£5 notes and turtles

In English class, the ten to eleven year olds have been learning about currencies. In advance of my first lesson as the teacher, my tutor directed me to the pages of the textbook that she wanted me to cover in class. As it happened, the textbook included a quiz about British currency so that evening I rummaged through my suitcase and dug out the British notes and coins that I had packed away upon arrival in Spain.

In the previous lesson, the students had read an article that mentioned that US dollars are made from cotton. I started my class by holding up a £5 note and asking the students to guess what it was made out of. I was met with some very sceptical expressions when I disclosed that it was made from neither paper nor cotton. In a bid to elicit the answer from the students, I began to roughly scrunch up my £5 note. Class 5 shouted, “No, Cate! Nooo!” but I continued, despite their pleas. When I straightened out the note and showed that it was none the worse for wear, someone finally twigged. “It’s made of plastic!”

I explained that it was difficult to tear or damage a plastic banknote. I even mimed putting the £5 note in my jacket pocket and throwing it into an imaginary washing machine to demonstrate its durability. This demonstration required some enthusiastic acting from me (whirring noises and a spinning arm) and a lot imagination from the students. Luckily, Class 5 are an imaginative bunch and they quickly caught on. I decided not to go into the disadvantages of the new banknotes as I suspected that eliciting and then explaining that animal fat is also one of the materials added during the production of polymer notes would take up far too much time in a forty minute lesson and would only provoke more scepticism.

To allow the students to take a closer look at British money, I handed out the note and some coins and they began passing them around the class. No more than thirty seconds had elapsed before one of the boys returned my fiver with a zig zag tear through Winston Churchill’s face. In hindsight, I should probably have explained that if you really try to tear a plastic banknote, you will succeed.

Luckily, the rest of my lesson passed without further mishap. We whizzed through a listening exercise and I went through the meaning and form of ‘quid’ in preparation for the quiz at the end of class. We practised saying ‘quid’ in a happy voice, a sad voice, a bored voice, then an angry voice and finally a whisper. This drilling method was a total hit with Class 5 who, I discovered, are keen actors themselves. All the students correctly answered the question, “In informal English, or slang, what do people sometimes call a pound?” during the quiz.

After my first lesson as Class 5’s teacher, it was time to break for lunch, so I wandered down to Valencia’s beautiful Parc de Capçalera. Whilst enjoying my walk in the sunshine, I stumbled across a quiet spot by a large pond that I decided would be the perfect place for sitting in the shade and doing lesson planning and blogging. Over the subsequent week and half, I have returned to this spot a number of times and discovered that it is also a favourite hangout spot for a family of turtles (pictures below). As I finish writing this post, I can hear the turtles splashing around together in the water below.