January 10

Apologies for not having a blog yesterday due to technical difficulties.

Today we had a Spanish club in which we did colours and looked at some pronunciation features of Spanish including : ñ, rr and ll. We learnt the phrase : me llamo - my name is.

I will attach some videos into the blog so that students who were not able to make it to class can still learn some Spanish if they wish, and those that do attend can practise for next week.

Number 1-10
Colours
Introductions

We will be doing this vocabulary in Spanish club in the weeks to come in preparation for some games.

In class we finished our wool craft and finished the first part of ' The Crumble Lady' book.

In social studies, we watched a short video in which a Ukranian girl told us about her life. We compared her quality of life to ours. A good activity to try at home would be to rewatch this video and discuss how her life is different to yours. Would you like to switch places with her? Why / why not?

The video led us to discuss the Russian - Ukrainian dispute over the Crimean Peninsula and a song written about war and sang partly in the Crimean language. This can be seen here.

The class were fascinated by how artistic her performance was and as part of our brain break we watched the following song which students agreed was very creative for a visual perspective.

Heroes by Måns Zelmerlöw

It was noted that during the video from the Ukranian girl, her home had been destroyed by war and that there were bullet holes in the walls of her house. We talked about how in 2014 Russia faced condemnation for its hostile actions not only towards Ukraine, but also Georgia and its attacks on freedom of expression and civil rights. We watched a winning video from the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest in which Austria sent a rather unusual competitor to make a statement in support of civil liberties and freedom of expression.

" When we disagree with someone, we don't have to get into fights or arguments. We can all use our voices to share our points of view respectfully to stand up for what we believe in"

Conchita Wurst - Rise Like a Phoenix.

Yesterday we also worked on our science projects which we will present next week.