Into the last week ... where's the time gone?

Not so much lesson planning for the last week as most classes are revising for exams, so it's about helping with sentences for Kahoots! quiz questions and supervising the playing of games. The students love this way of revising! The infant end of the scale involves minimal planning and the observations reminds me of when I took my own children to nursery school. It's just a bit more modern, with digital whiteboards showing Super Simple Songs from the Internet. The Natural Science primary classes are working on projects that flow from one lesson to the next so the classes are mainly monitoring. Although lesson planning is challenging, I'm a little disappointed that I'm not challenged more.
Today I'm planning three lessons for the coming week for 6 Primary, with an aim to encourage as must speaking as possible. Last week I used Emile's story about The Barber of Paris, where the students have to listen to the story, recognise the pictures they've been given, and reconstruct the story with the pictures. That turned out to be a very engaging lesson with less Spanish spoken – the students had to listen too carefully to the story.
For the next lesson I used an idea from the British Council teaching resources about planning to write a story. The planning process would involve speaking and putting ideas on the board. That was a big success even though it ended up with students arguing passionately in Spanish about their preferences for horse-riding or a science fiction adventure. I'm planning to continue with the story ideas this week until everyone has written their own very short story, and somehow tie it in with the course book grammar and unit revision.
I think I wrote in my last blog entry about how impossible it is to stop students chatting in Spanish – they're doing what comes naturally. Smaller classes are a lot easier to manage unless there are one or two particularly disruptive kids, and then it's hugely challenging even for the experienced teachers. As far as lesson planning goes, I've had the best results with activities on paper, away from the iPads, where students were engaged with the language. At Los Naranjos the youngest children are learning English from when they are about two years old now. Other years began English later. Their teacher tells me that she's hoping those children will become more fluent very early on, and therefore more comfortable with English as they move on to higher classes, and maybe even chat in English!
Nice that the weather's been getting warmer. A teacher put a heater in the staff room last week and everyone was pleased! It's all true: Spanish schools are cold!
Lesson planning permitting I'll go to Valencia this afternoon. Looking forward to a bit of sightseeing and meeting up with whoever is around, and Michael who arrived yesterday to observe us all the coming week.