Hägar wishes you "Merry Christmas"

Hello kids! After three months of hard work, you deserve some rest. I wish you the very best for the New Year. See you in 2012!

The Vikings are coming!

As you know, the vikings were an ancient people from Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) who travelled over Europe when nobody dares to move from his land or little village.

They were courageus and rude warriors, but intrepid explorers and brave sailors too.

They sailed from coast to coast, sometimes robbering rich monasteries, but many times knowing differents places, trading with a lot of villages, setting up settlements all over Europe, and even beyond...

See this map: over the year 1000, one viking captain, Leif Eriksson, traveled with his men from Groenland to Terranova in North America!! Being by this way the first european that saw America (almost 500 years before Christopher Columbus).

If you want to learn more about this brave and amazing people you can visit this page.

Now, answer the questions. You can look for the needed information in the same page:

1. See the map, what was the name the vikings used for the new territories they discovered in North America?

2. How were the vikings ships? You can read this

3. What can you tell me about the daily life of the vikings? You can find information here

4. The vikings had a pagan and politheist religion, what was it like? You can answer reading this

5. What the vikings left behind? How can we know about them and their adventures? See this

Now, we can find the vikings in cinema

Or even in comics!

One more thing... the vikings never wear HORNS!

LA CONSTITUCIÓN ESPAÑOLA

España es un país formado por muchos pueblos y muchas gentes. En 1.978 todos decidieron escribir cómo tenemos que comportarnos entre nosotros y con las gentes de otros países. Con todo lo que escribieron hicieron un libro que todos los españoles tenemos que conocer. Ese libro es la Constitución. En ella, se reflejan los derechos y los deberes de los ciudadanos españoles, así como nuestras libertades, límites territoriales, bandera, etc. Seguro que en clase, habéis tratado el tema y ahora repasaremos algunos de sus aspectos de una forma amena. Por ello, te proponemos las siguientes actividades:

1. Aprende más sobre La Carta Magna con el juego de la Constitución.
   
2. Utiliza tu imaginación y apunta un derecho o un deber que, bajo tu criterio, debería incluirse en una Constitución ficticia. Ahí va mi propuesta:

Todo el mundo tiene derecho a leer un buen libro, así como, el deber de recomendarlo a sus amigos/as.

BLACK FRIDAY

The day after Thanksgiving Day is called Black Friday in the USA. It's considered the beginning of the Christmas shopping.  Black Friday has been the busiest shopping day for the last 6 or 7 years.

  

A lot of retailers open very early (3 or 4 am) offering fantastic sales in order to kick off the shopping season.

There are so many people queuing for hours to get the best bargain that sometimes you may find it absolutely chaotic to take advantage of Black Firday sales. Some bargain hunting even camp out  overnight in order to secure a good place at the queue.

While the word "black" often has a negative connotation, here it alludes to profitability which is noted in black ink (loses are noted in red).

Questions:

1. If you have understood everything you'll be able to give a definition for the following words:

    retailer, sale, bargain, profit.

2. Do you remember when Thanksgiving Day is celebrated?

3. When was Black Friday 2011?

4. Do we have in Spain any shopping days named after colours?

5. When do people in Spain queue for hours?

6. Why do people in Spain camp out overnight?

7. For what reason would you queue for hours or camp out overnight?

Animals special adaptation

How can animals live
in such different places in the world?

Animals live everywhere on Earth. Some places on Earth are very hot and some are very cold. Some places on Earth have a lot of water and plants, and other places have very little water and few plants. Animals can live in many different places in the world because they have special adaptations to the area they live in. Each adaptation has been produced by evolution. This means that the adaptations have developed over many generations.

Look at this web: ANIMALS ADAPTATION. Read about the adaptations of all the animals on the left column, chose one, and make a summary about how can it survive in its environment.

Do you know any other animal adaptation that is not in this web?

REGISTROS LINGÜÍSTICOS

Hemos estudiado en clase, los diferentes niveles de lengua: culto o formal, coloquial y vulgar; incluso, habéis dramatizado delante de vuestros compañeros situaciones adaptadas a cada situación comunicativa. Para que no se os olvide, visionad la secuencia de la serie Aída y contesta a las siguientes cuestiones:

1. Determina el registro lingüístico que están utilizando los actores en su diálogo.
2. Señala, al menos, cuatro ejemplos de dicho registro que observes en él.
   

Les habitudes de Jean.

Salut! Voici un exercice pour pratiquer le français. J'espère que vous le ferez sans problèmes.
Vous pouvez le corriger après l'avoir fait.

Cliquez ici pour se diriger à l'exercice.

La deuxième partie, il faut parler d'une journée habituelle. Vous devez le faire ici (minimum: utilisez dix verbes au présent).

Time Travelling to Middle Age

Hi there boys and girls!

Have you seen the film "Back to the Future"? It's about a young boy like anyone of you, Marty, but with a special friend: a crazy scientist, Doc, who has just invented a Time Machine... and he put it in a Delorean! For the testing travel, the car-time machine must reach 88 miles per hour (about 120 km. per hour). Doc sent his faithful dog Einstein into the past... and it returned to the present without problem.

Now, imagine you are Marty and you can travel to the Middle Age. Your Social Science teacher wants you to do a special activity about tournaments in the middle ages. You must look for adequate clothes so anyone in the past feel anything strange about you... What will you wear?
Besides, you have to describe how the knights fought,

And how many types of tournaments there were

What do you think? It was a funny hobby? or it was dangerous and useless?

If you were a medieval knight, would you partipate in a tournament?

You can see a full armoured knight here

You have a lot of information about tournaments here

You must harry, you only have a few hours until the Delorean loses its energy to return to the future!

LA DESCRIPCIÓN

Desde el curso pasado, venimos trabajando en clase las tipologías textuales. Ahora, repasaremos la descripción. Normalmente, no hay problema en reconocerla; la dificultad se plantea cuando tenemos que realizar una descripción, ya que el escaso vocabulario que manejamos, en este sentido, nos impide un correcto y completo diseño de la misma. Por ello, te proponemos:

1. Completar la actividad que propone el siguiente enlace para enriquecer tu vocabulario.
2. Lee la información de esta página y añade dos expresiones más a cada columna.
3. Por último, realiza una descripción de tu persona con las nuevas expresiones que has adquirido.
   

Geometric approach for arithmetic problems

Hi everyone!

As my first contribution, I hope this one will be curious enough for you.

Do you remember about one of my inquiries in class regarding the easiest thing that anyone can do in Maths?

It was, of course, TO COUNT. Therefore, if you could reduce in some way another kind of problem to a counting-problem, it would be easier. The purpose of this entry is to put an example about this way of reasoning:

"What is the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 500?"

Whenever I mentioned this arithmetic problem in class, it seemed to take too long due to the quantity of sums it required. So let's have a look at another way to figure out the result of the sum:

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + ... (here go all natural numbers between) ... + 497 + 498 + 499 + 500.

If you were counting some things (red dots, for example) that have to do with that situation, they could be displayed as groups by rows, with each group standing for each one of these numbers, and all groups aligned at their beginning, like this:

                                                 •       (1)
                                                 •   •       (2)
                                                 •   •   •       (3)
                                                 •   •   •   •       (4)
                                                 •   •   •   •   •       (5)
                                                                               (etc.)

It is very easy to realize that all groups form a right triangle -with same height as length in dots, so it is isosceles too-, no matter how many numbers you want to consider, in our case 500. And that is very near to be half square with 500 dots on each side.

Now, imagine every dot inside a square box, and add more boxes on each row to complete a big square. It is obvious that we have  500 · 500  boxes, the only thing left to decide is how many of them have a red dot. It will help if we colour diagonal boxes in blue, and other boxes with dots in yellow, like in the picture below.

Boxes in both colours match to those with a dot. Notice that blue boxes must be exactly 500.

And what about yellow ones?.  Notice that there are same number of yellow boxes as no-color boxes, so they are

(500 · 500 - 500) : 2 = 124 750 .

Hence, the red dots are 125 250.



By the way... ...Could you apply this to other examples?

Hägar says "Hello, kids!"

Hello, my dear students. Just a couple of words to give you my warm welcome to your second year in the bilingual section of the school. I hope you had a good summer. My summer was great! I did nothing!!!!
Now it's time to start travelling again and I need to brush up on my English. I need it if I want to make contact with the people in other villages.
What do you think? Why do you need English? There are lots of possible answers.

ENGLISH IS ALL AROUND!

An Anglicism is a word borrowed from English into another language. In Spain, the adoption of English words is extremely common in the spheres of business and information technology:

                                   marketing      manager    software      blog     email

But we can find English words everywhere although sometimes we have a word or expression in Spanish with the same meaning (backstage-entre bastidores). Just look carefully around you and you'll read or hear English words everyday:

                       bacon     camping     hobby     airbag     aftershave  top model  
  

Look for ten examples of anglicisms and tell us where you read or heard them. Do we have a Spanish equivalent for any of them? It's going to be easier than you think, there are lots of them because ENGLISH IS ALL AROUND!

School Trip to Gibraltar

Rafa Díaz has made this wonderful video with your pictures. Enjoy it!

Summer Vacation

I have no words to describe this picture.

Click on the image to get a better resolution.
From Spiked Math

Big Challenge 2011

CONGRATULATIONS!
1º ESO B has won the competition this year. You are the winners!
Special congratulations to Juan Antonio, the first one in the group, for his remarkable performance.
Would you like to compete again next year?

Hägar says goodbye

Hello friends! I have heard that you are going to Gibraltar very soon. Well, it's a good land for looting. I hope you have a good time and can practise that barbarian language, English. When you are back, tell me all about it, what you did, what you saw, everything. I will read your comments on my way to stranger lands. Yes, I am travelling too. But I'll be back by next September. I wish you all a wonderful summer. Don't forget about me and tell me what you are going to do.

Cheerio!

BON VOGAGE !

Bientôt vous partez à Gibraltar...
Vous avez déjà préparé votre valise?



Cliquez sur l'image pour regarder la vidéo, écouter la chanson et complétez les paroles.




Et toi, qu'est-ce que tu vas mettre dans ta valise?



Amusez -vous bien et chantez !

Bon voyage!

A day in Roman Corduba

Last Monday we spent the day in Córdoba. First some guides from the City Town Hall showed us around some of the most important remains of the time when Córdoba was a Roman colony. Then we headed to the Mosque where we had an exciting gymkhana and finally we interviewed some tourists in English! And the best thing was that we met our penfriends from Lucena. It was a great day, wasn't it?

Gibraltar, here we go...!

Our trip to Gibraltar is just around the corner! How much do you know about this British Colony? You should discover some interesting facts before visiting Gibraltar. So click here and find the answer to these questions.

1. Where is Gibraltar located?       

2. How many people live there?

3. Which is the official language? 

4. And the currency?

5. Can we pay with euros in Gibraltar?   
6. Gibraltar was once Spanish, but now it's a British Colony. When did Spain cede Gibraltar to
    Great Britain?       
7. The frontier was closed by Spanish Government in 1969. When was it reopened?
8. When do they celebrate the Gibraltar National Day?

Can you prepare one more question about Gibraltar for your classmates? You can use the information in the link and ask each other during our next tutorial session.
                         

JEROGLÍFICOS

Los jeroglíficos son un sistema de escritura inventado por los antiguos egipciospara comunicarse. Fueron utilizados desde la época predinástica hasta el sglo IV. Se trataba de un sistema al mismo tiempo figurativa, simbólica y fonética.

La lectura y la escritura de estos jeroglíficos era sumamente complicada hasta tal punto que no todos los egipcios eran capaces de llevarlas a cabo. Posteriormente, para la descodificación de los mismos fue decisivo el hallazgo que se produjo en 1799.

Contesta a las siguientes cuestiones:

1. ¿Cuál fue el hallazgo del que se habla líneas arriba? ¿or parte de quién se produjo?




2. Elige la imagen de un jeroglífico egipcio y compártela con nosotros.




3. Escribe ahora tu nombre en jeroglífico; para ello, visita la siguiente web.

ANCIENT EGYPT

Watch this documentary and answer the following questions:

1. Where was Ancient Egypt located?

2. How long did the Upper Nile Valley Civilization last?

3. Why was Geography so important in Ancient Egypt civilization?

4. What were its natural boundaries?

5. What atmospheric phenomenon happened every year in the River Nile and why was it so important?

6. What was the main economic activity in Ancient Egypt?

7. What did their divinities represent?