Describing and comparing

When doing an activity you always have to find something relevant and meaningful for children. Today I will talk about how children describe draws or pictures.

First of all, when starting a new topic, you will need loads of drilling and also patience! You can introduce a topic from a poem, repeating and repeating. You can start by reading and showing them the poem itself and then from the words do little draws to give more meaning and make them understand it better. Another resource could be do mimic and/or start with a brainstorming.

When we already have chosen a topic and work a bit over it, you can ask them to describe you a picture, for instance, of a landscape with animals like that:

Let's say they are studying jungle animals, that picture can be kind of meaningful for them. While describing they can say "one giraffe", "there is one elephant"or just say "one elephant", using more or less grammar depending on their knowledge and the vocabulary they have learned before doing the activity. But what can be even more meaningful for them? Letting them to draw an animal, their own animal. You don't need to give them rules, just let them draw the animal they decide and however they want to do it. After that, you can ask them to compare their own draw with their classmates ones. While they compare the draws they will already be doing a description and empowering their language skills.

For example, if they have a cocrodile and an elephant, they can differenciate the colour, the size, what they eat, where they live, etc. Here's an example:

Lion
Paula, 5 years old

Giraffe
Ethan, 5 years old

We have here a Lion and a Giraffe, they can start by saying who is taller than the other, the color, the what they eat, where they live... there are many possibilities.

As I said before, it is so important giving them meaningful things to work on and they will always get much more motivated describing and comparing their own draw than a simple picture.

Teaching language skills

When we talk about language skills, we are talking about speaking, listening, writing and reading. These four skills are connected to each other because we learn to speak because we first listened. When we start writing, we write the words as we hear them, but if we don't know how to read the letters, we can't write.

That skills can be classified depending on the direction of the information, if you are projecting it or recieving it. They also can be classified by oral, speak and listen, and written, write and read.

In this post I am going to explain how children learn L1 and how to introduce an L2.

Children start talking around the age of two, not always, but before that, they already start by saying some random words or sentences. When learning L1, it is so typical as babies to hear what people say and copy or repeat it. There is a period called "Silent Way", where children just listen and don't talk until suddenly a day they begin to speak. During that process children collect words and expressions that they will eventually use when start to speak. Not every children goes through that.

At the age of 3 or 4, children start recognizing some letters. It is so typical to start recognizing their names, sometimes, not because they know the letters, but because they have seen it writed down many times that they know that in there it says their name.

Now we ask ourselves, how we introduce L2 to children? There are many answers to that question, but I am going to suggest a few possibilites. You can start teaching an L2 by listenint to songs, watch videos in that language or easy as speaking to them in that language. At first it may be weird for them, but they will eventually get use to it and will be catching and learning words day by day.

During the learing of a second language, there are two steps that we all go through:

• Passive knowledge: when we can understand a language but can't project it
• Active knowledge: when we can understant a language and project it

When teaching an L2 we don't have to be in a rush, it is a long process, even longer than L1, because they don't hear it everyday and everywhere as they do with L1. That's why we have to be constant and patient. 

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.