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!

DESCOBRINT EL CÒMIC

Laura Lorenzo22/01/26  

“Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures”

Harvey Pekar. 

A l’aula hem anat un pas més enllà de les descripcions físiques dels personatges. A partir dels còmics, hem descobert que les imatges també expliquen històries i que, sovint, ens transmeten molta més informació del que sembla a primera vista.

Per aquest motiu, hem analitzat els personatges del nostre còmic fixant-nos en l’emoció que transmeten en un moment concret i en la seva postura corporal. Gestos, mirades, moviments del cos o la manera de situar-se dins la vinyeta ens han ajudat a justificar què sent el personatge i quins motius ens porten a aquesta conclusió. Al mateix temps, hem observat el seu caràcter al llarg de la història, per entendre com és realment cada personatge i si canvia o evoluciona amb el temps.

Paral·lelament,també hem volgut conèixer la trajectòria històrica del còmic. A través d’un text en llengua anglesa hem descobert els seus orígens i les característiques principals d’aquest gènere. Aquesta activitat ens ha sorprès molt, ja que no érem conscients de l’antiguitat dels còmics ni de la seva importància al llarg de la història com a mitjà d’expressió i comunicació. 

And we discovered all that reading in English! To discover things about the comics we had two texts and we had to choose one. Which one would you prefer? The one with images?

This is the text that we decided to read because the images help us understand the text. We also noticed the words in bold and we discovered that these help too because they are the important words. These are not the only strategies that we learned: we realized that we can guess a lot of words because they are very similar to Catalan.

If you need to read a text in English, just relax and use the strategies we use:

-Think about all your previous ideas about the theme

-Look at the images–they give a lot of information!

-Look for the important words and try to guess the meaning

Per recollir tot el que hem anat aprenent, en petits grups hem posat en comú les nostres idees i coneixements, contrastant opinions i arribant a acords. Finalment, hem plasmat tota aquesta informació en un mural col·lectiu, que ens serveix com a base i referència per continuar avançant en el projecte.

Arribats a aquest punt, hem pres una decisió molt especial: acabar el còmic L’Art Alfa, una obra que Hergé no va arribar a finalitzar. Ho farem com a part de la celebració del 20è aniversari de l’escola, donant sentit al nostre treball i connectant-lo amb el projecte de comunitat Abracem el món.

OUR INVERTEBRATES

Laura Lorenzo14/01/26  

Now that we know a lot about invertebrates, it was time to be creative… We invented invertebrates!

Each Alicia decided if we wanted to create an insect, myriapod, arachnid or crustacean and we made it with plasticine. It was very fun! Do you like our art pieces?

But the activity did not finish here because we also needed to write a text about the invertebrates… in English! At first we thought it would be impossible but we found that, with the appropiate guide to help you with the letters (you can not write in English just like it sounds) it is not so difficult.

We were so happy with the exhibition that we decided to transform it into a game. We recorded our texts and then we listened to them to later choose the correct image. Click here if you want to play!

All in all, the perfect way to practise READING; WRITING; SPEAKING and LISTENING in English!

IS IT RIVER ANOIA?

Laura Lorenzo09/01/26  

As you know, we are studying how can we help our river, the river Anoia. We go to Parc Fluvial a lot and we are quite familiar with the image of the river in Vilanova but we know that the river is different in all its parts. We know the river starts near Calaf and that it ends in river Llobregat but… can we recognise the river?

We had different images and, in pairs, we had to decide if the images were river Anoia or not. We used a lot of strategies to get the correct answer: look at the animals, look at the plants around, look at the cities and towns around but it is not that easy! The best part is that it offered a great opportunity to talk in English and use structures like “I think it’s river Anoia” or “I think it is not river Anoia” to express our opinions. Do you want to try? Click here, look at the presentation and try to guess.

How many answers did you get correct? Did you recognise any other river?

DISCOVERING MARIMOS

Laura Lorenzo14/12/25  

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

After learning about the art of Bonsai, the other day we discovered another plant that is a national treasure of Japan: marimos. 

When we arrived at the class we found a glass jar full of water and two little green balls floating in water. Suddenly, a lot of questions came to our mind: is it alive? is it a plant? Is it an animal? 

We would soon answer all our questions just by reading. We were presented with four texts that contained all the answers to the questions and we had only 5 minutes to read through them. This time limit forced us to put into practice comprehension strategies like skimming and making predictions that are key when we want to move from recognising words to fully comprehend a text. 

In pairs, we read the texts and we agreed that only two of them had the information that we needed. Then, in order to discover the marimos, we had to choose one text to read more carefully and we decided that the first text, with images and shorter text, was the best for our purpose. What text would you have chosen?

As you can see, it is a plant that requires indirect light and cool water that must be changed every fifteen days. To keep the round shape, it is important to roll it carefully on your hands every now and then.  

We were very surprised to see that marimos grow very slowly… only 5 mm per year just to reach the 30 cm that measure the biggest ones. This raised a lot of new questions… How old is our marimo?  How does it measure? 

Seeing a marimo grow, just like reading, is a beautiful slow process that it can not be rushed.

COMIC CHARACTER DESCRIPTIONS

Laura Lorenzo12/12/25  

“Comics are the gateway to literacy”

David Kracov

During these months we have been discovering TINTIN, the character that gives name to our class. We read comics and watched the film

 “Castafiore’s jewels” and we discovered quite a lot about the characters. We have identified the main characters in the series and we have discussed their physical and psychological characteristics. We remembered the structure of descriptions and we wrote the descriptions in Catalan. 

When we found the same texts translated into English we realized that we were able to recognise some useful words just by comparing the Catalan and the English texts. Some words are very similar!

With our vocabulary a bit bigger we faced a challenge… Could we write a description in English?  Could the classmates recognise the characters?

We thought about all the comic characters that we knew and, following a template, we wrote our texts… In English!

Our favourite part was when we read our classmates’ texts! Some texts were very easy but others were very difficult to read! 

We realized that when we write it is important to take into account not only the content but also the presentation, especially if another person has to read it. 

Do you want to try? Look at the image, read the texts and try to guess the character!