New class

Santiago Sandoval is a very creative student-teacher and a musician. So he applies his two skills and makes wonderful classes. Here and here (click to download the plans) is a new one for his practicum in ESB...


Here is the song "I work to live".Great work, Santiago! I´m sure your students are highly motivated with this and add a positive value to your work.

Claudia Girod and Diana Martínez prepared this project on "18th Century Architecture" for Language and Culture III. They´ve made two different power point presentations on the subject and found videos on the topic.Great work that they want to share with all of you!!!

These are the links for the presentations:

History_of_Architecture_

Architecture_Timeline_18th_century._

and for the videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5HFNvi3ZwU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oB4tQVUI8U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbzo6Q08xl4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXNdkZ4yu4k

Thanks Claudia and Diana, and congrats on a job well done!!!

Do Not Panic: Classics!!!

Yuya Viglione, one of our most "well known" and beloved graduates produced for her final practicum a lesson on a classic: "Beowulf".Here´s her account:

Do not panic classics!!

I had never thought about working with classics. Actually, I’ve always tried to skip them and focused on modern and updated topics with my secondary students.
But this time I must admit that Beowulf- the epic poem from XI century - gave me a nice surprise.
The story began when doing teaching practice: we were given a lesson about Beowulf from a book called Opportunities and the classical issue: past tense. (old fashioned, uh?)
There we were, me and my partner, trying to convince ourselves that we could do it for good, that we could motivate a group of lazy, noisy and disinterested guys that knew almost nothing about English, and that probably would not do anything to help practitioners to succeed.

The key was motivation.
And where would we step to get it?
Firstly, we jumped into the net to get ideas about films, photos, Vikings, wars, heroes, legends and myths. After getting data galore, we decided to start working with photos, -a big one from the original book, and a good one from Viking boats.
How to make students speak?
Just by making them invent, make up words or try to find transparencies. (According to the book we had to get to “castle, armor, soldier, hero, sword, dragon and some more ones and to use the story to apply past tense).

Secondly, how to make them involved?
We started asking about myths and legends they knew. The answer was fast and rich; many legends from La Plata came up, and many heroes from movies and TV too. By the moment they told us the legends, we tried to translate them shortly into English to show them everything is possible in other language.

The key was in their stories: horror, suspense, war, fighters, so we hurried into the story in the book to analyze the pictures, highlighting cruelty and barbarism (let me remind you, we were working with teens) and guess together how the plot could be. After getting names, characters and places from the first part in the book, we asked them to imagine the following part. We repeated it in English and let the mystery for the next class.
By that time we had spent only an hour from a two-hour-class and thanks to Mr. Robert Zemeckis, director of Beowulf the film, we had the ribbon to wrap the first day; a film that would certainly give them the complete involvement we, teachers to be, needed. Therefore, we played the first part of it and stopped at its highest climax to be able to develop some oral exercises based on yes/No questions, re-ordering scenes from the movie with pictures and with short statements that make them think and realize the grammar point we were supposed to teach. Have I heard that this is old, haven’t I? First class was done.
OK. First part was complete. Second one developed as expected, recycling previous events, moments from the film, and some tiny issues about the past of the hero.
We obviously read the last part of the short Beowulf story in the book, and we were ready to watch the last part of the film.
Unexpectedly, we asked them to find the uncommon or weird values in the characters, such as: Who was a liar, who was dishonest, who cheated a friend, etc. The class was absolutely hooked on the plot and we gave them another view that made them think positively. Maybe You can imagine the rest: the whole group criticizing liars, blaming dishonest characters and censuring wrong values.
We introduced some new and guessing games five minutes before finishing the film to intrigue them all. After some minutes working and complaining, they finished the movie and when we ended up we realized we did it!! A challenging group had been paying attention to everything, had been taking part – the simple way they could- and even the most difficult students had been hooked to the end.
Maybe you got lost with all these words, please give me the chance to re read it, because today, I can tell you there’s nothing to rule out when teaching is needed. Who would have told that Beowulf turned out to be one of my heroes? Got a poster to share?

Thanks,Yuya Viglione, a great way to motivate students!!!

The Bus that Stops for Everyone

In the light of the new curriculum that forsters integration as one of its main points to deal with our students. Santiago Sandoval, a student of 4th year at ISFD 97, has developed a plan to work with his students that has into consideration helping students to become better citizens and people.
He developed this plan last year while he was pratising in EPB.
This is what Santiago tells us about his experience...

"The song "The bus that stops for everyone" was created by me during my "practicas" last year(3rd in the course of studies curriculum) in which I noticed student's lack of interest or enthusiasm in the activities from the coursebook they were working with at the moment. In addition to this factor I also realized students' lack of unity and sense of solidarity between them. This pespective triggered the idea of making something different in the classroom so as to learn but also to enjoy the learning of english at the same time. As I was teaching means of transport and I introduced the invention of the bus as an Argentinian invention I thought that a song would perfectly involve students in the learning of vocabulary and necessary language to participate actively during the lesson.
I took my acoustic guitar and played the song and the fist time I made my students listen to it just for pleasure but the second time I gave them the lyrics in disorder in a leaflet so as for them to find the right order of the stansas and chorus as well.
They were very enthusiastic about it and they wanted to listen to it once and again. In a second class I explained to them the importance of understanding the message of the songs they listen to, and I let them discover which was the message that I wanted to put across with my song which finally turned out to be theirs as they started to sing the song along with me
The great thing of this experience is that they were able to take what I wanted to give them, that is something which does not always occour. In the end they were able to reflect upon their behaviour and re construct the message of the song with their own words and that gave me a great sense of achievement I must say.

Hope this helps and I am always glad to hear from teaching experiences I thoroughly believe that if we exchange ideas and share experiences we can enrich our teaching practices and feel at the same time we are a team and we are not alone in this hard task which is education."

Listen to the song ,downloading it here....fantastic song!!!


Thanks to Santiago Sandoval