Pets project

On Friday's lesson, we saw another project' example. This time, the topic was "Pets" and it was a project made by students from the 3^rd grade.

First of all, we saw a different way to start a project without using the Magic Box or asking the children what do they know about the topic of the project. In this case, we could start the project by showing the children pictures of many types of animals (all mixed together). We could print some pictures and, as we show the picture to the students, they would have to say the name of the animal (if they know it) and we will put the picture on the board and write its name under it. In this way, students will remember or learn the vocabulary of these animals.

After having clear which animal is each one, we could ask the students to classify them however they want. As we saw in the example of the project we were working on, some students classify them according to their abilities such as jumping, flying, ... etc. Once they would have classified them, we would show students another way to do it: the "scientific classification" (mammals, birds, amphibians, fishes, reptiles, insects). Until now, we had been working on the same vocabulary (animals), but in different ways, so that children are repeating, again and again, the same vocabulary to integrate it deeper but, as this repetition is not always in the same way, they do it without being aware of this repetition and they don't get bored. Moreover, with the last classification, we would have introduced cross-curricular content about science.

The next step, in order to start focusing the animals in general to the pets, could be to make students do another classification: farm animals, pets, and wild animals. By this classification, we would introduce the topic we want to work on (pets) without having to tell students about it. They will review again the vocabulary said before and they will see new characteristics of animals too (CLIL content).

We could extend this activity suggesting children find differences between these 3 kinds of animals. In this case, the vocabulary changes and it could be more complex, so it is recommended that the teacher asks the children which ideas do they want to put, but he or she is the one who writes them on the board so that students can copy them. In this activity, the most important thing is the ideas that children have (the content) and after that, it comes to the language (the form). It's important to prioritize what do we want to work because students can't do everything at one time.

Another activity we could do in this project is to make children think what animal would they like to be. Doing this exercise, students will develop their cognitive skills by imagining themselves as animals and moreover, they will also work on grammar structures such as "I would like to...". Again, some of the students won't know how to express their ideas in the CLIL language, but the teacher can write this idea on a paper and children can copy it.

As we also saw in the "Jobs project", a good way to do CLIL and work with mathematics is doing a survey. In this project, we could count how many children of different classes have different types of pets (cats, dogs, fishes, birds, rabbits, ...). But, as we saw at class, doing a survey it's not that easy. It implies a very good organization!

1.   First of all, we should think how many groups of students will be asked (for example, 4 classes of 25 students: 2 from the 3rd grade and 2 more from the 4th grade).

2.  According to this, we will make the students group themselves in a way that everybody will go to another class and ask some children (for example, making 3 groups of 6 students and 1 group of 7 students).

3.   Then, we will think and agree with the other teachers when are you going to do the survey in their classes and how (for example, at the end of the classes, before the break, make a line and while the students are going out of the class, each member of the group will ask 4 students of the class).

In this way, students will do maths not only counting the results but also organizing themselves to do the activity.

4.  Once they will be all organized in groups and will they know how, when and what do they will have to do, make them think what do they want to ask and collect it in a grid.

5.   Finally, we'll do the survey and collect all the results.

By analyzing the results and doing the graphics, of course, they will do maths, but they will also develop their speaking and writing skills doing the questions and afterward writing some conclusions of the survey.

To work with more CLIL content related to science, we could also investigate what do pets eat (omnivores, herbivorous, ...) or where do they live (types of shelters, differences between the shelters of pets and the wild animals, ....).

Finally, in relation to the idea that we saw the other day on the Jobs project that written activities are mainly introduced with a previous oral activity, in this project we could see this point if we work on how to take care of a pet. To introduce this wide aspect, we could start talking about what do pets need to be healthy and write down all the ideas so that we will do a grid with all the options said before.

Considering all the possible activities we have previously described, we can say that "pets" is another great topic to work with students and do CLIL in  a fun and meaningful way.

Assessment

As December is getting closer, on Monday's lesson we started planning how to design an English CLIL project that we ourselves will have to do in groups as if we were going to implement it in a real school.

We saw many "theoretical" aspects that we will have to include in our Didactic Unit such as the aims of the project, the competences that we will develop, which concepts the students will learn (both language and cross-curricular concepts), ...etc. But we especially work on the assessment step.

After sawing different types of evaluation, in pairs, we put them in order according to the importance we give to them. In my concrete case, we chose as the most relevant one the "Ongoing" and the "Formative" assessment because we think that learning is a process and not only a final result and, because of that, we should focus more on the development that children do while they are learning more than just on the final product. After this first type of evaluation, we thought that the second should be the "Self" and the "Peer" evaluation. We put these two kinds of evaluation on the same level and we thought that they are also some of the essential methods because, in the case of the self-evaluation, it allows children to be more aware of their learning process and it develops their reflective skills; and in the case of the peer-evaluation, we believe that it helps students to be more respectful and tolerant with their partners as they both have to accept and give positive feedback to learn from each other.

To continue with, we chose in the third place the "Backwards" and the "Diagnostic" assessment. Again, we put them together as we thought they had the same aim: get to know which knowledge do our children already have. We think this kind of evaluation is also very helpful in order not to repeat the content that children have already studied, and to develop it so that they can learn new things by connecting what they knew with what they are learning now in a meaningful way. We think that it is equally important not to provide children with too difficult content that they cannot connect with any of the ideas that they already have, but also not to provide them with too easy content that will make them be bored and that it won't be challenging to learn at all.

Finally, we placed the "summative" evaluation in the last place because, as I have said before, nowadays it's increasing the importance of valuing the whole process instead of just the final result and, in this way, the summative assessment is becoming less popular as we are replacing it with the other types of evaluation.

Moreover, as a transverse tool to implement the evaluation, we talked about using rubrics. They can help teachers to have more clear which items do they want to evaluate, but it could also be an easy way to make students become the evaluators by crossing or punctuating the items placed in the rubric, both about themselves or about the others (self and peer evaluation). About this resource for evaluating, we saw a website called "Rubistar" that help teachers create quality rubrics to evaluate. (http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php)

Luckily, I have seen all these types of evaluation in the schools where I have done my practical training and that's why I can say that the ones that I have placed in the first points (ongoing, self and peer and backwards evaluation) really work well in the schools and are more meaningful and helpful for students.

To end up with the importance of the evaluation, we saw a video called "Austin's butterfly edit" in which a teacher explains the case of one student who had to draw a butterfly for a project. At the begging, the student draw a butterfly that wasn't really similar to the photo he chose to copy (he forgot many important details), but thanks to the opportunities that the teacher gave to him to revise his first draw and the advice he received from his partners, the boy got to do an awesome draw of the butterfly after trying it 6 times! This video shows us the advantages of the peer-evaluation as the student couldn't have done the final fantastic draw without accepting and valuing the advice his peers gave to him. It also makes us aware of the benefits it could have to give children the opportunity to improve their jobs and to value this process because, if we only look at the final draw of the butterfly, we could think that it's just a good draw but that's it, when it actually contains a lot of effort from the student. That means, if we take into account the whole process that he has done to get to the final draw, the draw's value increases a lot!!! So, here it appears the importance of the ongoing and the formative assessment mentioned before. 

Job project

Which are the interests of our students? What do they want to become when they grow up? "Jobs" is a great topic to work with primary students. Moreover, as we saw in Friday's lesson, it is a suitable topic to do with CLIL methodology.

This week I've learned how to distinguish, in the same CLIL project, between the activities that are more focused on the CLIL language skills and the ones that introduce the content of other areas apart from English, the CLIL content activities.

By making a brainstorming about which activities would we do in a Job project, and which content would we address, we classify the activities in the two types mentioned above like this:

• Language skills activities:

    - To begin with the project, we thought about asking the children which jobs do their parents do, in which places can these jobs be done, which tools does the person of each job use, ... we could also ask them to describe the clothes that different people wear according to their jobs (colors, parts, ...). All these first activities would be addressed to review and learn vocabulary about this topic.

      - To improve more language skills, we said that we could work with Future tenses in order for the students to express what do they want to become when they grow up.

     - Again about expanding their vocabulary, we propose to do an activity with mime to represent and guess different jobs.

     - Finally, by introducing a rhythm or a song we could also review the vocabulary learned in the project (making them fill in the gaps with job names...)

•  CLIL content activities:

     - We thought about doing some surveys about different aspects, for example: which jobs are the best paid, which are the most popular jobs, what do children in our classroom want to become in their future, ...etc. By counting and analyzing the results of the surveys, students will apply mathematical skills in the project.

     - An activity related to science could be to classify jobs according to the primary, secondary and tertiary activities. To do so, we thought about following the process of creation of a final product, step by step, to see what is its origin and which transformations does it suffers to end up being sold in the shops where we buy it.

After classifying these activities, we emphasize the importance of linking the activities of the project and do them in a logical order. To do so, we got in pairs and each of us analyzed an activity of the real project done by students in the school of our teacher. We thought about which activities we would do before and after the one we had and the way we would link them.

By putting in common our ideas, we got to the conclusion that, in general, each written activity needs a previous oral activity in between them that links them properly.

Finally, we put in order the activities that each pair had and we compare them with the ones that we create at the beginning of the class. We did it pretty good as many of the activities were very similar or even equal, but we also gain some new ideas like doing a survey about "What do people work for?", write down the conclusions of all the surveys, prepare an interview and make students do a self-evaluation about the whole process.

Again, seeing real examples of projects worked with students is very helpful for me to get ideas and be aware of new aspects to take into account when designing projects and activities for children.

Animal projects

"Animals" is a typical topic for English projects, but in the sessions of this week, we worked deeper in the way teachers can design projects and, moreover, to make them become CLIL projects.

 

By seeing some real projects from the school where our teacher works, we came to the conclusion that all the animal projects follow a similar structure and they also include almost the same aspects of the animal in concrete. These common points are:

• Ask children what do they know about the animal (previous knowledge and background)
• Ask them what would they like to know about the animal
• Parts of the body
• Where does the animal live
• What can and can't the animal do
• What does the animal eats and doesn't eat
• Breeding process of the animal
• Comparison and classification of the different species of the same animal or with other animals.
• Storytelling about the animal (and related activities to the story)
• Songs or rhymes about the animal
• Final mural or album to collect all the work

We always have to be aware of the characteristics of the animal we have chosen to do the project because not with all the animals can be suitable to investigate all the aspects listed before and, furthermore, sometimes we will add new activities if we think it's appropriate for the animal we are working on. Also, it's nice to compliment all the information that children discover with drawings and pictures that represent it. I also thought about adding a vocabulary list at the end of the project with all the new words or expressions that children will have learned during the project of their animal.

Apart from seeing which aspects we can investigate about an animal, we also talked about the different materials and resources we can use for each activity. The ones that I liked the most were: make a jigsaw puzzle about the parts of the body, use flashcards, represent the breeding process with play dough, watch videos, ...etc.

After having a general view of what a CLIL project of an animal can include, we studied closely the part of the storytelling in the project. We saw a video of some students having a storytelling session in the library of a school, but in concrete, we analyze the part when the story had already been told and the teacher was asking some reading comprehension questions to the students. It's important to say that in the educational center of the case that we watched, students have lessons in English the whole day and teachers implement a lot the CLIL methodology. We pay special attention to the way the teacher of the video managed the group of students and we observed a lot of things from the ones I would like to highlight the followings:

• The teacher tried to ask questions to all the students, promoting the participation of the ones that were more shy or afraid of talking and getting back the students that were distracted.
• When a student didn't know the answer to a question, the teacher encouraged the other students to help him or her by defining a word, giving some clues, or even presenting 3 possible answers to the question so that the student just had to choose between the options given.
• The teacher mimes a lot in order to introduce new vocabulary words.
• She puts a lot of emphasis on respecting each other all the time.
• The setting was also specially designed and prepared so that students feel comfortable. It was very cozy, plenty of pillows, students were sitting on the floor, ...etc.

I really liked the way this teacher performed the session. I think that these little aspects mentioned above make the session very effective and meaningful for the children.

Finally, we also observed very carefully the kind of questions the teacher asked the children. We identified 4 types of questions: 

1. Questions about the plot of the story: although this type of questions can seem the easiest ones, we have to think them carefully so that we don't require children "literal answers". We should try to avoid this "literal answers" because they don't promote children's comprehension of the story.
2. CLIL questions: to work with other subjects apart from English.
3. Personal questions: to relate the story to children's personal experiences.
4. Questions to make children reasoning, imagine and predict: this kind of questions contribute to the development of cognitive skills.

Until now I had never been aware of the importance of asking meaningful questions because, at least in my school, when I was little almost all the questions of a story were just directed to find concrete information that had already been said in the text and we didn't need to think so much, but by including this other types of questions we can increase children's motivation for paying attention and understand the story we are reading.

Finally, the session in the library was completed with another session in which students can choose one of the stories that they have previously heard and discussed with the teacher in the library and, individually, they can hear it with earphones while they are reading the story again at the same time. I found this a good idea because in this final step of the storytelling activity children can relate better the pronunciation with the spelling of the words and, thanks to the previous work of the story in the library, all students will be able to understand the story and enjoy it.

Step by Step

In connection with the last activity we worked on last week called "The Magic Box", we started Monday's lesson expanding this methodology a little bit. We went deeper into the step when students had already guessed what is inside the box and we have to start working on some activities. In this point it is important that the teacher asks the students what do they know about the topic. Being aware of students' previous knowledge will allow the teacher to prepare more meaningful activities for them because he will ensure that they won't repeat what they already know and they will learn new aspects of the topic.

Moreover, if the teacher thinks it is appropriate for the target class, he can also ask children what do they want to know about the topic. Again, this can help the teacher to keep children's motivation towards the project and make them feel protagonist of their own learning process.

Strongly related to this two questions, it is necessary that the teacher asks himself: Where are we now? How can I "close the gap"? Where are we going? By this questions he has to design the didactic unit taking into account that the activities go from the beginning to the end, including a final task to check if the students have achieved the aims of the project. As you can see, it is a complex task, but I think it's worth it if children learn and have fun with it.

Continuing with what we did on the lesson, we have to talk about an activity to group together students in teams. This exercise also includes some vocabulary skills because, first of all, children have to think about some opposite adjectives such as: long and short, thick and thin, rigid and flexible, big and small, ...etc. and also other aspects that can be used to describe an object, for example: it is made of... (plastic, glass, wood, metal), its shape is... (round, square, rectangular, triangle).

Once they understand all the words they can use to describe something, they have to placed in a circle and put their hands behind their backs. The teacher now will distribute some objects to the students and, without showing and looking to their objects, they will have to use the adjectives mentioned above to prepare the description of the object they are holding. 

Then, one by one, they will start describing the objects out loud and at the end of the round, each student will have to find a person that he thinks that has the same object, check it, and if it's the same, make a group. When all the members of the group are together, they can make a definition of the object and share it with the others so that they can guess which object they have.

We ourselves did the activity to experience how was it and it was very fun at the same time that it worked very well. After doing the activity, with the group that we end up with the same object, we wrote step by step the instructions we would give to our students to do the activity with them. That was, at least for me, the most interesting part of the exercise because I noticed that when doing this kind of active exercises the teacher has to pay attention to many things apart from the basic instructions of the activity. For example, when we tell the students to make a circle, we also have to take into account that they will need enough space in the classroom to do so and that maybe some of the students can put the chairs and tables to the side to make room before everybody start moving. This kind of prevision can prevent the activity to become a mess. Another example can be not to forget to tell students key steps that they need to do at some point so that they will be able to do further steps. In the case of our activity, when they start describing the object in the circle one by one, everyone has to try to remember every students' description so that later, they can find the ones that are like their own. The effort to think carefully and specifically every instruction you'll tell the students to do is very important in order to be aware of the key points of its performance.

Finally, I would like to mention the video we reflected upon on Friday's lesson. It is called "I Just sued the school system" and it's act by the famous American artist "Prince Ea". The video is a very hard critique of the school system and it highlights the weak points of the current education.

On the one hand, I agree with some of the ideas that Prince exposes. For example, he starts quoting Albert Einstein with the sentence "Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, he will live its whole life believing that it is stupid". This idea can be related to the one that he says later "1 teachers standing in front of 20 kids each one having different straights, needs, gifts, dreams, ... and you teach the same thing the same way". I strongly agree that teachers have to be always aware of the fact that every student we have at class is unique and because of that, we have to promote "differentiation". This term, according to "The Glossary of Education Reform", refers to a wide variety of teaching techniques and lesson adaptations that educators use to instruct a diverse group of students, with diverse learning needs, in the same classroom or learning environment. The basic idea is that the primary educational objectives (making sure all students master essential knowledge, concepts, and skills) remain the same for every student, but teachers may use different instructional methods to help students meet those expectations. I personally find this idea one of the basis to ensure effective and meaningful learning for our students.

Moreover, I also agree with the evidence that Prince highlights when he says that "teachers have one of the most important jobs on the planet and they are under paid". Although in my opinion the money you earn in a job it's not the most important aspect of it, I also think that it is sometimes related with the value this job has and, in this way, I feel that the educational field is not being as valued as it should be and as a consequence some teachers may not be aware of the importance of their job. In my opinion, being better paid will also increase the commitment that teachers have with their job.

The last idea I agree with that I would like to point out is the one that says "students are 20% of our population, but the 100% of our future". This argument is key to defend that we should invest more in the current education because what today is only a part of our society, tomorrow will be the whole of it and that means that what we are doing today has direct consequences on our tomorrow.

On the other hand, I also disagree with other ideas that appear in the video. For example, Prince starts showing some pictures of things that have evolved a lot, such as a modern phone versus its old version, or a car from today versus an old carriage... and he ends up with a picture of an old classroom and a classroom of today and they are exactly equal! I totally disagree with this example and moreover when he says that nothing in education has changed. Not only in my opinion, but also because of my experience of the practical training where I have been to very innovative schools, I can say that there are many educational centres (at least in Catalonia) that are really evolving the concept of education and they are fighting to improve and change what it's not longer working on the educational system. As one of my partners in the class exposed, I agree with her in the fact that Prince generalizes a lot some of the problems he exposes in the video and not everything he says it's true everywhere. As I have said before, here in Catalonia we have many schools that are actually innovating in many aspects of education. They are designing new projects or implementing new methodologies that have just the opposite characteristics that Prince exposes in the video. They are taking into account children's individualities, they promote a more experimental learning, they transmit the value of collaboration and respect among children. I think that we don't have to forget this increasing projects that we are so lucky to have because it is so sad and useless to just focused on what is going wrong and criticise it instead of promoting the good innovations we are doing and valuing the amazing effort that some educators are doing every day in our schools so that children have a better quality education and a happier life.

The Magic Box

Yesterday, we started the last session of this week doing a collection of the ideas we had been working until now. By doing this activity I was more aware of what I have learned until now and I noticed that on my first entrance in the blog I forgot to mention an idea that I really think it's important for us in our future as teachers. That was the benefits of sharing and expressing our feelings, both students and teachers. In the case that something is not going well in the class, if the teacher tells the children that he/she is feeling sad or angry or nervous, students can empathize with him/her and be more aware of their attitude and its consequences on the environment of the class.

After that short exercise, we started talking about the idea that teaching English is much more than teaching only a language. We reflected upon the fact that English teachers, like the rest of the teachers in the school, also have to deal with children's needs in the class and with the different personalities and interests they have. To do so, it is also important to take into account what children need, for example, preparing a structured session can help them follow it better;  including routines in the lessons can make children feel more secure; working with interesting, meaningful and useful topics ensures more motivation from the kids and meaningful learning; offering a variety of activities and tasks make them work with different competences and abilities; giving daily feedback help them improve little aspects day by day and feel accompanied in their learning process; finally, we also have to think about specific teaching skills such as the eye contact, the intonation and the rhythm.

Specifically thinking about planning an English lesson, we talk about different aspects we have to prepare so that the lesson goes well. First of all, we have to chose an appropriate topic according to the age of the students. Then, we have to describe the learning outcomes we want children to achieved by the end of the project. Finally, we have to decide the methodology we are going to use, such as projects, ...etc. This three aspects are also accompanied by the "ordinary classroom language", which are simple actions that we tell children to do in English so that they learn them by using and doing them. This expressions are mostly learn "unconsciously" by kids as they repeat them all the time and finally incorporate to their learning. An example of this expressions could be "Can you open the windows please?".

About this idea, I would like to point out that never before I had thought about this "natural expressions" that I learned at school without even noticing it. That makes me see that teachers a lot of times prepare more things than the ones that students are aware of and as a future teacher, I will have to start thinking about this little actions that contribute a lot to the learning of a foreign language.

Finally, our teacher showed us a methodology that children love. It is called "The Magic Box" and it consists on taking an empty box and fill it with any kind of objects related to the topic you want to work at class. It could be pictures, toys, a story book, real objects (fruits), a video, nature elements, ...etc. For example, in our box there were different dolls representing the members of a family (the mother, the father, the daughter, the son, and the little baby).

This methodology has its own characteristics:

• Students have to predict what is inside the box by the sounds it makes, its weight and size, ...etc.
• It also fosters the use of language because students have to ask questions in order to discover what is inside the box. By this, we can work with the basic question structures such as "Is it....?" or "Is there any...?". Teachers can always give some clues to help kids guessing.
• Obviously, it generates students' curiosity and attention because it's a very funny activity.
• Finally, it also provides a good interaction between the teacher and the children as they are asking and answering questions all the time.

This funny activity that could seem pretty easy, makes the teacher be very attentive to every single comment that children do so that they can learn a lot of things. Some of the tasks that the teacher has to do in this exercise are:

• Make repeat students the sentence they have said but in a right way.
• Rephrase children's ideas
• Introduce new vocabulary within a sentence
• Ask a lot of questions
• Even miming some actions!

I found that methodology wonderful because, a part from the funny moment of guessing what is inside the box, it can lead to work an amount of different activities related to the things that were inside the box and when it will be time to work on them, students will already be very motivated to do so because of the funny beginning of the lesson. I will definitely try to do this activity with my students in the future!