One more year we are about to celebrate the European Day of Languages on Monday 26th. It is a celebration of culture and roots all the European countries share together.
Learning languages is essential to open our mind and to get to know people. In Europe our languages share a common root : The Indoeuropean, but we also borrow and lend words, all the languages are full of borrowings from other languages around.
Try to think aboout a word that is used in other language and yours and you will find it for sure. Ej: Sandwitch, hobby (Spanish) / siesta, cafeteria (English)
This year we will celebrate it in school too with exhibitions of book and the investigations of our students in the hall.
In 1st of ESO we are going to do two tasks:
·Portmanteau words / blendings (acrónimos)
The students make a small card bending the right and left of a small cardboard and put the blending inside in the middle and the two words that form it on both sides. They can write real blendings or one that they invented
The students look for a proverb in Spanish and then llok for the equivalent in a European language. They write the two versions of the proverb on a cardboard
We will exhibit all the ativities in the hall of school
On April 22nd people all over the world celebrate Earth Day.
This event was organised in 1970 for the first time by Senator Gaylor Nelson to try to encourage respect for life on Earth,
and concern over pollution of the soil, air, and water.
There are lots of iniciatives, even Google has a doddle for this day, but I want to highlight two videos that I really like.
The first one is part of a project by Conservation International where famous artists give voice to Nature. The one I include gave me the chills when I first watched it. It is calledNature is Speakingand the voice is Julia Robert's
We've been revising the uses of gerunds and infinitives in class lately and I thought it would be useful to include notes and activities to help you revise.
It is amazing how Covid19 has changed our lives. It's been with us for almost a year and we have adapted to wear masks, clean our hands compulsively, avoid touching other people, working/ teaching online or semi-online with windows and doors open (almost frozen) etc.
Language has changed and adapted too, we have got used to a medical and technical jargon that some moths ago was completely unknown.
I have decided that it would be interesting to summarize some of the most commmon words and expressions that are here to stay.
I must thank Oxford and Cambridge blogs for their useful posts on it.
Some of the words you see in the photo above are quite common nowadays, but I thought it could be great to know some others that are also present in the news we listen to or read everyday.
Referring to people we can talk about.....
(a)symptomatic (adjective): showing symptoms or not of a particular disease - She had no idea
her husband had coronavirus because he was asymptomatic.
Carrier(noun)= portador: a person or animal that transmits a disease to others, whether
suffering from it themselves or not - People who are asymptomatic can still
be carriers.
It is important to track those people to avoid virus spreading and get immunity...
Contact tracing(noun)= rastreo: identification and
monitoring of people who may have had contact with an infectious person - By insisting on strict
contact tracing as soon as someone was potentially infected, they managed to
control the spread of the disease.
Droplets (noun)= aerosoles : the spray produced when
people cough or sneeze, and which can spread diseases - Health care personnel wear protective
clothing to guard against the disease carried in droplets
when infected people sneeze or cough.
Herd immunity (noun)= inmunidad de rebaño: an indirect protection from
a disease resulting from a large percentage of the population gaining immunity
(either through vaccination or through recovering from the disease) - This
virus is unlike the seasonal flu because there is currently no vaccine or herd
immunity.
Not to get infected it is important to have the correct protection....
Personal protective
equipment (PPE)
(noun)= EPI: special clothing, headgear, goggles, masks and other garments that
shield people from injury or infection. - Much of the PPE
worn by doctors and nurses has to be worn once only and destroyed after use.
Vaccine(noun)/ˈvæksiːn/: a substance used to protect
humans and animals from a disease- A vaccine for
cholera was invented in 1879.
You could be tested with a PCR test using a swab (hisopo) or with anantibodies / antigen test (test de anticuerpos).
If you are not lucky enough and you are infected you can have some of these symptoms: rash ( erupciones) sore (dolores)
vomiting, headache, fever ( fiebre), fatigue, cough ( tos) chills (escalofríos),
breathless ( problemas respiratorios)
Some governments have taken measures such as curfews (toques de queda), lockdowns (confinamientos) or restrictive timetables, but please try to avoid panicbuying (buying large quantities of
particular products because of fears of shortages) or stockpiling ( store large quanties of stuff)
If you want to know more or practice with this vocabulary, I recommend you to watch the following video
or read the following blog by Oxford with an interesting post by Janet Phillips
