THE DAY OF EUROPE: BALTIC COUNTRIES AND POLAND

A post from Exmouth

Good morning, dear followers! Here we are in our staying in Exmouth after three days of lessons and activities in this beautiful seaside town of about 45,000 people who put us up with gentle care! Our students have lessons in Mountland Language school in the mornings. They start at 9 and have two English speaking lesson with a native teacher and then they later have a break for half an hour until 11.30 After that, they have another lesson with another native teacher until 13.30 when they lunch time starts. After lunch there have been several activities organised as something like a gymkana to get used to the town, British culture and today they will watch a British comedy film. Yesterday evening, after our early dinner at 6 in the afternoon, all we went to a Rugby club to dance in a kind of disco with other young students from Madrid, but we completed the "night" with a visit to a local pub which held live music from the 60's and 70's. We will continue our staying here until Monday that we will go to London, but before we will visit Exeter too and go bowling or do a day trip to Exeter too. But that will be another post. See you!

Road to Exmouth-England-Great Britain

Hi, there!
Here we are again for a short post about a trip with students from our school.
This time the destination is England and it is not a language interchange, but an immersion in English in a small town called Exmouth, 16 kms from a bigger city, Exeter, as you see with a common root name due to a river: Exe.
We will try to keep news from there and send some photos.
Up to now, we have the group photo and a video about our destination.
See you!

European Day of Languages at Salesianos Pamplona

Good morning to everyone,
School started last 11th September and after two weeks of work and targets for the course, I restart the labour of this blog too.

The aim of the blog is to introduce topics related to English language, culture and history worldwide, apart from other different topics, written in English of course, like Osasuna and football, which are some of my interests, too.

But there is a main issue this course at Salesianos Pamplona: PLAN EUROPA. And we have started with some projects in the lessons of Secondary levels and put the books away for the time being.
Students have prepared some fact files of each country in the European Union ( U.E.) and written on cardboards to exhibit in their classrooms, corridors and entrance of the school.

The European Year of Languages started in 2001 with the help of the Council of Europe and the European Union. The main aim of that day was to celebrate the linguistic diversity in Europe and to promote language learning. Following the success of that year, the Council of Europe declared a European Day of Languages to be celebrated on 26th of September each year. And there are many activities you can do to promote to learn languages.

We will report the activities we have done during this week at Salesianos Pamplona next week.

Have a nice language course.

El viaje a Braunschweig y las familias de acogida

El viernes por la mañana quedamos en el patio del colegio todos los alumnos del intercambio para comenzar nuestro viaje hacia Bilbao, donde teníamos que coger un avión unas horas más tarde. Llegamos a Bilbao cerca de las once de la mañana y fuimos a facturar nuestro equipaje.

Tras facturar y recibir nuestros billetes estuvimos un rato en el bar del aeropuerto hasta que llegó la hora de pasar los controles y embarcar para tomar el avión de la compañía Germanwings rumbo Stuttgart. Allí nos esperaba un pequeño avión de no más de 150 plazas que tras 2 horas de vuelo, nos dejaría ya en suelo Alemán.

En la estación de Stuttgart tuvimos una hora más o menos para comer algo y prepararnos para coger de nuevo un avión hacia Hannover, donde nos encontraríamos con las familias. En esta ocasión el avión era de tamaño mayor pero el viaje era solamente de una hora. Una vez en Hannover, las familias estaban esperandonos en la estación de llegadas del aeropuerto, donde recibimos una acogedora bienvenida.

Después de los primeros abrazos y saludos con nuestros amigos alemanes y sus familias nos organizamos para viajar hasta Braunschweig que esta a una hora en coche desde Hannover más o menos. En el camino a Braunschweig pudimos comprobar de primera mano las autopistas sin límites de velocidad alemanas, alcanzando velocidades de hasta 190 kilómetros por hora.

A la llegada a la ciudad los alumnos españoles fuimos repartidos en las familias y cada uno fue a su casa aquí en alemania. Pudimos comprobar las diferencias de esta ciudad con Pamplona rápidamente, ya que tiene un tamaño bastante superior al de nuestra ciudad y esto implica que los desplazamientos requieren mucho más tiempo. A parte, algunas de las familias viven en el centro de la ciudad, a unos escasos 5 minutos de la escuela, mientras que otros viven en pueblos a las afueras necesitando hasta 20 minutos por autopista para llegar al colegio

Intercambio Kleinburg Gymnasium-Salesianos Pamplona

Guten Tag!
We are back in the blog with another interesting entry related with our school or English topics.
Now the topic, as it was the last one, is about interchanging and the knowledge of cultures around Europe.

Apart from the pen-pal with Birmingham in ESO level 1 ( 1°-2° ), Salesianos Pamplona has started an in-person interchange with a school in Braunschweig, Germany : Kleinburg Gymnasium (school in German).

Last March, 13 students from that school and two teachers came to Pamplona to meet those 13 students from our school who volunteered to enter in the new programme. They first sent each other a letter to introduce themselves and Juanjo Bonilla and Maite Pierola, from Salesianos, connected the German student with our student.

As I said, our students put up the German students in their houses/flats and the school organised some social activities and special lessons for them in the school. They first had a city tour around Pamplona and its fortress on Saturday and free time for Sunday, so they went with their host families to Donosti-San Sebastian, for instance, or famous places in Navarre like Javier, Olite or Isaba.

The week of the 16th March-20th March German students had special lessons at our school about subjects like Music, Sports, Philosophy, English and of course Spanish with our teachers Nerea, Soler, Mikel, Berta, Inma, or Maite.



Finally they visited the city hall, met the mayor Enrique Maya and went out in the balcony where our famous festival of Sanfermines start from, went shopping to Itaroa or La Morea, and visited the two universities in our city.

Ahora estamos en Braunschweig, devolviéndoles la visita y hemos llegado el viernes 17 al aeropuerto de Hannover, donde nos recogieron los padres de los alumnos del intercambio, igual que nosotros les recogimos en Bilbao, pero ésta va a ser otra historia que a partir de ahora os van a contar los alumnos del intercambio de nuestro colegio que han venido con nosotros.

La idea va a ser escribir en "English" la mayoría y algo en el idioma de Cervantes, porque como sabéis no tienen nuestras letras ni acentos, y va a ser difícil escribir muchas palabras, pero esperamos que nos sigáis igual que siempre.

Juan Ignacio Ullan
Juanjo Bonilla

Pen-pal Interchange with King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Girls in Birmingham

At the beginning of this course 2014-15, the Grammar School  King Edward Vi Camp Hill for Girls from Birmingham, England got through our Department of English at Salesianos Pamplona to start a penpal relationship with students.

Their Spanish teacher, Rocio Inestal, a good friend of mine, who is working this year at that school wrote me a mail to find out the possibility of starting a relationship between students from 2º ESO ( Secondary levels ) and her students who are already learning Spanish for three years, at least.

The first delivery of letters arrived in October from Birmingham. Girls are 13-14 years old and our students got excited when they received their post. Then, my students from 1-2 ESO replied those letters and they told the girls about their lives in Pamplona and the school.

Now it's Christmas time and our students at Salesianos Pamplona have made drawings about these holidays on cards and written some wishes for their first British friends, and the girls from Camp Hill sent their Christmas Cards in Spanish.

Who knows if as Humprey Bogart used to say in the film Casablanca: "This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" or we can have a good partnership in a near future!