January - Services and Political Organisation of Spain

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In January, we reviewed what we had learned about villages, towns and cities in December. I threw my small blue, fluffy toy, 'Pepito', to different students who had to answer questions like 'do you have flats in villages?'. This is a great trick for getting the quieter students involved and participating!

Then we played a guessing game where students had to pick village, town or city but not tell the others. They came to the front of the class and students had to ask them 'is there a... shopping centre / church / train station etc'. This was a great review and students seemed to remember the differences between villages, towns and cities very well. 

Political Organisation of Spain

This was one of the most challenging things to teach in English. Especially as a foreigner, as I had to learn all about the political organisation of Spain myself before teaching it. First, we went through the organisation in a PowerPoint, where I interacted with them as we went through different slides. I asked them who the president on Spain is, who makes rules in Andaluica and in Alcalá too, before we did a role play where they had to think about decision making and what politicians do. They really enjoyed the role play and it helped them understand in English about politics and decision making. We also looked at national and regional health services. 

Review of Services

This week we reviewed the different services in Alcala and towns in general e.g social services and health services. We drew a table and they had to work out what contributes to each service e.g hospital in health services. They were engaged with this but loved it more when they used white boards to write their answers. They had 15 seconds to work out which service the photo on the board belonged to. Then they wrote on their boards and shouted out the service together. For this, they had to think quickly and practise their spelling. They also used investigator skills to look closely at the photo, because sometimes it could be more than one kind of service!