IB Student Leads Spanish Grammar Workshops

As part of the focus on academic enrichment for pupils of all linguistic backgrounds, Year 13 International Baccalaureate (IB) student Natan Marczak, has recently started running intensive grammar workshops for Year 11 pupils of Spanish.

This mentoring role has provided him with plenty of insights into the planning, preparation, teaching, marking and motivating that feeds into successful language teaching.

"I was positively surprised by our Year 11 pupils", Natan said. "I decided to start with basic grammar points such as regular and irregular verb conjugations, adjectival endings and high frequency vocabulary in Spanish. Pupils took to the activities I had planned straight away and wanted to learn more and more."

"Seeing which tasks are particularly challenging in Spanish will prompt me to devise further resources for them. Pupils really pushed themselves and were reluctant to stop work at the end of the session. Impressive! They deserve a lot of credit for their effort."

Natan, who hopes to follow his IB studies at Ellesmere College with undergraduate studies at a US-American university, hails from a multi-lingual background himself which includes Polish as a native language and English, French, Spanish and German which he studies at Ellesmere College. Melody Reynolds, the College's Gifted & Talented Coordinator and also a full-time Teacher of Spanish and French, said: "As a vibrant, progressive department, we are always looking to maximise language-learning opportunities for our pupils. Peer-to-peer support is always popular and Natan's grammar workshop is an ideal example of how this can work in practice. Further language booster sessions and extension activities are planned for language learners of all ages and abilities and we look forward to sharing details with pupils, tutors and parents."

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25th October 2018  Back to News