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.