Competent learners

Besides learning the contents comprised in the syllabus, our students are constantly developing the basic competences that will make them better learners for life. Recently, in the 2nd Year Baccalaureate English class, students embarked on a project that involved most of the seven key competences included in the curriculum of the Ministry of Education. 

Students created a poster which reviewed a music festival held in 2017. They used their communicative competence throughout the process, especially when they presented their results in front of their peers and answered the teacher’s questions. Their mathematical competence was used in the design of the poster, in deciding how much information to write in each category or how much space to take up with festival images.

The learning to learn competence was applied when organizing the information they found online into the sections that the review had to feature; and to obtain the information students used their digital competence to go online in the iMac room and find the details of the festival. They worked autonomously during parts of the process and used their social and civic competences for those parts in which they had to cooperate with the members of their team. Finally, since most of the festivals they selected take place in English-speaking countries or feature English-speaking performers, students were also exposed to the cultural and artistic competence.

It was a motivating project that had students engaged in creating a product about a topic of their interest. Throughout the experience they used English meaningfully and in a realistic way. 

Who knows, perhaps some of them will want to be music critics or festival organizers, and at School we try to give them the tools to be able to pursue their dreams in an ever more globalized world.

Javier García

English teacher

Using music in the classroom

Using music in the classroom is always a good idea. It can provide a background for students to feel comfortable talking to each other in English without feeling listened to during speaking activities, it can be used for dictations, or to do research projects and work on a part of English culture.

In this case, we used the song “Where Is the Love?” by the Black Eyed Peas in 2nd Year Bachillerato to introduce the theme in a new unit and to do a Use of English exercise. 

At the beginning of the lesson, students listened to the song and jotted down the topics it deals with. They came up with concepts like “discrimination,” “terrorism” or “money,” and from that they had to guess the theme of Unit 8, which we were about to begin. Cristina was right in guessing that the unit theme was “Issues.”

After a couple of introductory activities in the book, we rounded off the lesson using the same song for a listening comprehension/grammar activity. This time it was not the usual “fill in the blanks” routine. Students were given a word from the family of the missing word next to each blank (if they needed the adjective, they were given the noun or the verb), and they had to practice the same word transformation routine that they need to master for the Use of English section of the First Certificate exam that some of them will be taking this year.

It was a nice way to use music both to make the introduction to a new unit more interesting and to practice the students’ grammar skills in an unusual manner. The students loved it.

Javier García

English Department

Songs & Rhymes

Music is very important for everybody, but it is gaining ground among teenagers day-to-day since they use it for almost everything like dancing, taking a shower or even for studying. 

Last November, 1st Year Secondary students went to see an English play called Ghosts in Love which immediately called their attention as it involved that catchy component we are talking about, music. The play involved cover versions of several current songs they all were familiar with, like Happy by Pharrell Williams or Sorry by Justin Bieber. They really enjoyed it and some of them even took part in it, dancing or acting when those songs were played. It was hilarious.

 When we came back to School we started working on what we had just seen, so we proposed comparing the lyrics of the cover versions we had heard with the original ones. They learnt about rhymes through an interesting activity and then they made their own versions taking their favourite song. 

It was difficult at the beginning to find rhymes at the same time they were writing a song which made some sense but once they took the hang of it they created amazing versions. And the best was yet to come, the bravest students had to present their creations in front of the toughest audience, their classmates! We had so much fun! 

Cristina Cutanda

English Department