Van Gogh's teaching unit

This teaching unit is about the painter Van Gogh. It is aimed at 12 year old kids and it deals with Art and ICT contents.

On the Scribd file below you have the teaching unit with the goals, contents, activities and assessment. You are welcome to use it in your lessons.

 



 

 

Van Gogh by isabelbp

CLIL- Vigo 2012: Good practice

Teaching Social and Natural Science though English from isabelbp

Andy Warhol

   I’ve designed, with the help of the language assistant, a lesson plan about the artist Andy Warhol. It is aimed at 11/12 year olds and as the title suggests, it deals with Art contents.

   Below you have the teaching unit sketch in Galician but you also have the digital activity in English with all the information you need to put it into practice.  It shouldn’t be a problem if you don’t understand the document in the Galician language.
   I hope you like it and you use it in your Art lessons.

Andy Warhol

Book reports

     My older students are required to read one book in English per school term and I find that checking this task is quite a difficult job for the teacher, up to now I asked them to talk about their books during a break but I realized that it was better to make them write a report because they will take the task more seriously.

     Within the School 2.0 framework I have decided to design a book report using forms in Google Docs, the students can access to the form in the Moodle courses and fill it with the information required. The form application in Google Docs is very useful since it helps to keep a record of their works and the books read by each of them and it even allows you prepare some graphs for the educational end-of-course report.

     Apart from the compulsory reading, they can voluntarily read more books what will be taken into account to assess them. It is also interesting to have a reading log poster to display in the classroom for all to see.

     Below you can take a look at the reading report I’ve designed and you have a link where you can find different report models and reading logs or records.

http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/book_reports.htm

Mind Maps

     Free Mind is an open source program that allows you to make mind maps. I’ve recently discovered the program and, once I did, I realized the useful it can be for students and for teachers and I decided to implement it in my lessons.

     Our school is immersed in an ICT project (Escuela 2.0, also called Abalar in Galicia) by which the educational government provides the students with personal netbooks, those netbooks work with a Linux-based operative system and open source software. FreeMind is one of the programs that comes in the computer image we are working with.

     How do I use FreeMind in the classroom? The most common purpose is as 'a teacher tool' to explain a lesson, especially Science lessons, below I let you one map I prepared to talk about classifying animals in the second and third grades of Primary Education. 

     Taking into account this, another purpose comes by inversing the process, making students prepare their own mind maps to summarize a lesson and learn it better, but that would just be appropriate for higher levels and subjects such as science or history. 

     As I haven’t yet started to teach Science in English to the higher level students, I decided to ask them to make a mind map at the end of each of the ESL units. At the beginning, I had to spend some time teaching them how FreeMind works but now they find it very easy and they don’t need the teacher help. It might be good to give them a model to start.

 Free time (Unit 1, model, saved as Flash object) 

  
     When students have their maps finished and corrected, they can export them to JPEG files or FLASH files and print them to study and review at home.

Examples of my students’ maps:

 The Animal Kingdom (Unit 2, 5th Grade) by Nerea

 Food from around the world (Unit 2, 6th Grade) by Chris

Food from around the world (Unit 2, 6th Grade) by Lucy

     If you want to download the program, click on the following link:

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Vegetables

My higher level students have a unit on food in their coursebooks but they already know a lot of vocabulary related to the topic so I decided to prepare this vocabulary game to teach them vegetables. Primary education students usually learn some vegetable vocabulary like potatoes or carrots and that’s the end of it so, why don’t teach them more?

I hope you like the activities:

Plants

‘Plants’ is a CLIL unit aimed at the first and second grades of Primary Education.

The goals I want my students to achieve are divided into two groups:

Science goals:

• Describe the main characteristics of a plant.
• Recognize and label the parts of a plant.
• Name some common plants and trees from our environment.
• Say what a plant needs to grow.
• Find out about seeds.
• Distinguish between flowered and non-flowered plants.
• Analyse and recognize the different stages in the plant life cycle.
• Tell the difference between bushes, trees and grass.
• Find out about vegetables.

Linguistic goals:

• Understand and produce vocabulary related to plants: names of plants and trees, parts of the plant, …
• Write words and vocabulary in the second language.
• Sing a song in English.
• Listen and understand important information.
• Connectors: first, then, next, finally.
• Talk in English about plants.
• Read short sentences related to the unit.

I have developed a Notebook file for the digital whiteboard that acts as the guiding thread of the whole unit. There are different types of pages in this file, some to teach vocabulary with pictures, some to practice the contents by doing different exercises, some to elicit oral interaction, some with animations and interactive games, … You can see how the file works in the video below and if you like it you are free to download it for your lessons.

Notebook plants

Download

One of the proposed goals deals with the parts of a plant, in order to teach them I work with the following video song that it’s quite catchy and helpful (my students love it).

Parts of a plant

Apart from the multimedia resources already seen here, students also do some worksheets to practice individual writing skills, those worksheets are a way to check their knowledge and to give me feedback about the lesson plan.

A practical activity I put into practice to make students see the life cycle of a plant was “growing a bean plant”. We inserted three beans with cotton in three transparent glasses and we watered them from time to time, there were different conditions in each of the glasses (different levels of water, different position according to the sun, …) and during some weeks we drew the different stages of the plants and finally we analysed why one grew before the others and what the differences were among them.

An excellent book we read in the classroom when talking about seeds and plant stages is ‘The tiny seed by Eric Carle’. Apart from being very useful for teaching Science it’s also great to use in Art because of the so good and colourful illustrations.

Last but not least, I prepared a Wordle with all the things the students knew of plants at the end of the unit.

Wordle