Written by Gerhard Moerdyk – teacher at St Peters College, Auckland
The Salamanca University Biblioteca (Library) Back row L to R: Anna Kempkers, Christine Feuillade, Lois Parker Hanks, Leo Mendes, Willy Rodrigues E Silva, Gerhard Moerdyk, Kara Morrison, Finn Perring, José Miguel Sánchez Llorente (CEO CIUSAL) Front row: Anita Vennell, Daisy Huang, Wakana Matheson
There's a little app on the Internet that shows where you would get to if you drilled through the world to the other side. Salamanca is a few hours’ drive from that point. Upon arrival in Madrid, we were off to an inauspicious start when we could not locate the ‘man in blue shirt’ who was meant to pick us up.
Before you knew it we were in our classes. Everyone else managed to make the ‘superior’ level of class and I to my amazement made the ‘advanced’ level class. Any delusions of grandeur were quashed when I realised I was the only person older than 30 in the room surrounded by teenagers from Miami and Texas. In my defence most of them had grandparents from Cuba. The courses and lecturers were diverse and as a teacher it was a pleasure to experience being on the other end and noting different styles of pedagogy. The afternoons and evenings were filled with a variety of different classes such as cooking, dancing and tours of different sites in the city. The weekend was jam packed with a tour of Toledo on Saturday and Avila and El Escorial on the Sunday. While all these towns looked somewhat alike at face value, they all had a very distinctive flavour of their own upon deeper exploration.
Before we knew it there was talk of final examinations and…a tour of the city. On the last day. While the tour timing seemed a tad arbitrary it had some real nuggets of interest. For example, did you know that the devil came to Salamanca and impersonated a university lecturer, teaching seven students in a little grotto? So, the final tour really encapsulated the city of Salamanca for me: steeped in history, mystery, and bizarre anecdotes that only hundreds of years can create.
On behalf of Ana, Anita, Christine, Daisy, Finn, Leo, Lois, Wakana and Willy I’d like to thank Kara, Clara and the team behind the scenes at Tui Tuia for allowing us all this incredible opportunity!
End of course – it’s a wrap. Sitting on the steps of our residence hall. Back row: Leo Mendes, Gerhard Moerdyk , Daisy Huang, Willy Rodrigues E Silva, Kara Morrison Front row: Lois Parker Hanks, Anita Vennell, Wakana Matheson, Anna Kempkers, Christine Feuillade, Finn Perring
Quiz de Español
By Wakana Matheson and Jack Chapman, Takapuna Grammar School
In Term 4 last year, we were in our language department office talking with our colleagues about how the other language subjects have an annual quiz night and we thought it would be nice to have one for Spanish, so we decided to organise one ourselves.
On the 10th of May we hosted 15 teams from eight schools from across Auckland for the inaugural Spanish Quiz. The students had eight rounds of questions on topics such as geography, music, food, famous people and sports. We tried to create an immersion environment and all the instructions, questions and answers were in Spanish. Examples of some questions were: ¿Verdadero o falso? El nopal es un relleno popular de los tacos; ¿Cuál fue la nación hispanohablante atea y comunista que no celebró la Navidad entre 1969 y 1997?; ¿En qué imperio se jugaba el ōllamalitzli?.
We wanted to have students collaborating and working together and made an effort to get away from digital quiz tools which are less work to prepare but also don’t let students interact as much. Students had 5 minutes to answer 8 questions in each round and there was a competitive and fun atmosphere, especially when the answers were revealed to students between each round and gasps, sighs or shouts filled the room when they found out how well they had gone in that round.
Students enjoyed getting to know each other between rounds with a pizza dinner and had an opportunity to try Latin American snacks like de la Rosa Mazapán* and tamarindo candy*.
A huge thank you to all participants and wonderful teachers who helped make this event a success and thank you to Clara Gómez Jimeno who came up from Wellington for the event. Congratulations to the winning teams from ACG Strathallan and Takapuna Grammar School. We look forward to hosting the quiz again next year and hope that even more students can participate in this fun event!
Notas*: - El Mazapán de la Rosa es de origen mexicano y su ingrediente principal es diferente del mazapán español. En estos enlaces se puede leer sobre cómo llegó éste a México o sobre el Día Mundial del Mazapán:
por Courtney King y Lauren Smith Año 12 Spanish John Paul College, Rotorua
Last May 19 John Paul College celebrated Pink Shirt Day. Pink Shirt Day began in Canada in 2007 when two students took a stand against homophobic bullying after a new year 10 student was harassed and threatened for wearing pink. We've been celebrating Pink Shirt Day in Aotearoa since 2009 and the campaign grows stronger and larger every year. We decided to make a chalk mural to raise awareness about the issue of bullying and to encourage people to stand up to bullying, also relating to the theme of being an upstander instead of a bystander. In 2023 we believe that it is important to stand up for those who might experience bullying which is what inspired us to make a picture.
While creating this piece we were aware that the majority of bullying occurs at school, so we decided it would be a good idea to create a picture that would be seen by many people. As senior students at John Paul College who take Spanish, we thought that this was most effective way to get the message across of being an ‘upstander’ rather than a bystander to bullying. Pink Shirt day is not only celebrated in Aotearoa but also internationally, including Spain, which is why we wrote this very important message in Español:
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2023 - Spanish - Term 3 Newsletter Articles
Salamanca Immersion Programme Julio 2023
Written by Gerhard Moerdyk – teacher at St Peters College, Auckland
The Salamanca University Biblioteca (Library) Back row L to R: Anna Kempkers, Christine Feuillade, Lois Parker Hanks, Leo Mendes, Willy Rodrigues E Silva, Gerhard Moerdyk, Kara Morrison, Finn Perring, José Miguel Sánchez Llorente (CEO CIUSAL) Front row: Anita Vennell, Daisy Huang, Wakana Matheson
There's a little app on the Internet that shows where you would get to if you drilled through the world to the other side. Salamanca is a few hours’ drive from that point. Upon arrival in Madrid, we were off to an inauspicious start when we could not locate the ‘man in blue shirt’ who was meant to pick us up.
Before you knew it we were in our classes. Everyone else managed to make the ‘superior’ level of class and I to my amazement made the ‘advanced’ level class. Any delusions of grandeur were quashed when I realised I was the only person older than 30 in the room surrounded by teenagers from Miami and Texas. In my defence most of them had grandparents from Cuba. The courses and lecturers were diverse and as a teacher it was a pleasure to experience being on the other end and noting different styles of pedagogy. The afternoons and evenings were filled with a variety of different classes such as cooking, dancing and tours of different sites in the city. The weekend was jam packed with a tour of Toledo on Saturday and Avila and El Escorial on the Sunday. While all these towns looked somewhat alike at face value, they all had a very distinctive flavour of their own upon deeper exploration.
Before we knew it there was talk of final examinations and…a tour of the city. On the last day. While the tour timing seemed a tad arbitrary it had some real nuggets of interest. For example, did you know that the devil came to Salamanca and impersonated a university lecturer, teaching seven students in a little grotto? So, the final tour really encapsulated the city of Salamanca for me: steeped in history, mystery, and bizarre anecdotes that only hundreds of years can create.
On behalf of Ana, Anita, Christine, Daisy, Finn, Leo, Lois, Wakana and Willy I’d like to thank Kara, Clara and the team behind the scenes at Tui Tuia for allowing us all this incredible opportunity!
End of course – it’s a wrap. Sitting on the steps of our residence hall. Back row: Leo Mendes, Gerhard Moerdyk , Daisy Huang, Willy Rodrigues E Silva, Kara Morrison Front row: Lois Parker Hanks, Anita Vennell, Wakana Matheson, Anna Kempkers, Christine Feuillade, Finn Perring
Quiz de Español
By Wakana Matheson and Jack Chapman, Takapuna Grammar School
In Term 4 last year, we were in our language department office talking with our colleagues about how the other language subjects have an annual quiz night and we thought it would be nice to have one for Spanish, so we decided to organise one ourselves.
On the 10th of May we hosted 15 teams from eight schools from across Auckland for the inaugural Spanish Quiz. The students had eight rounds of questions on topics such as geography, music, food, famous people and sports. We tried to create an immersion environment and all the instructions, questions and answers were in Spanish. Examples of some questions were: ¿Verdadero o falso? El nopal es un relleno popular de los tacos; ¿Cuál fue la nación hispanohablante atea y comunista que no celebró la Navidad entre 1969 y 1997?; ¿En qué imperio se jugaba el ōllamalitzli?.
We wanted to have students collaborating and working together and made an effort to get away from digital quiz tools which are less work to prepare but also don’t let students interact as much. Students had 5 minutes to answer 8 questions in each round and there was a competitive and fun atmosphere, especially when the answers were revealed to students between each round and gasps, sighs or shouts filled the room when they found out how well they had gone in that round.
Students enjoyed getting to know each other between rounds with a pizza dinner and had an opportunity to try Latin American snacks like de la Rosa Mazapán* and tamarindo candy*.
A huge thank you to all participants and wonderful teachers who helped make this event a success and thank you to Clara Gómez Jimeno who came up from Wellington for the event. Congratulations to the winning teams from ACG Strathallan and Takapuna Grammar School. We look forward to hosting the quiz again next year and hope that even more students can participate in this fun event!
Notas*: - El Mazapán de la Rosa es de origen mexicano y su ingrediente principal es diferente del mazapán español. En estos enlaces se puede leer sobre cómo llegó éste a México o sobre el Día Mundial del Mazapán:
por Courtney King y Lauren Smith Año 12 Spanish John Paul College, Rotorua
Last May 19 John Paul College celebrated Pink Shirt Day. Pink Shirt Day began in Canada in 2007 when two students took a stand against homophobic bullying after a new year 10 student was harassed and threatened for wearing pink. We've been celebrating Pink Shirt Day in Aotearoa since 2009 and the campaign grows stronger and larger every year. We decided to make a chalk mural to raise awareness about the issue of bullying and to encourage people to stand up to bullying, also relating to the theme of being an upstander instead of a bystander. In 2023 we believe that it is important to stand up for those who might experience bullying which is what inspired us to make a picture.
While creating this piece we were aware that the majority of bullying occurs at school, so we decided it would be a good idea to create a picture that would be seen by many people. As senior students at John Paul College who take Spanish, we thought that this was most effective way to get the message across of being an ‘upstander’ rather than a bystander to bullying. Pink Shirt day is not only celebrated in Aotearoa but also internationally, including Spain, which is why we wrote this very important message in Español:
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