Lope de Vega working on Spelling Bee

All-School Spelling Bee


As part of our Europe Day celebrations, the students of C.E.I.P. Lope de Vega are practicing their ABC's and brushing up on vocabulary to prepare for the Sixth Spelling Bee Competition.

There will be contests first at the class level, then in each cycle (first and second grade, third and fourth, fifth and sixth), and finally we will hold a competition with the Primary School in Herrera. Then, we will decide the school spelling champion to commemorate the Europe Day.

Stay tuned for updates on the Spelling Bee!

Put your Clothes On

Dressing is an important but sometimes challenging skill for children to learn. You can lay the groundwork when your child is a baby, then build on it over the next few years. 

Learning to dress requires patience, persistence and practice from both you and your child. 
It also involves getting to know the things you have to do to get dressed:

• picking out clothes that are right for the time of day, the weather and what you are doing that day - the tutu might not be the best thing for a bushwalk!
• deciding what to wear - the dinosaur t-shirt or the truck t-shirt today?
• putting on and taking off clothes and shoes.
• doing up buttons or zips, getting collars and waistbands, and getting socks on the right way around.

Step by step

Getting dressed can have a lot of steps. It helps to break it down into smaller steps -- for example, putting on underwear, then t-shirt, shorts, socks and shoes.

A good way to teach your child to dress is to break each task down into small steps and teach him the last step first. Once he can do the last step of the task, teach him the second laststep, then the third last step and so on. For example, when putting on shorts, you might help your child face the shorts the right way, hold the waistband and put his legs through the leg holes. Then teach him the last step -pulling up the shorts to his waist by himself. Once your child can do this, teach him to put his legs through the leg holes and pull his shorts up. You can keep working your way backwards through the steps until your child has mastered them all and can put his shorts on for himself.

A big advantage of this approach is that often the most rewarding thing about a task is getting it finished -- and your child gets to this reward sooner when she masters the last step first.

When your child can almost dress himself (usually from three years and up), you can check whether he understands the steps by asking. 'What is the first thing you need to put on?' If he can't remember, you can help get him started by reminding him.

http://raisingchildren.net.au/articles/getting_dressed.html

Put your clothes on song

Quick, quick, it's getting cold
Put your jumper on. (coat, scarf, socks, boots)

Quick, quick, it's getting hot
Put your shorts on (T-shirt, shoes, sandals)

St. Patrick's Day

Hope you all had a very happy St. Patrick's Day.

Spelling Bee Competition

A Spelling Bee is a competition in which contestants are asked to spell a broad selection of words, usually with a varying degree of difficulty. The concept is thought to have originated in the United States, and spelling bee events, along with variants, are now also held in some other countries around the world. 

A spelling bee at an elementary school, with a speller addressing an audience and a judge, with a table of contestants behind them.

Historically, the word BEE has been used to describe a get-together where a specific action is being carried out, like a husking bee, a guilting bee, or an apple bee. 'Bee' is derived from the Old English word bēn , meaning 'prayer'.

Frank Louis Neuhauser (1913-2011) was born to German American parents. His father, a stonemason, worked on spelling with his son on weekends if the weather was bad. Newhauser became an American patent lawyer and spelling bee Champion, who won the first National Spelling Bee in 1925 by successfully spellingthe word 'gladious'. Today, the bee is know as the Scripps National Spelling Bee. As well as covering the 50 U.S. states, several competitiors also come from Canada, the Bahamas, New Zealand and Europe. 

Favourite Dates in March and April

Please, take a look at what the students in Sixth Grade decided about  their favourite dates in the months of March and April. As we said in September, they worked in the English Lesson on their favourite dates all along the year. Each one talked to their classmates and their teacher about some of their favourite dates. We have posted the 7th and 8th months of the school year below and this is what they said about, they are very interesting.

Celebrating the One-Hundredth Day of School

In Politics the first hundred days is a sample of the first 100 days of a first term presidency of a president of the United States. It is used to measure the successes and accomplishments of a president during the time thattheirpower and influence is at its greatest. The term was coined in a July 24, 1933, radio address by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, although he was referring to the 100 day session of the 73rd United States Congress between March9 and June 17, rather than the first 100 days of his administration.

In Schools another counting is taking place right now in American Primary Schools throughout the country to commemorate an event that happens every year: the onehundredth day of School. The count begins on the first day of school, when number lines and tallies begin, and counting sticks are placed in the 1s container. Culminating celebration activities abound as cereal, leaves, buttons, beads, and other everyday items are counted, sorted and placed in groups of 10, displayed, or mounted. (...)

'The 100th Day of School' by Angela Shelf Medearis:

(...) Now is the perfect time to bring out your favorite counting books, assess your collection, and add a few new treats to your shelves in preparation for this year’s celebration. It provides a great opportunity for reading a few counting books aloud and making a classroom or library display for children to enjoy.

A few books have been written specifically for this kind of celebration. Angela Shelf Medearis told this story about the beginnings of her book The 100th Day of School:
I was visiting a school when a tribe of first graders walked into the assembly wearing sashes and hats decorated with all kinds of odd things glued on them. The teacher was wearing a vest with 100 pennies glued all over it. I thought that maybe it was somebody’s birthday and asked the teacher. She told me that it was the 100th day of school. She was a first year teacher and I thought that maybe she was particularly happy to have completed 100 days! But, then she told me all about celebrating the 100th day of school and the counting and calendar activities teachers did. I knew immediately that I wanted to write a story about the 100th day of school to give teachers a tool.

http://www.ala.org/offices/resources/100thdayschool

This year children of 5th and 6th Grades celebrating 100th Day of School on February, 17th and they did it in that way:

They also worked on a huge project that they found out one hundred important events during the last one hundred years, and this is the result:

Valentine's Day

Each year on February 14th, many people exchange cards, candy, gifts or flowers with their special 'valentine'. The day of romance we call Valentine's Day is named for a Christian martyr and dates back to the 5th century, but has origins in the Roman holiday Lupercalia.

How did St. Valentine become associated with love and romance? There are so many stories and all of them have their true sense.

Heartwarming romantic gestures are incomparably more attractive, effective and valuable than words. For proof and guarantee that your Valentine's Day gift will seem inadequate- look no further than those famous romantic acts, which stand as some history's most passionate expressions of love. As examples: The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Edward VIII's Abdication of the Throne, or The Taj Mahal.

http://www.history.com/news/7-heartwarming-romantic-gestures


This year in Lope de Vega Primary School children showed a friendship gesture to one of their classmates in Valentine's Day. They had to pick up a piece of paper where the name of a classmate was written. Noone was allowed to know which name was in the paper until the selected day, Valentine's Day. Then, everyone heard the message, always a nice and positive one. 

After the actuation, everyone was happy and we took some pictures:

Here you can see some examples of friendship gestures from children to their best friends:

Have a very nice time until next Valentine's Day!!!