Metodoloxías activas que fomentan a creatividade e a interacción nas aulas de EFL e CLIL

Comunicación Keep Calm and Mind the GAPP (EICE, Valencia 2016)

Creación de materiais (Santiago 2015)

Language assistants

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:

Thanksgiving Day

     This year for the first time we have been working on this important American date. We have learnt about the Thanksgiving History through a video, we have learnt some vocabulary with an activity played on the interactive whiteboard, we have coloured some pictures, we have written our ‘thanks for’ and we have designed our own Pilgrim and Indians hats in the Art lessons.

     Teachers can realize the variety of possibilities this topic offers, most of the skills and different competences are innate to it and several subjects can be involved (History, Art, Religion, Citizenship, Language).

     The video below was the one we watched in the classroom to understand the Thanksgiving origins.

     We have played this game below on the interactive whiteboard in order to learn some vocabulary.

zonaClic - actividades - Thanksgiving day

     Older students wrote some sentences following the pattern ‘I’m thankful for (my family, my cat, …).

     The next box shows some pictures with the Pilgrim and Indian hats.

Make a free slideshow design

Special Dates

I am a pizza

     'I am a pizza' is the title of a song I’ve recently discovered when teaching food. It’s a great song that allows you to exploit different ESL contents: food vocabulary, feelings and intonation, asking for a pizza (pizza menu), writing a recipe…

     The song and the pictures in the videoclip are really funny, my students love them and whenever they have the opportunity they ask me to play it, no need to say that they are singing it all the time. Although the song is rather long, it isn’t a disadvantage because ‘I am a pizza’ is a catchy song that sticks in your mind and you can’t stop singing it.

     
     I worked with this song in the first and second grades or Primary Education when we were dealing with a food teaching unit. I designed a digital activity for the SmartBoard aimed at pre-teaching the vocabulary in the song. In the video below you can watch the different screens with the different activities and games, if you like and you are interested in downloading it, you are free to do it, there’s a link below the video screen that allows you to open or download the file.

Download the file.

     As you can see in the video, although you can’t hear it, there are some activities with audios and listening games.

     I was going to adapt the activities for higher levels by adding some ordering activities, some pizza menus with prices to prepare dialogues, some drill activities to exploit some phrases in the song … but I ran out of time and I had to cover other curriculum contents that couldn’t be related to the song.

     Lastly, a good piece of news for those who like and teach other languages is that you can find the song in French and Spanish too.

Pets and their food

    ‘Pets’ is one of the teaching units in the 1st cycle teaching program. This year as a final activity I asked the students to talk about pets and their food after doing a cut-out with food and animal stickers.

    The contents involved are animal vocabulary, food vocabulary and present simple of have got.

    This is the video with my students talking about pets.

ESL in Moodle

In this post I want to apologize for not writing as many posts as I would like, I’m quite busy at the moment and it’s very difficult to publish something because of all the work that is behind (writing the post, preparing the pictures, making videos and presentations, uploading files…), the problem is that I have many things to tell you and many posts stored in my mind and no time to make them real.

Future posts I hope to write are: 

• Easter
• Past Carnival
• The very hungry caterpillar
• Oliver’s vegetables
• I am a pizza

Let’s see if you can read them before the school year finishes. I will try my best.

The reason why I’ve been so busy to write is that I ‘was and am’ working in Moodle. I created two virtual ESL courses aimed at the older students (10-12 years old), the courses are based in the teaching program I have for those levels and in the coursebook I use, but they can be used with other teaching programs because the contents that most of the teachers deal with in those levels are more or less the same.

I'm embedding a presentation about Moodle for those teachers who haven't heard of it.

Moodle presentation

View more presentations from Alja Isakovic

My virtual courses allow students to review, practice and study the contents they have seen in the classroom with me, apart from improving their listening, reading and writing skills, as well as their digital competence, so important at the moment.

Along the units I provide students with all kinds of exercises, activities and explanations. They have listening quizzes, cultural videos, grammar explanations and exercises, writing tasks, vocabulary practice, texts … a great variety of opportunities to improve and practice the language.

You can find different kinds of files, Powerpoints, Flash, PDF, Word, html… and you can find activities designed with Hotpotatoes, Quizfaber, JClic and online tasks. As you can check Moodle is a very interesting tool where you can compile lots of different files and activities.

I made some screenshots to show you some of them but I invite you to take a look at it on the next link, you have the possibility to enter as a guest in the two English courses.

http://www.edu.xunta.es/centros/ceipvilarbarrio/aulavirtual/course/category.php?id=13

Moodle

View more presentations from isabelbp.

St. Patrick's Week

   This will be a flash post about St. Patrick’s Day, just to tell you my teaching experience at school.

   We have been working through this special date along the past whole week in the different subjects I teach: English, Art and even Science.

   The contents about this date for the different subjects are:

• English: traditions, sociocultural aspects, Ireland as an English speaking country, vocabulary (leprechaun, shamrock…) …
• Art: felt-tip pen colouring, combining colours, cutting and tracing, templates, using paints and paintbrushes…
• Social Science: Irish traditions and geography.

   Students learnt some vocabulary related to this special date, they read some texts and answered some questions, and they played games.

   In the Art lessons, the higher-level students coloured a leprechaun poster and also cut some shamrocks in green cardboard paper in order to decorate the school. Students in lower levels coloured some leprechauns and some pots of gold, and they made a leprechaun face from a paper plate.

   You can download in the link below a file with the worksheets on St. Patrick’s Day that I used in the classroom.

http://db.tt/ynL7nlr

   On March 17th, students wore green clothes and other stuff in order to commemorate the famous Irish date. I uploaded a video with some photos.

Ourense tourist guide

Couldn't help it, it's late at night but I have just found this presentation made by some ESL students from Ourense directed by their teacher María Jose. That will be the tourist guide for native speakers in the future. I really like the result of their work.

Find more videos like this on EFL CLASSROOM 2.0

He/She has got

   Today I want to show you an activity I’ve prepared for the digital board using the Smartboard software. It’s based on the principle of learning by doing and acting. It is addressed to ten-year-old children.

   Students will learn to use the third person of singular of the verb have got by including it in small descriptive texts. They will also learn some vocabulary related to face signs and hair colour and they will recycle previous words from other courses and units.

   I recorded the activity, so everyone can watch how the activity goes. I’m not going to upload it because there are photos of my students but if someone is interested I can send it by mail.

Useful resources

I was looking for some Sesame Street colouring numbers because a teacher had seen them in another school and she couldn't find them anywhere on the net when I found this great page with lots of resources for our lessons: crafts, colouring pages, videos and so on.

I just wanted to share it:

http://www.sproutonline.com/sprout/home/

Microsoft Paint in our lessons

I'm going to present you a new activity I've recently made in the English classroom. The main goal of the activity was to evaluate the use of there is/are and some/any in the written form.

If I tell you the truth, I'm really fed up with those structures, even if students know the rules to use them; when writing, they aren't able to apply the rules and so, their compositions are always full of mistakes and I get angry because I can't understand their mistakes.

As my older students had to review this grammar point, I decided to prepare a different activity, I asked them to draw a picture with Microsoft Paint on the computer and then, they should describe it using there is/are and some/any. Apart from the structures, they had the need to remember recycled vocabulary from other units and they had to be creative in order not to do similar drawings.

Here are the results. If you can't read the texts, it's possible to take a look at them on the Slide webpage.

St. Valentine's Day

Due to Carnival celebrations I hadn't got time to work on Saint Valentine and, in my opinion, this date represents a good chance to work on poems and creativity.

At the last minute and running I decided to do something on the topic with my older students since it would be the last year at school and I had never done anything about writing poems with them. First, we have worked on some vocabulary and then, we started with the poems, I gave them a pattern to follow and based on it they made up their own poems.

The pattern was a structure they have learnt in the first term to talk about TV programs and their likes so, at the same time, they were reviewing curriculum contents. The verbs they could use were like, love, hate... and they should take into account that after those verbs they could only write noun phrases or gerunds.

The result wasn't as good as I had expected but it's necessary to bear in mind that they invented them in a hurry and they couldn't improve them because of time.

Writing poems is a useful activity to teach grammar, teachers only have to take a pattern or a grammar point and give students a model to use. A good pattern for valentines is also the composition of an adjective plus a noun.

Here you have my students' poems.

Clothes & Carnival

Using an idea I saw at http://casadetolos.nireblog.com/, I edited some student's photos, I cut their faces with an image program (Photoshop, Gimp) and I added them to a disguise, so each student was wearing a different costume. Afterwards, I printed the final photos in a piece of paper and students had to design a WANTED banner describing the clothes and the accessories they were wearing.

The final result was really funny, you can see it below and pupils were motivated to write in English.

Carnival

Give peace a chance

Schools usually commemorate Peace Day making different activities: workshops, outdoor games, readings and so on. As a compulsory activity in our curriculum we must deal with it in the best way so that our students can learn new contents in the second language.

Let's Dream Of Peace

View more presentations from Nubia Group.

From the ESL point of view, teachers can work with famous songs and singers that support the Peace idea. The songs about Peace I like the most are:

-Imagine (John Lennon)

-Peace on Earth (U2)

-Heal the world (Michael Jackson)

-Give peace a chance (John Lennon)
-USA for Africa- We are the world (Michael Jackson)

This year I designed an activity to do in the digital whiteboard with my older students based on the song Heal the world by Michael Jackson. I love this song and I chose it as a remembrance of one of the best composers in the world. To see the activity follow the link: http://tinyurl.com/yhjgt7s

 If you are interested in Peace facts, I will recommend you to use the activity Peace? Yes, please! with your students at the computer room. It was created with EdiLIM by a famous teacher in Galicia. Don't hesitate to visit her blog because she has got great ideas for the classroom.

Peace? Yes, please!

Finally, you can work on Peace in the Art lessons, I let you here some ideas of projects in this subject:

-A dove cap

-A dove made of a white balloon

-A mosaic of doves

-Origami doves
-Posters
-...

It's possible to see some of them on the slide below.