Staff at Embassy

Fundraising at Embassy London

Lisa Evripidou, from Embassy London, writes:

Students sold St. Valentine's cards and flowers last month, and I can now report that we raised £211.52.  This will be doubled by Embassy to £423.04. This is a fantastic achievement for the charity committee and great for the students who volunteered their time. See photos on our Facebook page.

Secondly, the money raised from the Football Tournament has not yet been counted yet but is over £400, which will be doubled to £800 by Embassy. Another fantastic achievement!

On Friday 18th March it was Wear Jeans Day which meant staff were allowed to wear jeans for the day.

On the same day, we held International Food Night in the canteen for staff and students. 18 countries took part. Students could come and buy food typical of these countries. The students who cooked the food were very excited about sharing their favourite dishes with everyone. All money raised will be going to charity.

That brings our running total to £16,570.19 raised for Building Futures, the dedicated Embassy charity.

 

News from Embassy London

Lisa, the new Activities Leader at Embassy London, has these updates from the school. it certainly sounds like it's been an exciting few weeks.

New staff starting at Embassy

Four new members of staff join the school. Welcome to all of them!

Amanda Mackmurdie: Welfare Officer
 Sheila Clewley: Assistant to the Principal
Ian Claridge: Head of Security
and me, Lisa Evripidou: Activities Leader and Librarian

Celebrity Sightings at Embassy London!
Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides, the new sequel to be released in Summer 2011, is currently being filmed at The University of Greenwich. It's a ten minute walk from Embassy London.

Some very lucky students have seen Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz and Ian McShane. The filming has been going on for over a month and does not seem to be leaving any time soon!

The University of Greenwich is a popular filming location and has hosted feature films such as The Duchess (2007) starring Kiera Knightly, National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007) starring Nicholas Cage, and Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix (2005).

 
Riz Ahmed, a British actor and musician who has starred in The Road to Guantanamo, Shifty and Four Lions was spotted at The Nikey Running Club in Shoreditch, London, where students had the chance to meet with the celebrity.

In 2008, Riz won Best Actor at the Geneva Cinema Tout Ecran and was nominated for Best Actor at the British Independent Film Award for his role in Shifty.

 

 

 

 

Upcoming events on the Social Programme:

Legally Blonde in the West End
London Eye visit
Halloween Party on a boat
Lion King in the West End
Phantom of the Opera in the West End
England vs France football game
Gorillaz (music band) perform live at the 02 arena
Chicago in the West End
Madame Tussauds visit
Wicked in the West End
39 Steps in the West End
Westlife (music band) perform live at the 02 arena
Maroon 5 (music band) perform live at the 02 arena
... and lots of visits to museums, sporting events, night clubs, galleries and exhibitions.

London Homestay of the Year 2009

Homestay is an Embassy accommodation option in which you live in a local household as if the other inhabitants were your family.

Andy Quin, Principal of Embassy London, writes: 

December saw the school invite all its Homestay hosts to the annual Embassy & Bellerbys College London Christmas Party. Lorraine Welham, Accommodation & Student Services Manager, Jennifer William, Homestay Accommodation Officer, and Claudia Corti (Accommodation Assistant) had organised a superb buffet with the help of Donald Sweeney (Head Chef) and his hard-working team. Dozens of our wonderful Homestay providers came to chat to us and each other about this important part of our service.  

The school awarded prizes to the best Homestays, based on consistently high scores in end of course feedback this year. The winners were Lyndia Bowers (whose student Yigit Cirdi wrote in her questionnaire: “When I was ill Lyndia looked after me like my mum”); Michael & Jackie Simpson (Daria Zhgun: “Jackie is a wonderful person and made my stay at her home unforgettable!”); June Magloire (Marlene Lopes: “All the family is kind and understanding. I felt very special there and I am going to miss them a lot”); and Shirley Blake, who was also a winner in 2008 (Viktoriia Barkova: “Shirley is friendly, cheerful, caring, supportive. You feel at home, in a family circle. Delicious and healthy food, clean and comfortable room.”) 

The Homestay providers were full of praise for our students and the support of our accommodation team. One said “the vast majority of your students are very polite and well-behaved, even though they must feel very strange sometimes, especially if they’ve come from far away maybe for the first time and perhaps to stay here for a very long time. And what amazes me is that they are all serious students who are always asking for help with their homework!”

Find out more about our London accommodation options on the main Embassy website.

Ian runs again

Supportive crowds lined the streets of London on an October Sunday morning chanting “Ian, Ian, Ian!!!” The reason for this was that Ian (pictured, wearing a red top) was running a 13.1 miles half marathon and raising money for Embassy’s chosen charity: Building Futures. Any money that he raises is doubled by the company. 

Ian said that afterwards he felt wonderful and had a great day, achieving an impressive time of only 1 hour and 36 minutes. The route was past many of London’s landmarks – Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and Marble Arch.

Ian's wife Jo was there amongst the crowds to lend her support. Needless to say, Ian is as fit as a greyhound and is looking forward to doing it all again next year.
 

HomeStay of the Year

Students at Embassy CES London have voted Doreen Lee as the HomeStay of the Year in 2007. Doreen has been hosting students for 8 or 9 years and one significant thing she has learnt from the experience is tolerance. She likes hosting students from Embassy CES because she gets support when she needs it, and particularly enjoys hosting students from Taiwan and South America.

Below Doreen answers a number of questions about her hosting experiences:

What do you do to make students feel welcome?
I don't have any rules except that students must call when they are going to be late. I tell them to treat my house as their own. I encourage students to have their friends round and to stay because they are far from home.

Why do you host?
Originally I had a friend who was an Accommodation Officer and she asked me if I'd like to host.  Then my husband died and I had time on my hands. 

Have you had any problems?
Just one. I had a nice Chinese rug in the students room and it was a bit large so it kept getting caught in the door. Rather than move the rug one of them cut the end off it!

What sort of things do you do to encourage student to practise their English? 
I ask them to stay when I have friends visit (and not scuttle upstairs to their room), so that they are included in the conversation and get the opportunity to practice their English with someone else besides me.

Things to do in London

Wendy Brown, Student Services Manager at Embassy CES Oxford, writes:

On July 14th we took a group of Oxford Embassy students to London. 

For many of the students it was their first time in the capital, so we devised a tour: visiting the Tower of London; where some of England’s most infamous criminals have been imprisoned and the home of the crown jewels, before going on a cruise down the Thames past St. Paul’s Cathedral, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the Tate Modern to the Houses of Parliament.

A walking tour takes in many of the world renowned sites of central London:  Lunch in St. James’ Park, before trying to spot the Queen at Buckingham Palace or the Prime Minister at 10 Downing St, seeing the changing of the guard at Horse Guard’s Parade and marvelling at the London Eye, the world's tallest observation wheel at 135m high. 

The students are then allowed plenty of free time to explore this diverse and dynamic city or just to go shopping on Oxford Street!

Click to see the pictures bigger. (Left: students in the crowd around the Horseguards; Right: Look at our souvenir hats!)

Embassy CES students and staff - stars of the TEFL world!

The Embassy CES schools in London and Hastings were recently the scene of some professional filming - and our staff and students were the stars!

Renowned publishers Longman Pearson sent cameras into the classrooms to film examples of real-life English lessons. They were keen to show the use of our modern and recently-installed interactive whiteboards, as well as more traditional methods based on course books.

The resulting DVD is to accompany the new edition of 'The Practice of English Language Teaching' by Jeremy Harmer - one of the best-selling books on TEFL methodology. It shows some of the best practices in teaching, discusses common issues in the classroom, and hopes to instruct new teachers.

Each teacher was interviewed about his or her lesson, and the interviews appear on the DVD, along with full-length footage of the classes. Watching the DVD gives a very good impression of what it is like to study at Embassy CES. It is also a fine tribute to our staff that we were selected to stand as an example to teachers entering the TEFL profession.

If you are interested in seeing the results, the DVD is included as an insert with the new edition of 'The Practice of English Language Teaching' . All Embassy CES schools also have a copy available for students and staff to borrow.

Our student in the news

(Click to see image full size) It seems we are starting a trend for photos of students standing next to British Bobbies (see also A Close Encounter with the Queen of England).

The main Sao Paolo newspaper Folhas has published an article about blind Brazilian student Marcos Rodrigues, who studied at Embassy CES London in March and April 2007. He had a fantastic time in London, it seems. We admire his dynamism in visiting a foreign country, and are proud that he chose Embassy CES. See the newspaper article (in Portuguese) on the London news page >>>

A close encounter with the Queen of England

Most of us living in England have never met the Queen, so here at Embassy CES head office we were astonished when our intern, Laura Star, came in and showed us some photos from a recent day out in London. Not only had she seen Queen Elizabeth, but she had this close-up image to prove it!

Laura was in London during the annual Trooping the Colour celebrations when the Queen and her faithful horseguards parade through the Mall. Not everyone manages to get so near. It looks to us almost as though the Queen is looking straight at Laura, rather sternly, we have to say! And isn't it interesting to see that she uses a car blanket to stave off the cold, just like other ladies of her generation all across England?

You can read all about Laura's experiences of this, her first trip to England, on Student Club (free registration required). She really used her time here to full effect, taking in many of London's most famous sights. But we have a feeling that the one she will remember the best is that of the Queen fixing her with a beady-eyed stare.

Does Laura's new friend explain how she was able to get so close to the Queen?!

Find out more about Internships with Embassy CES here.