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.