EXPERIMENTING WITH MAGNETISM

Laura Lorenzo11/06/25  

After learning about “grounding” we learned that around the Earth there is a magnetic field and we wondered about magnetism. What do we know about magnets?

After a brief brainstorming and some reading, we saw the connection between the poles in a magnet and the Earth poles, we remembered how magnets work (two different poles attract whereas two same poles repel) and we reflected on many magnets do we use in our real life. Magnets are not only to attach papers on the fridge!

It was time to put all this knowledge into practice and try to solve different questions:

-How can we know the poles on magnet without colours?

-Can we see the magnetic field?

-Can we make a pencil levitate?

We had everything we neeeded to answer the questions: magnets, school objects, compasses, iron fillings and our creativity!

We saw the magnetic field using a magnet and some iron fillings and we found the poles on a magnet using a compass. Making a pencil levitate seemed impossible though!

After watching a tutorial, we realised that we colud make a pencil levitate using magnet properties. Do you want to do it at home?

INTERNATIONAL BOOK DAY

Laura Lorenzo05/05/25  

The 23rd of April is a very important day in Catalonia because of St. George celebration. But, did you know that it is celebrated worldwide as the International Book Day?

It all started in 1995 when the UNESCO decided to dedicate a day a year to promote reading, a lifelong skill key in learning that also adds richness to our lives.

They chose this date to honour two of the most famous writers ever who died on a 23rd of April…

Both names were familiar but we realized that we didn’t know much. We watched a video about William Shakespeare life and we were amazed! Did you know that he helped build a theatre and that he wrote more than 35 plays?

The video was very interesting and the images helped us understand it better. We were even able to summarize the text by putting sentences in order!

Another curiosity about Shakespeare is that he invented a lot of expressions that we still use today, even in Spanish. Play the game and match the expressions. How many can you get right?

TEXTS ABOUT THE SCREEN-FREE WEEK

Laura Lorenzo18/03/25  

Last week was the first after the experiment of living without screens during seven days. It was a time to analyse the pros and cons of such an activity and we shared all our discoveries. It was very difficult for some, but the general opinion was that it had a lot of advantages and everybody claimed to have changed their routines in some way.

We discovered that these experiment was not new and that it has been held in USA since 1994. This fact made us realize that screen usage is a worldwide problem.

We found a lot of texts about the perils of screens and, of course, they were all in English. This is what generally happens when you make a search on the Internet, that the vast majority of texts are in English. Nowadays, with the use of Google translator, there are no major problems to understand the gist of any kind of text but it is not a good idea to rely exclusively on the answers provided by AI tools. It is much more benefitial to develop strategies that enable you to understand any kind of text. In this occasion, the texts about screens provided the perfect opportunity to practise how to locate specific information.

The main goal of this activity was not to read and understand a whole text but to be able to find the answer of some questions. The questions were in Catalan and, in groups we had to critically analyze all the aspects of the text to select the correct text from a collection and then locate the answer on it.

Titles and images were useful to discard texts that were not related to the topic, for instance, and they also paid notice to words in bold, that offered hints about where in the text the information would be.

The fact of being able to understand texts that were not adapted was very encouraging too! English is not as difficult as it may seem!

LET’S GO TO THE THEATRE!

Laura Lorenzo21/02/25  

Yesterday we had a great opportunity to practise English while having a good time by watching a play: Sleeping Beauty (or not).

“Mitjans” and “Grans” had been preparing the theatre for weeks and they knew the story very well: it was a new version of the traditional fairy tale in which the princess, Aurora, changed the story to fit her true desires.

The students laughed and sang together with the characters and… some even became actors and danced or rode toy horses!

All in all, students discovered that, knowing the context and some basic language, it is possible to understand a complex story with lots of unknown words. Why don’t you give it a go and watch cartoons or films in English? You may be surprised!

WRITING FORMAL LETTERS

Laura Lorenzo21/01/25  

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.

WRITING LETTERS

Laura Lorenzo17/11/24  

Investigating about Roald Dahl’ ‘s bibliography, we discovered that “Love from Boy”, one of his books, was a compilation of letters he wrote. We realized that we had NEVER received or written one single letter! To put a solution to that, we analyzed the stucture of a letter and each one of us wrote to a student in the high school. We not only put into practice our writing skills but also learned the typical expressions to write a letter in English like “It was great to hear from you”, “all the best”, “how are things” or “XOXO”. Now we are looking for schools in English speaking countries to exchange letters to!

Reading in English

Laura Lorenzo03/10/24  

Once children are confident using the language orally, they must start reading in order to fully master English. Learning to read in English, though, is quite different.

Since the children can already read in Catalan and Spanish, they can activate different strategies to be able to get the meaning of different messages. One of these strategies is being able to find similarities between words that help them infer the meaning.

To help them develop this strategy and stress the importance of reading, at school we have distributed posters around the classroom that encourage reading for pleasure. The children had the sentences in Catalan and, working in pairs, they had to match them to the correct poster. After finishing the activity, they explained the strategies they used to find the solution. They all agreed that it was easier than it seemed: “si hay palabras casi iguales”.

This sense of achievement creates a positive attitude towards reading in English for pleasure, an activity we do once a week with the “big ones”.