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!