NUACHTÁN MIDDLE SCHOOL | January 2021
The year 2021 will be full of opportunities, where we start the second semester of the school year 20 – 21.
After a few weeks of school break we are ready to continue working with enthusiasm all of us who form the Middle School section. During the last weeks our teachers were in training with the objective of continuing to provide new learning experiences.
ACADEMIC ASPECTS
EBSCO
Maria del Pilar Mones Urtuzuástegui | Jorge Victoria García
Nowadays, the world of virtual communication is playing an important role in the situation of pandemic and confinement that we are experiencing. In particular, the field of education has been totally reconfigured to the distance modality, integrating various technological means.
In the month of February of this year, Celtic International School, with the purpose of expanding the possibilities of information management, and to support our International Baccalaureate Programme, analyzed a range of learning resources. The criterion was to choose a tool to potentiate knowledge and documentary research through a virtual library; therefore, after an exhaustive search, the decision was made that the right mean for our needs was EBSCO Information Services. EBSCO is a world-renowned platform, it was founded in 1944 by Elton Bryson Stephens and currently high-level educational institutions and various educational levels are linked to this platform, because it is composed of different resources such as complete book bases, magazines, encyclopedias, newspapers, dictionaries, national newspapers, scientific and specialized articles, which provide support to more than 50,000 libraries in the world.
Currently, both students and teachers of the Celta Internacional Querétaro School have begun to become familiar with this platform, working through EBSCO-explora for students and EBSCO-host for academics; which has transformed the way of accessing a world of information, as well as creating new forms of learning and inquiry, in addition to expanding culture through these virtual media.
MIDDLE YEARS PROGRAMME (MYP)
Alicia Silva
Perhaps you know little about me and my role in the Programme, but I would like to tell you that in addition to coordinating the MYP, one of my prides within the functions that I perform, is to be part of the Personal Project as a Class Teacher and Project Coordinator. I mention this because in the following lines, although they intend for you to find out a little about what this Project is about, serve to extend my recognition to students and teachers who participate in this important event from my perspective of Personal Project Coordinator. Thanking the work and heart that the supervising teachers put into the Project and the effort of our students.
The Middle Years Programme (MYP) has a very important event that is the closing of our programme, Personal Project; it is the moment in which our students show their best attributes and the skills that they have been improving and acquiring during their previous four years. They work throughout the school year in said Project, facing challenges, disappointments, important decisions and a whole self-management in which self-knowledge of the skills and their areas of opportunity are vital to complete this Project that can be achieved, being a challenge, more than with the Programme, it is with themselves. It is one more step in their academic life that prepares them for the future, in the Reflective Project of the Career-Related Programme (CP) and their university life, even providing evidence to their academic curriculum.
This is especially because, upon successful completion of the Programme, they may receive a diploma certifying that they have completed the Middle Years Programme and their Personal Project. These certificates are issued directly by the International Baccalaureate. It is a certificate that more and more universities around the world consider at the time of their application to enter the university world, especially because it supports the skills that our students have.
On January 27th we will carry out the peak moment of the Personal Project with the delivery of the MYP certificates to our 2020 generation who is now in 11th grade. It is a generation that for the first time in history had to close its Project from virtuality, with the challenges that this implies. So, I want to extend my congratulations and appreciation to my dear students and supervisors who carried out a great job during the closing months of the Project, which were also the first months of the quarantine due to the pandemic that the world is going through in these moments.
It is very important that you know that regardless of the number that is registered on your certificates, what you have learned during that school year when developing your Personal Project must always accompany you and the value of learning is invaluable.
Congratulations Generation 2020 for this great step!
PSYCHOPEDAGOGY
New Year’s resolutions, are they necessary?
Paola Llop
Hello Celtic community, I hope that this Year 2021 is full of health, love and new challenges.
Like every New Year, many people make their list of resolutions, but to be honest, is it important to write resolutions? Has it happened to you that we started out motivated and after a month we forgot the proposed challenges?
If they ask me, do you recommend making a list of purposes? My answer is YES. Human beings need to set a goal and trace a path towards it, having purposes gives direction and meaning to our day to day. Even having goals builds self-esteem, there are few things that generate so much anxiety in human beings like feeling that we are adrift, that our life does not have a direction.
Now, why is it so difficult to fulfill these purposes? It is not only a matter of will, but of purpose structure. I am going to share some suggestions that can help you fulfill them.
1. Establish few objectives, generally we want to make a list of 12 purposes, focus on few objectives, in this way the chances of them being fulfilled are greater.
2. SMART Objectives, using this tool helps to give structure to our purposes, they must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and temporally.
| Ambiguous objective | SMART objective |
| Exercise | Month 1: Get 10 minutes of exercise 3 days a week. Month 2: Get 30 minutes of exercise 3 days a week. Month 3: Get 40 minutes of exercise 4 days a week. |
3. Detailed plan, what steps you must follow to move towards that goal, small steps will lead to big goals.
4. Own objectives, many times we write common purposes, but that little motivate us, it is important that you choose goals that motivate you.
I hope our resolutions of New Year do not remain in words and in good intentions, we must take it to action!
Bibliography:
Del Cerro J. (2019). “¿Vale la pena hacer propósitos de Año nuevo?” Recuperado el 11 de diciembre de 2020 desde https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/269431
STUDENT LIFE
Carlos Zermeño
‘I don’t want him to lack anything’, ‘I want him to have better opportunities that I had’, ‘I don’t want her to suffer’; are phrases that we have heard from a parent about their children. Without a doubt, parents look for what they consider best for their children. Who would not?
However, there are times when decisions made with the best intentions end up causing deep and long-lasting damage, and the consequences may hardly be visible until years later. Every parent seeks that their children grow up healthy, self-confident, with opportunities and with the ability to make decisions to go through the path of their lives.
For this reason, the task of parents is not to make decisions for their children, but to teach them to decide and guide them along the way. Surely on more than one occasion you have asked yourself how you would like your daughter or son to develop, and the word independent comes out. But … do you really want them to be independent, or rather to be autonomous people?. Because these two common terms that are used for the same thing, they are very different from each other. Independence refers to the fact that one does not depend on another, however, this way of thinking could generate selfish, lonely, isolated people; because the other is not needed.
On the contrary, autonomy endows the person with the ability to do things for themselves, to decide for themselves. So, are we making our youth autonomous or making them independent? We want children to be independent, to go to the bathroom alone, to sleep alone, but we don’t let them get dirty or choose their own clothes; we require adolescents to make thoughtful and informed decisions, but we do not take their feelings or opinions into account, and we do not allow them to take decisions when they were children.
The abilities and capacities of the people are not more than the outcome of behaviors learned and acquired through practice; it is not surprising that young people who have grown up in an overprotected environment have completely nullified their autonomy.
Is it that lack of autonomy that complicates them to end a harmful romantic relationship, the infinite career changes, the endless sabbaticals or apparently living without any meaning? Anthropologist Marta Ausona tells us about the importance of teaching children autonomy and not being independent, since we are interdependent beings; in other words, we depend on each other.
We can encourage our daughters and sons to have confidence in themselves, to form a healthy self-esteem, to develop a self-knowledge of what they like and what they dislike, to learn an ability to decide what they think is best. Here are some strategies to develop decision-making as well as autonomy:
Recurrir al diálogo: entender los puntos de vista y obtener mejores resultados en la comunicación.
- Use dialogue: understand points of view and obtain better results in communication.
- Limit time: set time frames to get used to having to decide and reduce anxiety levels.
- Avoid overprotecting: even if it is the simplest solution since children will only learn through experience.
- Allowing mistakes: the greatest learnings come from mistakes and strengthen tolerance for frustration.
- Show interest: without pressing, accompanying and showing that it is important, and they don’t do it alone.
- Analyze the consequences: in their own way and scope, so that they begin to perceive that every decision entail resignations and consequences.
- Setting an example: it is the best way for children to learn, through congruence and the fulfillment of the word.
Bibliography:
Rebeca Podestá. (2018). ¿Soy Realmente Una Persona Autónoma? 2/12/20, de Rebeca Podestá; psicoterapia cognitivo conductual Sitio web:
Diana Oliver. (2017). Niños con autonomía, no con independencia. 2/12/20, de Marujismo Sitio web:
www.marujismo.com/ninos-con-autonomia-no-con-independencia/+&cd=12&hl=es&ct=clnk&gl=mx
María García, Francisco. (2020). La toma de decisiones en la adolescencia. 04/12/20, de Eres mamá Sitio web:
https://eresmama.com/la-toma-de-decisiones-en-la-adolescencia/
DATES TO REMEMBER
JANUARY 11th | Return to Classes
JANUARY 19th | P2 Grade reports
JANUARY 25th a 29th | ‘Retrieval’ tests
JANUARY 29th | Parent Information Meeting for 6th parents ‘This is Middle School’
EDITORIAL
• Mónica Antuna (Middle School Principal) | monica.antuna@celta.edu.mx
• Ma. Del Pilar Mones (Academic Coordinator) | mariadelpilar@celta.edu.mx
• Alicia Silva (MYP Coordinator) | alicia.silva@celta.edu.mx
• Paola Llop ( Department of Psychopedagogy) | paola.llop@celta.edu.mx
• Carlos Zermeño ( Coordinator of Student Activities) | carlos.zermeno@celta.edu.mx