences, all were good. She told us that one of the best things of the project is that all the teachers love their jobs.

She said that travelling around the world is a beautiful experience and a great opportunity. She had travelled to the United Kingdom, Ireland and the USA as a tourist and also to improve her English. She can speak four languages: French, Portuguese, English and Spanish.

We also asked her about ways to learn a language. She told us that the best way was to make an exchange with another country, because it is a nurturing experience in which you will meet new people and you will learn important things about other cultures. An exchange makes you grow as a person and helps you to become a more open-minded individual. It teaches you to respect each other whatever its religion, its nationality or its colour of skin.

She told us that a useful technique to improve pronunciation was to listen how native people speak and repeat the words  as much as possible.

Finally, we said to her goodbye and we took a photo with her. It was a very interesting interview and we learnt a lot of things.

Reporters Ruth, Diego, Sara and Pedro with teacher Julia.