GUIDING PETE TO HIS SANDWICH!

Laura Lorenzo25/05/26  

“Computing isn’t about computers. It’s about people, solving puzzles, creativity, changing the future and, most of all, having fun.” 

Paul Curzon

In the pursuit to make the menu board for the school, we found a story of Pete, a cat that was hungry and wanted to make a sandwich for lunch. The problem started when he kept adding ingredients to his sandwich until it was enormous! Click on the image and enjoy the story just like us.  

We like listening and reading to stories like this because it is a great opportunity to learn vocabulary and structures while having fun.  It is also a good activity to start writing simple sentences using structures we know in its oral form like  I LIKE, I LOVE or I DON’T LIKE without all the stress that the English spelling may bring. 

In this case the accumulative structure of the story was a good starting point to work Computational skills. Computational thinking is a foundational problem-solving process that involves breaking complex challenges into simple steps, identifying patterns, filtering out irrelevant details, and designing step-by-step solutions. It allows humans to approach difficult problems logically and systematically, much like a computer scientist. 

In this case, the problem we were facing was to lead Pete through a labyrinth collecting the necessary ingredients to make his sandwich. The activity involved different steps: remembering the ingredients of the story and its order, locating them in the maze and imagining the best way to reach them. 

Once this was done, it was time to give the instructions… in English! We learned the words GO FORWARD,  GO BACKWARDS, TURN LEFT and TURN RIGHT. 

All these words implied movement, so the best way to memorize them was moving while we said the words. We played different games moving around the class in line, in pairs and it was so fun! 

With the vocabulary learnt, it was time to give PETE the instructions using the wooden pieces in the Scratch Jr game. The game consisted of a board in which, in groups, we had to move Pete using algorithms. It seemed very easy at first but we soon faced the first problems: we were not sure of the directions in which Pete had to turn and we did not have a lot of pieces. When faced with these problems it was time to analyze and find the solution in groups.  

We now know how to give Pete instructions in both English and algorithm so we are ready to try with real robots? Will we be able to program them? Of course!

PLAY AND THINK LIKE A COMPUTER

Laura Lorenzo23/05/26  

“Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way”

Rudy Rucker

Computational thinking is a foundational problem-solving process that involves breaking down complex challenges, identifying patterns, ignoring irrelevant details, and developing step-by-step algorithms. Computers work this way but, far from just programming, computational thinking is a universally applicable way to deal with everyday life problems like adapting a recipe for a large group of people to assembling a piece of furniture. 

In our last session of Martamàtiques with the families, we had fun together while playing some games specially designed to put into practise these thinking strategies. 


Algoracing is a board game for 4 players in which we have to program rovers to move along the board. It took a while to read all the instructions because there were a lot of things to consider: the setup, the cards to program the algorithms, the objective, the “obstacles” in our way… When we got to play we discovered that it was quite simple to play and design the algorithms but it was a bit more complicated to try to make the most of our cards and be efficient. This efficiency implied a lot of strategy and decomposition that quite often led all of us to mistakes that helped us learn!

Circuit challenge is a very fun logic game in which you have to create a path to lead the ball to find its destination.  Following the instructions to put the pieces and thinking how to place them properly involved a lot of spatial knowledge that enhanced. It seemed very simple because we started by trying our solutions piece by piece. When we were encouraged not to test our solution until the end, we realised that it was quite simple to make mistakes! 

This also happened in Laser Maze, a game in which you have to play with mirrors to make the laser reach the target piece. 

The biggest surprise for us all was Quadrilla. Apparently we thought it was “simply” a marble circuit and we tended to play with it. After reading carefully the instructions and interpreting the pictures, we realized that it was much more complex: we had to build the maze in such a way that the marbles fell in a specific sequence!

In order to do so, it was necessary to plan ahead all the movements taking into account variables like speed and position. The simplest game turned out to be the most similar to a computer. 

We will definitely need to play and practise more to master the games but we really understood that computational thinking is  structured human thinking. 

RHYME OR NOT RHYME? NOT SO EASY IN ENGLISH!

Laura Lorenzo11/05/26  

“Poetry is the rhythmic creation of beauty in words”

Edgar Allan Poe

In class we are learning about rhyme in Catalan, Spanish and … English!

We were familiar with the concept of rhyme because in our life we have listened and learned a lot of poems, songs and word games. In fact, it is precisely this simple, repetitive songs are often the first steps in learning a language because their rhyming and rhythmic structure helps to remember and retain words.

But not all the languages are the same and each has a different pattern of stress, intonation and rhythm that is important to recognise and understand. 

In English, there is also another aspect that we need to consider when talking about rhyme… English pronunciation! 

In Catalan and Spanish it is very easy to recognise if two words rhyme because their endings are written the same. In English it is not that easy: two words can be written very differently and sound the same!

 Play this game and do like us and decide if the words rhyme or not. 

Having learned about rhyme, we were ready to try to complete a poem with the rhyming words. It was very fun!

FLOWERS AND THEIR FUNNY NAMES

Laura Lorenzo02/05/26  

“The earth laughs in flowers”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

After discovering the importance of flowers and the relationship between flowers and insects, we became quite curious about flowers! They are very beautiful but we do not know many of their names in our language…. imagine in English!

To discover some of the names, we were faced with a challenge… could we discover the name of some flowers by reading their descriptions?

We were not convinced at first, but we realized that reading a text in English is just a matter of putting into practice some simple strategies. 

The first strategy, and quite obvious, is to identify the topic and activate the vocabulary that may appear. If we are reading about flowers… the flower parts must appear in the texts! To recall the vocabulary and familiarize with its written form (you know that English words are written very differently!), we played a game on the screen. It was very fun!

After, it was time to work in pairs to read the texts and match the names to the correct pictures.  Knowing the parts of the flower and identifying words that we know very well like colours and numbers, we could do the activity with no important difficulties. Another strategy some of us used was finding words in catalan that are very similar to English! 

As we discovered, it is not necessary to know all the words in a text to understand its general idea. Follow these strategies and try to name the flowers in the picture. It is not as difficult as it may seem!

SAYING HELLO, NOT A SIMPLE ROUTINE!

Laura Lorenzo19/04/26  

“Effective speaking routine in language classrooms help scaffold learners’ talk, making oral language development more accessible and less intimidating”

Andrew Wilkinson

Greetings are one of the first things you learn to say in a foreign language. When you travel to another country and already know how to say “hello!”, “good morning”, or “good afternoon”, you show respect for the other speaker’s culture and help create a more relaxed and friendly environment.

In English sessions, greetings play a very important role. Everyone is greeted and given an opportunity to express themselves and share anything they want or need within a routine that marks the start of every session.

Once everybody is sitting in a circle, the teacher throws the “world plushie” to a child, and the conversation begins: “Hello! Good morning! Good afternoon! How are you?” When the child has answered, it is their turn to ask another classmate, and the activity continues until everyone has spoken.

Although the conversation starts in English, when children want to express something for which they do not yet have the vocabulary or grammar, they naturally switch to Catalan or Spanish. This does not mean that the activity has failed—quite the opposite: they express what they want or need, and in doing so, they reveal the vocabulary they most need to acquire. The teacher, as an active participant in the routine, listens and monitors the conversation, asking questions, rephrasing and introducing the necessary vocabulary. Over time, through repetition, children gradually acquire the structures and vocabulary needed to say things like “Today I am going to the park with my sister” or “I am nervous because I am playing an important football match.”

Another important aspect is that they learn to recognise their emotions and expand their vocabulary to express themselves—not only in English, but also in Catalan. They learn to distinguish between being nervous and excited, bored, tired, or exhausted, and even between being happy and “over the moon.”

A familiar routine like this, with a clear, simple, and predictable structure, offers a great opportunity for everyone to practise speaking and listening in English. Simple, guided repetitions gradually evolve into real conversations in which all learners “build” knowledge together.

LET’S GO TO THE THEATRE!

Laura Lorenzo22/03/26  

“Don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.”

Roald Dahl

Last week we had a lot of fun while practising English by going to Can Papasseit to watch a theatre play: Little Red Rocks.

Because watching a theatre play in English can be a bit difficult; we have been preparing this challenging activity for weeks in class. By meeting the characters and reading the summary of the story we realized it was an adapted version of Little Red RIding Hood, a fairy tale that we all know.

In this version of the story Little Red is a brave girl who lives in Barcelona that has to fly to London to help her grandma, a famous music star who needs an important document. In her adventure she meets Lupita and Olenka, a flight attendant and a perfumist that help her. She also meets Mr.Wolf, a greedy person who wants to steal grandma’s money and jewells.

We had a lot of fun singing the songs and helping Little Red write the end of the story… Our favourite moment, though, was when three colleagues went on the stage to take part in a smelling competition!

Watching a play or a film in English may seem difficult but, if we are familiar with the story and know all the basic language it can be a fun and motivating activity. Why don’t you try watching your favourite film in English?

OUR RIVERS

Laura Lorenzo19/02/26  

We are learning a lot about RIVER ANOIA and we decided to use all we have discovered so far to invent our own river. 
We had a lot of fun creating our river because we did not just draw.. We used blue paper and scissors to make our river with one continuous string. We had to be very careful when we used the scissors because we wanted to make it as long as possible without breaking the paper…

It was very difficult to cut thin paper and it required a lot of care. What a great way to practice cutting skills! When everybody got their rivers, it was time to measure them. Some rivers were so long that we had to help each other use the measuring tape. You can see how long our rivers are in this picture.

This activity offered us the opportunity to introduce big numbers and practice saying them. It was very fun and much easier than we thought!  After spending some sessions playing games to practice saying, reading and writing numbers in English we were ready to write the info about our rivers… We had to complete a table with the basic information of our rivers (including the length in KM!) which later served us as the prompt to start writing our text describing the river. Writing in English is not as difficult when we have the right support!

MOVING LIKE ROBOTS

Laura Lorenzo16/02/26  

These days we have been playing while learning a bit about computational thinking.

Computers? We did not touch any computer but we solved problems just like computers do: analyzing the problem, breaking it in small parts and sequencing instructions.

To be more precise, we focused on sequencing by giving instructions. First, we pretended to be robots and we moved when we heard the precise instructions. It seemed an easy task but it implied a lot of positional knowledge! We also learned the words GO FORWARD, GO BACK, TURN RIGHT and TURN LEFT.

Once we had this clear, it was the moment to give the instructions to our colleagues. We built a maze in the class with little squares and we had to give instructions to one of the alicies to get to the destination. Experimenting all this instructions giving and receiving was vital not only to memorize the vocabulary but also learn about position and perspective. My right is not always your right!

To finish the lesson we had a special treat… 3D mazes! This material consists of a board in which we have different mazes. In the mazes, we have to move a cat to help him eliminate the aphids.

The difficult part was that, like a robot, we had to program the cat with wooden pieces that follow the block programming system SCRATCH Jr. Not as easy as it seems! What is the correct solution to this maze?

LUNCH BOX

Laura Lorenzo12/02/26  

Studying about how to make the school menu accesible, we discovered that lunches in the school are not the same in all the countries.


In the USA, for example, EVERYBODY has lunch in the school. Children DO NOT have lunch at home!
In the USA you decide if you BRING your own food or take the food from the cafeteria. Watch this video to see the lunch in the USA.

The food we see is very different but we discussed about it (using “I like” “I don’t like”) and… we generally love the food! We imagined what would be our perfect lunch box and we drew it. What is your perfect lunch box? In ours there are pizzas, pasta, chocolate and fruit!

Looking at some real photos of real lunch boxes we discovered that, in general, lunch boxes are NOT HEALTHY and we started to check the contents using a checklist. It was a great way to practise English vocabulary!

Now that we knew that a lunch box needs DAIRY, FRUIT, VEGETABLES, WHOLEGRAINS and MEAT, FISH, EGGS or PULSES, it was time to analyse OUR lunch boxes...

What a surprise that most are not healthy at all!

INSTRUCTIONS: VERY EASY TO READ, DIFFICULT TO WRITE!

Laura Lorenzo25/01/26  

As part of our project “We make our board games” we are reflecting a lot about a text that is very present in our lives: instructive texts.

All the board games that we played had one characteristic in common: they all had a set of instructions. It is true that not everybody reads the instructions and this is a real problem. Not reading the instructions can make the game boring or even impossible to play!

Now that we realized about the importance of instructions, it was time to read different sets and focus on their characteristics. We read a set of instructions in the different languages present in the school and we realized that they all had the same characteristics: they were short, direct, simple and sequenced. It was very interesting to do the activity in different languages because it also offered the opportunity to observe the similarites and differences between languages.

It was easy to understand the general idea of all the texts because of some key words very similar to Catalan and Spanish. And we could guess the meaning of difficult words in English just by using this strategy! Of course this was not possible with Arabic, which we learnt is a language that has a different origin and a different alphabet! Can you understand the texts? Can you match them with the set of English instructions?

With all this ideas, we were ready to create our instructions. We started with a simple exercise: a geometrical dictation. We created pictures using different shapes and we had to write or tell the texts so that our classmates could replicate them. Simple? Not really! We discovered that we had to be very precise in doing the instructions and specify very clearly not only the position, but also the size and the colour.

While reflecting about all we have learned about instructions, one Matilda suddenly realized that clear instructions are the basis of COMPUTERS… We will have to test instructions on some of the robots we have at school!