November’s event of the Kidlympic Games

November Kidlympic Games brought to you from GERMANY!!‏

Relay Race

Deutschherrenschule would like to host November's event of the Kidlympic Games.  

They propose a 

'Kamelle' Throwing Relay Race

'Kamelle' are called the sweeties which the participants of Carnival Parades during the Street Carnival days in their part of the country throw out to dressed up kids and other people watching the parades in the streets. If you like more information about the Cologne Carnival in particular, you may have a look at the following web page: http://www.cologne.de/events/cologne-carnival 

And then have a good laugh at the crazy Germans ... ;-) 

Here are the rules for the Relay Race:

Have 6 kids team up and stand in line at the starting point. Place a bucket with sweets ( like lemon drops, chewing gums, etc) at a distance of 20 metres. Place a hoola hoop ring another 3 metres away from the bucket. When the race starts the first kid has to put on a funny hat or a clown's wig and run to the bucket, take a hand full of sweets and throw them into a ringshouting 'Kamelle', run back and hand over the hat/wig to the next kid. Winner is the fastest team. Note please: any sweets landing outside the ring will add penalty seconds to the time scored by the respective team.

 

This sketch might help with the setting up:

And now have fun!

HALLOWEEN NIGHT on October, 31st

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/five-little-pumpkins

Halloween is always fun. When Halloween is coming up, people have fun looking at horror books to give to their friends and family. If you want to find out more about this ‘tradition’, go over to the ‘All Hallows Read’. However, even ‘Five Little Pumpkins’ and ‘Trick or Treat, Smell my Feet’ are not either particulary scary but they are keeping with the Halloween theme.

Younger kids also enjoy Halloween at school, this year, they learnt the basic vocabulary:

http://www.learningchocolate.com/node/329

And also they sang ‘Five little pumkins’ song, a very popular song to sing when you are little.

You can see the lyrics below:

Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate.

The first one said “Oh my, it’s getting late.”
The second one said, “There are witches in the air.”
The third one said, “Why we don’t care.”
The fourth one said, “Let’s run and run and run.” And
The fifth one said, “Let’s go and have some fun.”
“Ohoo”, went the wind and out went the light and the five little pumpkins rolled out of sight.”

Welcome Students of Roehampton Church School

In March we got a link with a school in the U.K, Roehampton Church School, it is a primary school in south west London.  There are about 250 pupils.  This school is multicultural, with about 25 nationalities including British.  The children in years 3/4 (ages 7 - 9) learn basic Spanish.  They were particularly interested in starting a link with our year 3 children who are 7/8 year olds and we decided to start a partnership with them last year school. Once again, we started with new students in year 3 and they are writing a letter to new students in England. They are so excited and we are sending the first letter for them pretty soon. 

Here you can get some information about Roehampton Church School:

http://connectedup.com/rcs/index.htm

Welcome Back once again!!

 We guess it is a little bit late to say ‘hello’ but, we could not update this blog earlier, things got complicated at school during the two first months this school year.

Even it is late, we welcome all students and staff at CEIP ‘Lope de Vega’ in 2012-13. We hope all of us have fun and learn a lot.  We will try to share with you all some of the English and bilingual activities that we have already done and we are doing at the school.

This year, we don’t have any American assistant teacher yet, and we don’t know if we will. 

The Benefits of Bilingualism

The U.S. newspaper, The New York Times, has a great piece on the benefits of being bilingual.  It turns out that not only does it increase the number of people you can communicate with, but it generally just makes you a smarter person!  Writes the author Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, "The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving." Wow! So being bilingual helps you focus, helps you remember, and may prevent the early onset of diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia.

All of us here at C.E.I.P. Lope de Vega already knew that being bilingual is totally awesome, but it's great to know that we're helping our brains stay fit, too!

Read the article here.

- Robyn

(Photo via.)

National Capitals

"But what does 'D.C.' stand for?"

This week, in Fifth Level, we're learning about cities and their sites.  We've been practicing our vocab for museums, monuments, cafes, cinemas, libraries, and everything else our towns and cities have to offer.  But why not learn a little bit about national capitals?!  The students have prepared posters and presentations on London, Belfast, Cardiff, and Edinburgh, as well as Madrid - their own national capital city.  So I thought that I'd share a bit about my capital city, Washington D.C.

The students loved seeing all the sights that D.C. has to offer, and were amazed at just how big all of the monuments were!

Check out the slideshow on Washington D.C.

- Robyn

B-E-E

Oh, spelling. It's tough. It's embarrassing. It never gets any easier.

Some of my earliest memories are of learning how to spell in Mr. Takuda's first grade class, the most vivid being when I finally tackled that tricky word, computer.  Maybe I'd be a bigger fan of spelling if I'd gone to C.E.I.P. Lope de Vega, where we regard good spelling as the coolest thing someone can do by participating in the annual Spelling Bee!

We've been practicing all year with different types of spelling - phonetic, letter guessing, dictation, and good ol' letter-for-letter.

Stay tuned for updates on the Spelling Bee!

- Robyn