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.