C.E.I.P. Antonio Machado
(Collado Villalba, Madrid)
The school is located in the western mountains of Madrid, specifically in the town of Collado Villalba, 39 kilometers northwest of Madrid and 917 meters of altitude. The town is situated on a large hill in the Sierra de Guadarrama, a large valley around the Guadarrama river.
The town of Collado Villalba has a population of, 62 684 inhabitants in 2013 with a population density of 2365.43 inhabitants per square kilometer.
C.E.I.P. Antonio Machado is located in a neighborhood characterized by immigration, initially from different parts of Spain, and currently from Africa, South America, Asia and Central Europe. All students of the center are divided into 17 groups. Five of them belong to Infant Education and the remaining twelve belong to Primary Education.
According to facilities we have to say that there are two buildings with classes, one for Infants and another one for Primary. In this last case classrooms are distributed in two floors. Next to Primary building there is a big sport hall used to develop different activities and sports organized by the town authorities.
Related to the scope of work we need to emphasize that we teach different areas such as the most important ones: Spanish Language and Mathematics, and we also teach English, Science, Geography, Physical Education, Arts, Religion and the subject of "Technology and digital resources". This last subject tries to implement the use of tablets in the classroom, robotics and programming. Apart from that we reinforce other subjects learning through the use of these digital resources.
Most of our students are already bilingual speakers since they speak both their family mother tongue and Spanish. For that reason our experience tells us the acquisition of a third language is easier for them. We would like our students can practice English language with people from other countries to make their learning more real in a motivating way. So they are conscious that English is a language used as a bridge between cultures and it is a language spoken by most of people around the world.
From teachers’ point of view, this is a great opportunity to share what we are doing in our school and enhance the motivation and quality of our work.
One of the most important project in the school is the ICT. We are being trained about new programs and devices: Arduino, 3D printed, scratch, scratch junior, digital pad, … which are being introduced gradually in our classrooms. We would like to show other colleagues what we are doing to improve the use of these new technologies with new point of views and learn from them also.Our center has an ample supply of digital resources and a specific English classroom, a computer room, several classrooms with projectors and screens for using with iPads which are present in the classes of all levels.