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.