As part of the project, the Irish and the Spanish high-schools were asked to prepare a presentation to talk about climate change, highlighting the work they have done during all the activities proposed and showing the ways we can change our world into a greener one. The presentations were done in their mother tongue.
In other to improve our students' English skills, I took advantage of the Irish presentation to create a listening activity in which they had to listen to their Irish partners presenting their topic and, then, vote on the eTwinning page for the one they thought was the best speaker, paying attention to the body language too.
Another activity was a reading activity to develop their reading skills. Therefore, the students read the Irish PREZI, answered some true and false sentences justifying them and found some synonyms in the text.
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| by Lorena Nieto Almaza |
Finally, in order to improve their writing skill, students were asked to think and give their own opinion since they were explained how to write an opinion essay in one of the units from their student's book. Based on the model given, they wrote an essay expressing their opinion on the following: Do you think Spanish people are doing our best to prevent climate change? Why/Why not?
Here are some examples:
Nowadays, climate change is one of the biggest environmental threats that is damaging our world a little more every year, resulting in the destruction of our environment and our health. But are we doing our best to prevent this menace? As I see it, not all people are aware of the seriousness of the situation.
First of all, it has been proved that a big percent of the population has taken measures of this problem. Besides, thanks to many projects that have been conducted by enterprising people who are looking to raise awareness from kids to teenagers within several education centers about the importance of climate change. One example is the “eTwinning project” in which we are involved; this plan has helped us to spread to countries, taking carefulness of the environmental change.
In addition, there still being serious problems. As a result, there are rises in the earth’s surface temperature, widespread melting of the ice poles as well as the rising of the sea levels. This is because the rest of the population still badly ill-treating the planet for simple reasons such as: abusing the use of transports, deforestation, not recycling, among other things.
To sum up, it seems to me that taking into account the previous considerations, unless people take serious measures, catastrophic changes in our health like dangerous illnesses and into the environment will take place.
Lorena Nieto Almaza
Currently, we watch a lot of news talking about pollution, the importance of recycling, the Earth changes… but we think this problem won’t affect us. In fact, every year the level of pollution goes up. Are we doing our best to prevent climate change? In my opinion, we aren’t taking the necessary part to prevent it and in the near future we will have more problems.
Recent research has shown that climate change is an actual problem that is bringing more disasters to Earth. Because of this, we have to be united and try to prevent it. It’s very difficult or impossible to solve the problem completely but if everyone does a little we are going to change the world!
There's no doubt that everybody hates doing changes or starts doing new things but personally I’m sure we don’t want to destroy our first house. So recycling is a good option, it’s the easiest one and we advance a lot. But also there are cooperatives and people that are highly interested in doing a change. As a result, we are going to be healthier and happier. Is the COVID-19 a message from the Earth? I think so, finally, the Earth is breathing.
In conclusion, I believe that the Spanish people aren’t doing the best and I think that everybody has to be included. We can do more! We’re still on time but hurry up, time flies!
Lucía Hurtado Cobos
Climate change affects us all and it has been caused by the emission of gases, which are harmful to the atmosphere, and our poor contribution to recycle and maintain the Earth clean. However, during the last decade, some global organizations have done some campaigns to make us realize the bad we are doing. Is Spain one of the countries where people are doing their best to prevent climate change? In my opinion, we are working hard, but not as much as we could.
Two years ago, “Germanwatch” and “Climate Action Network” published an entry on a web page called the Climate Change Performance Index. There, you could see how every country was dealing with climate change and how they were improving. Because of this, all the countries started to be more involved in the cause.
As a result, the web page included a podium of the more hardworking countries the next year. The top three were Sweden, Morocco, and Lithuania. Out of fifty-seven countries, we occupied the number thirty-four. Nevertheless, we are still going up. We could be doing way better but it is really hard to change the mindset of the people living in a country that quickly. However, the Spanish President Pedro Sánchez has talked about legislating movements and laws pro organizations and movements to prevent climate change.
In conclusion, I think we are doing good, but we can improve a lot more and become a country that others would look up to. If everyone started doing the method of the three R’s regularly and make it part of their routines, we’d accomplish our goal sooner than we thought.
Sofía Castaño Ruiz
