Day four

Motivating day at school today! As days pass by, I'm starting to notice weariness but fortunately the lessons are becoming more and more interesting, so I feel good.


We started the day with a different activity to revise vocabulary. This time, the teacher displayed several words from yesterday's session and, in small groups, we had to discuss the words and define them. 
Next, we continued with the activity we hadn't finished yesterday. We shared all the information we could gather about three topics and a spokesperson from each group told the rest of the classmates a kind of report about the results. It was nice, especially because the teacher gave us loads of new vocabulary of different registers (colloquial, formal, standard, etc.) and that's so useful. Besides, the topics we were proposed were very interesting and helped us see the things we have in common and the things which differentiate us (religion at school, pastoral care, gifted and talented students, etc.). To be true, we have been dealing with this type of vocabulary for quite a long time now but this way we will keep it in mind for longer.

After the break we dealt with reading in a rather popular way. We did a jigsaw reading, which is nice, but I use it in my classes quite often so I didn't learn that much. We were in groups of 4, each with a different text to read for homework, and we had to summarise ours to our partners. I liked that the teacher asked us to jot down the collocations and key words that we found necessary for our partners to get the most accurate idea of our text. My text was a news report about the increasing amount of autistic children being excluded from school mainly due to the lack of understanding of schools, which confuse their meltdowns with aggressive behaviour.

The second period of Language Development was devoted to memories. First, we had to stand up in a line according to our birthdays. Being the first person in the line the one who was born closer to 1st January and the last one the person who was born closer to 31st December, we had to share our childhood memories with the person next to us. I spoke to Domenico, a very nice Italian teacher (he teaches Philosophy) with whom I had already been working together.
Next, we did a listening task. Although the topic was quite interesting, the way we approached the listening was not innovative at all: answering the questions. The only memorable thing of this session was the new vocabulary we learnt.

After the lunch break we had Methodology and today it was devoted to music for teenagers. We had a new teacher today and we loved her too. She provided us with loads of possible activities to use songs and with web sites to take ideas from, either for songs or for real-life videos. As we did quite a few, I will describe one I especially enjoyed.
She played a song full of special effects and then she asked: what's the purpose of this song? After listening to it, the message was clear: encouragement. Then we tried to find out what all the special effects were. It was so difficult to try and guess the story without seeing it! After a brief discussion, she played the video and nobody had expected what we saw. Here you have the video:

 

Finally, today was also a good day because some of our classmates, Marga and I have been to the theatre in the evening. Alan Ayckbourn is a

Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough

playwright from Scarborough who always premiers his plays here in the city. It is said that if people in Scarborough don't like the play, he doesn't go on with it any more.

 

The play was called Better off Dead and I have to say that we enjoyed it a lot, although for us foreigners it was sometimes

hard to get all the local jokes. It is true what people say about his plays: as he writes about everyday life, when you get out of the theatre, you go back home thinking that you know someone like every character in the play.