Planning a project

We all have heard someone talking about "projects in the schools" or even ourselves have participated in some. But, what is a project and how can we plan a great project?

To plan a great project we have to start by asking ourselves some questions:

• What will be the aims of our project?
• What competences will it develop?
• What concepts will the students learn?
• How will you introduce the topic?
• What stage will the project follow?
• What materials will you need for each stage?
• What assessment criteria will you apply?
• What material, activities and/or worksheets, etc. do you intend to use?

In this post I will try to answer that questions and in doing so explain how to plan a great project.

Well, first of all, we have to ask ourselves what we want the children of our class to learn with that project. Let's say we want to do a project about farm animals, so we have to establish some aims that we want the children to reach during and at the end of the project. One example could be, learn about five different animals that lives in farms, what they eat, how they reproduce, etc.

The competences and concpets will be so related with the language and curricular concepts, which we would need to check while preparing the project. A good way to structure a project could be do a chart like we use for a micro teaching project.

After that we have to plan which stages the project will follow, the material you will need for each stage, material, plan activities, etc... It is so important to be ready before starting any project, because when it's on, you have to keep going.

Finally, you have to decide which assessment criteria will you apply. That is so related to the aims, competences and concepts, because in this part, we will see if children have really reached all the aims we wanted them to reach and if they didn't, see which their progress have been.

When you have already established everything we have said, you have to decide how to introduce the main topic to children. There are many tools you can use, but one of the most encouraging may be the magic box, because you keep them wondering what is that is going to come off from there. Other easy ways to introduce the topic could be a explain a tale or playing a song.

Before starting the project, you can use some technique to create little groups to work whenever it is necessary during the project. Depending on what you plan on doing, you can creat more little or bigger groups. I believe the ideal would be to work in pairs, little group, individually and altogether. We should try to find activities where we could fit that kind of groups, so children can see different ways of working.

When doing a project, always keep children guessing. Challenge them with questions, make them show what they already know, explore as many possibilities as it comes to your mind to keep their attention on all the time.

To finish with, I would like to say that we always have to listen to the desires children have, what they are interested on learning and what motivates them. If they are not motivated or interested, they will not do great and won't enjoy either. A project is not just a single activity, it is a set of activities that are done progressively in more than one day, so it is so important to keep children motivated.

Magic Box

The Magic Box is a wonderful resource you can use either in Early Childhood or Primary, because children always get excited about it. You bring a box to the class and put inside it something related with a topic you want to introduce and talk about with your students, for instance a jigsaw or some pictures.

Let's say we want to talk about elephants. We can start by bringing the magic box to the classroom and tell them a little story of how this box appeared in your office and inside of it there is a jigsaw and you need some help to solve it. You can work on an story or not also depending on the age of the children you are showing it to.

When children already have solved the jigsaw and know the animal we are going to talk about, we have to ask them questions. It is so important to know what do they know about it and what do they want to know, reason why we need to ask many and different kind of questions. Here are some examples:

- Any of you have ever seen an elephant before?

- Is it a big or a tiny animal?

- Which colour elephants are?

- Where do they live?

- What do they eat?

By doing that exercice, you are introducing new vocabulary related to elephants an animals in general.

As I said, we can use a story or also a song to introduce that activity. To talk about the parts of the body of the animal, we can also use a jigsaw, but this time we can make them colour a picture of an elephant and then cut some parts of it and then they will match it and discover and work with it the parts of the body of an elephant. We can use other tools like flashcards as well.

Dumbo maybe would be a nice film to show them, at least some part of it, to show them a different way of living of an elephant apart from the ones who lives in the jungle or the zoo.

To finish with, they can do a mural to hang in the classroom where they can draw some elephants, the jungle, what they eat, some sentences related to elephants, etc.

I believe that the magic box is a nice resource and a nice way to introduce a topic. The most important thing about introducing a new topic to a classroom is to call children attention, if they are not interested or motivated, they won't follow and they won't want to participate because they won't care. That is why it is so important to listen to them and know what they want to learn.

What do we know about...

Whenever you want to introduce a new topic in a class, you always have to try and make children participate and share their knwoledge. How can we do it? Easy as asking them questions. Make them be who guides your questions, you can prepare some basic ones before the class like:

- What do you know about that topic?

- What would you like to know about it?

Then go further from what they answer. For instance, if we are talking about transports, ask them for instance how many transports do they know, when they answer, then ask them to organize them by the way they travel: air, sea, road... There are infinity of possibilities depending on the item you choose to work on. It is so important to ask as many different types of questions as we can.

As a future teacher to be, I truly believe it is so important to let children participate. Lessons don't have to be about the teachers but about the students. We have to let them participate and share as much as they know. We have to go from that basis to what we want them to learn.

Ways to create groups

When we think about making a group in class we may tend to separate it in two parts, ask kids to get in pairs or get in groups by themselves. What is the problem about that? That kids always get the same partner or the same group and sometimes we get kids left alone. How can we avoid that? It is easy, we can make the groups by playing a game.

One of this games could be to give every kid a number from 1 to 4. They will have to remember that number. Check that everybody is hearing and understanding you, that is an important point. When everybody has a number, you ask them to get in groups by the number they got.

Another way could be, after practicing some kind of vocabulary, let's say class material vocabulary, shapes and lenght, you ask kids to get into a circle and give every kid an object. They can't show what it is to the others. One by one they will have to descrive the object they have and when everybody is finish, they will have to guess who else has the same object as them. When they have discovered, they will have to get into groups and explain to the others what they have. Let's say, if one of the groups have sharpeners, they will have to say "our object is use to sharp the pen". The rest of the class will have to guess what object it is.

There are many other ways and games to creat groups, but these are a couple of examples. Even tho they are a bit long to do, I believe they are a nice and different way to create groups and everybody gets to participate.