As everybody discovered in the “Festa Major” speech, Matildas are organizing a cultural exchange with Irish students. We have compiled a lot of schools’ adresses and now it is time to see if we can get a school that wants to start an exchanging letters project with us. We think it is a great opportunity to practise English and to discover the connections we have with other cultures. As we have to ask the head teachers permission, we realized that it is necessary to adapt the language in our letters. It is not the same as writing a letter to a high school friend! We learned the typical expressions to write formal letters such as “I’d like to write letters “. Do you know what it means?

By the way, we have received the answer to the letters we wrote to our high school mates! It was very exciting! To our amazement, we also discovered that reading in English it is not as dificult as it may seem!

It is very important to offer students real and meaningful opportunities to read and write authentic English because it is the best way to motivate them and encourage them to put into practice all the strategies they have learnt.

In the class we are doing a timeline and we had a board game just about that! The name of the game is “Timeline” and it is a card game in which players have to make a timeline putting in the correct place an event card.

Well, we know that now because first we had to read the instructions… and they were in English! We had to use reading strategies to infer the meaning of the unknown words and, in some case, we had to use the dictionaries. Can you understand the instructions?

Once we had the instructions clear, it was time to play! Needless to say, we played the game using expressions like “it’s my turn”, “i’ts your turn”, “this is not correct”, “take a card” and “I’m the winner!”. It was also a great opportunity to say the years in English. It was so fun!

Today some Petits Princeps were very happy because on Thursday it’s “Halloween”. It is very fun to wear costumes and go trick-or-treating but we do not know much about  “Halloween”, though.  We saw a video that was very eye-opening…

We thought that the Americans invented Halloween recently just to have fun but we discovered that, in fact, it is a very old tradition that has a long history. And, much more importantly, we discovered that “Halloween” and “Castanyada” have the same origin!

In ancient times, the Celts, a tribe that lived in Ireland and the United Kingdom, celebrated harvest time with a big meal they called “Samhain.” They also thought that, on the 31st of October, the separation between the world of the living and the world of the dead didn’t exist. 

To avoid ghosts, people in Ireland started to dress up to protect themselves from bad spirits. They also left food outside the house to feed the ghosts and avoid them entering. These ancient traditions evolved with time and became the popular “Halloween” traditions that we know.

As somebody in class said “we celebrate the same (harvest and remembering the dead), but we do it in a different way”. 

It was really very interesting! If you want to know more, just check the video!