We pride ourselves in providing high quality bespoke tours to Spain for schools throughout the world. We have summarized some of the great points of our school tours in the slides below. We hope you enjoy! Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need anything.
Our educational group partners the bilingual school el centro inglés has an open doors day where you can learn about the school and much more. Go along and find out what happens there.
Our fantastic teacher and chaperone Mario Baéz Torres now his own wonderful business card. Did you know that it is called a “tarjeta de visita” in Spanish? To read more about the rest of our fantastic staff at Spark, please check out new Spark Staff Page.
If you interested in studying Spanish don’t hesitate to drop us a line.
We are currently looking for a Spanish teacher and client attention junior to join our team as soon as possible. The full time position includes teaching Spanish, helping out with client attention tasks in our English academy and running the occasional school tour as a chaperone. Are you ready for a new challing and looking to join a young, dynamic and passionate team?
Read our job description here: ELE teacher and Client Attention junior
Application form: Spark application form
School Trip to Spain: Andalusia and El Puerto de Santa Maria
Norwich School 12th February- 15th February 2016
Norwich School group hug
We were delighted to have Norwich School with us on their first school trip to Spain with us in El Puerto de Santa María this last weekend. All students stayed in our Spark residence during their time with us, and they enjoyed their various excursions and activities, as well as their Spanish classes.
Despite their early start on their first day, they seemed to enjoy their visit to Seville, their tour of El Puerto, witnessing the carnival in Cádiz and a flamenco show with tapas on one of the evenings.
We at Spark had a fantastic time with the group and their two teachers, we were impressed by how well behaved and full of energy they were (they even got up dancing flamenco to “Bailando” by Enrique Iglesias in one of the bodegas. They were also extremely motivated to practice their Spanish, or so it seemed! We hope all the students got a chance to appreciate Spanish culture and history and that they had a fantastic time together.
Inge Hol – Director of Educational Programmes
Bueno! Pues tuvimos una gran experiencia con estos chicos y chicas de Norwich School durante su viaje escolar en españa. Hicimos muchas cosas juntos y sobre todo, ellos practicaron mucho su español que por cierto era muy bueno!
Visitamos ciudades como Sevilla con su catedral y alcázar o Cádiz en plena fiesta de Carnaval. Los estudiantes pudieron ver cómo se vive el Carnaval en la capital. También hubo tiempo para hacer un tour por nuestro Puerto de Santa María, con la visita al Castillo o al mercado.
Y por supuesto, pudimos vivir en directo un gran espectáculo flamenco donde los estudiantes y yo mismo pudimos mostrar nuestras habilidades como bailarines, ¡fue muy divertido!
Norwich school in Cádiz
Ah! y que no se olvide, el grupo pudo probar la gastronomía española con los deliciosos churros con chocolate, ya que comieron churros más de una vez! o cocinando una magnifica paella!
Las clases fueron muy interesantes para nuestros alumnos y para mí también, llenas de debates donde todos pudieron hablar y practicar su español para sus exámenes, a su vez y a modo de presentación hicimos una exposición de diferentes temas de la cultura española con representaciones artísticas como la escena del camarero y los clientes, muy divertida también!
Concluyendo, esperamos que tanto los alumnos como sus profesoras hayan pasado un buen rato con nosotros y que sobre todo hayan practicado y aprendido mucho su español. Un abrazo grande y suerte!
Mario Baez – School Group chaperone and Spanish teacher
To download photos please do so from here. All you need do is right click on an image and then insert the correct password. The download password was given to teacher leading the school trip.
We loved it, the students loved it, thank you so much!! Inge made organising it all so easy and stress-free, Mario won the kids’ hearts, the activities and classes were great, and well organised, and the flamenco performance was the wonderful last touch. THANK YOU!
C. Gillham – Trip Leader Norwich School
Thank you so much for an amazing experience!
C. Bettoni – Norwich School student
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We are proud of how hard we work to do our utmost to provide the best service possible to our Spanish Students be them adults, school groups or children on summer camp. Running a language school is not easy but it is certainly rewarding. Our motto has always been “your learning, our passion” and via our mission and values to work by we strive to do our utmost to provide our students with the personal high quality service we set out to run. Perfection isn’t possible, but trying our best is and latter at Spark I believe we have lived up, something our student reviews back up. Below are two graphs indicating over 200 hundred students overall opinion of the service they received at Spark in 2015 in our Spanish Language School and also the things they stated they most valued about their experience with us.
At SparkSpanish we have a development meeting every 3 months where we work together to improve parts of what we do. This last month we set ourselves the task of coming up with 10 ethics to work by. These ethics or values we wanted to define not only what we believed in but how they could guide us in providing the best service possible to our students. We also wanted them to be harmony with our set company mission. It was a more challenging task then we expected as we wanted to have unanimity and also to have each value well worded in as a precise way as possible. The 10 “values” or “ethics” we came up with are in the presentation below and to make sure we live up to them we wanted to share them with you our client as it is to best provide our service to you that we made them up in the first place 🙂 Tambien están en español aqui.
En español: LOS 10 MANDAMIENTOS DE SPARK
“The Fonz” ha vuelto y ya trabaja en Spark. En Spark no solamente damos clases de español sino también damos sugerencias en la moda. El que manda es nuestro profesor estupendo “Mario Baez” el “Fonzie de Spark” el más guay y chulo de nuestro equipo. Ven a estudiar con nosotros, van a conocer el “fonzie Real”.
Andalusia is generally considered the most beautiful “comunidad” (region) in Spain which is why it receives more tourists than any other area. It is generally the Malaga coastline, the famous “Costa del Sol”, which is the most well known and also the spectacular cities of Sevilla and Granada too. However the real hidden gem of the comunidad in our opinion is the province of Cadiz which whilst well known with Spanish tourism is not yet flooded with international tourism of other areas. Its undeveloped beaches, sparking white sand, sherry heritage and white villages make it a gem to discover with so many things to do. Also the small numbers of international tourists and authentic Spanish culture make it an excellent place to learn Spanish. If you dont trust us, check out the video below and also we have more videos of Cadiz province and El Puerto De Santa Maria. Come and discover a beautiful neck of the woods.
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A great revision game for the language classroom that a friend of mine once showed me on a summer camp is the Spider Game. It’s extremely easy to set up but will allow for lots of revision and fun of either grammar or vocabulary items and will add a Spark to your lessons!
Preparation
Set up in class
How to play
Examples language points:
Conclusion
It’s a very easy game to play and requires very little preparation time, but the fact that the points are hidden (and could be minus points!) adds to the excitement of the students, which makes it a very motivational tool to review the language points.
Inge Hol is the Director of Educational Programmes at Spark Languages in Southern Spain. Originally from the Netherlands and with a degree in Clinical Neuro Psychology, she decided to follow her passion and become an English teacher in Spain in 2007. After teaching for many years, she moved on to teacher training, language programme management and conference speaker until in 2010 she started Spark Languages together with her partner Douglas Haines. Spark organizes Spanish and English courses for children, teens and adults as well as school trips to various areas in Spain.
El Puerto de Santa Maria forms part of sherry triangle with nearby Jerez and SanLucar. Indeed the English word “Sherry” is an anglicization of the Spanish city Jerez which last year was the European Wine Capital. The Ruta del Mosto takes place each year in El Puerto de Santa Maria in November to celebrate the first wine of that year that is ready to drink and usually it is made by smaller bodegas (wineries) which is what this festival focuses on. Not only is it a great way to learn about culture of wine making in the area but usually each mosto is served with some food so it a great way to enjoy tapas. Click on the image below for more details on the event and where you can get Mosto. If you are interested in studying Spanish and learning about making of sherry why not considering a Spanish Course with us, especially our Spanish and Feria might be of interest for those with a love of wine and Flamenco and just generally having a great time 🙂
Mosto: el primer vino fermentado, que se empieza a beber a partir del mes de noviembre, con un grado alcohólico aproximado de 12%. En muchas ocasiones este mosto se realiza de manera artesanal en cortijos y viñas, siendo un atractivo culinario.
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When doing listening activities in class, a main problem I find is that students can get really nervous about it and then perform worse than they would have if they hadn’t been so worried about it. Weaker students especially can be affected by this and see it as a test they are bound to fail, worrying instead of using their skills and ability to grasp the main message.
A great game to counter these problems that is enjoyable and rewarding is Listening Snap, which makes a standard listening much more fun AND prepares the students for the material by identifying key words or chunks of the listening content before answering detailed questions about the recording.
Preparation
1. Find the transcript of the listening material and highlight the main messages or words.
2. Depending on the level and the type of listening activity, select around 8 – 10 words or chunks of language you would like the students to identify.
3. Put the items on a piece of paper along with 1 or 2 “distractors” for each word. E.g. if you are doing a listening on jobs and you want the students to identify the word “journalist”, then put in “journalist”, “TV-presenter” and “author” for example. You should have a list of around 20 – 30 words of which about 30 – 40% are real words from the listening, the rest are distractors.
4. Prepare one copy of the list of words for each pair of students and cut all the items up individually. (Alternatively the students can cut up the words in class if you have a lot of students!).
Set up in class
1. Give the students the topic of the listening activity in class and elicit what the recording might be about.
2. Explain you will be playing “snap” and go through the rules of the game: when they hear a word in the recording that they have on their table, they should grab the paper before their opponent does. (Ripped papers don’t count!). They get 1 point for each correct word they have and a minus point for each word they took that was not in the recording. The aim of the game is to get as many points as possible. Once they touch a paper, they must take it (to avoid them constantly trying to get all the papers).
3. Divide the class into pairs and give each pair a copy of all the words which they spread out on their tables. Allow time for the students to read all the items.
Play the game!
1. Play the recording just once, making sure students are doing the activity appropriately. Expect some excitement, raised voices and other expressions of students being engaged!
2. After the recording ask for feedback as to which words were in the recording and elicit what they remember about each word and what was being said.
3. Award points and minus points, announce the winner per pair and also the overall winner of the activity (the student with more points than anybody else).
The students have now listened for the gist of the content, and have been able to hear from others what they remember from the story related to the main items of the listening. Continuing with the listening follow up to listen for detail (usually answering specific questions in the book about the recording) should now be a little bit easier and less stressful for all of your students.
As you can see, this isn’t just a fun game, it also gives the students more confidence for the second part of the listening and (as long as you choose the words well) should have helped their skills to focus on the most important parts of the listening, instead of trying to understand everything!
Inge Hol is the Director of Educational Programmes at Spark Languages in Southern Spain. Originally from the Netherlands and with a degree in Clinical Neuro Psychology, she decided to follow her passion and become an English teacher in Spain in 2007. After teaching for many years, she moved on to teacher training, language programme management and conference speaker until in 2010 she started Spark Languages together with her partner Douglas Haines. Spark organizes Spanish and English courses for children, teens and adults as well as school trips to various areas in Spain.
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