COLORING INSTRUMENTS

As we approach Music Week, which we will celebrate from November 11 to 18 with various activities, all the students are coloring some pictures of musical instruments, from the 3 year olds through 6^th grade. Look at how well it went for us in the photos and how pretty all the drawings turned out and the poster we put up in the entrance!

During Music Week, we honor St. Cecilia, who is the patron of Music and whose day is celebrated on November 22^nd. But since some of our teachers will be meeting with fellow Comenius partners in Turkey on that day, we have moved it up a few days.

During these days, we will be visited by a luthier, Don Antonio Belmonte Diaz, who builds musical instruments from pumpkins planted in his own garden. These are mainly string instruments (guitars, lutes, laudino, mandolin ...), although he also has some percussion instruments, such as claves or maracas. He will do us the honor of visiting the school on November 14 to show us his work.

During Music Week we will also build our own musical instruments, but with recycled materials. You'll see how fun they turn out!
Other things that we will do will be to participate in various games in English about musical instruments: domino, memory, Parcheesi ...How fun!

But above all, we are learning a lot about experiencing music and having lots of fun.

PRESENTATION TO STUDENTS OF PORTFOLIO MATERIALS

On October 10, 2011, Reme, the music teacher, and María José, group tutor, presented to students in 5^th and 6^th grade the materials we will use to show what we are learning during the 2011/2012 school year in different subjects in regards to the European Musical Portfolio, but especially in music, of course.
These materials are: Passport, Musical Dossier, and Musical Biography. They form part of the Comenius Project, European Musical Portfolio,

— Passport, which is the size of a real passport, serves to record the skills, certificates and experiences of the students in different aspects of music.

— Musical Biography. In this document, the student self-evaluates himself with different color musical notes (green = good, blue = regular or red = bad) to in different areas of learning about music, such as:

If I know people who know and enjoy music; if I know how to translate songs; if I sing; if I watch videos or movies; if I have been to concerts and auditions; if I listen to songs; what instruments I play at school; if I take classes outside of school, etc.

— The Musical Dossier: It is a registration document, where the student notes important things with their dates which he or she has decided to save: concert tickets, other tickets ... Here they also compare composers, musical styles, instruments and music-related sites.

These documents are in English (although some sections are subtitled in Spanish), because this is the language with which we use to communicate with our Comenius partners (Italy, Poland, Romania, Wales and Turkey). So we are all learning lots of this language as well.

And at school, the teachers as well as the students are very excited about this project. We are going to enjoy it, and we are going to know a lot of information about countries with whom we work and about our own.

Greetings to all!