Hello my blogger friends,
My name is Carla and I am a last year student of the Bilingual Teaching Training degree. As you could supposed I am really interested in educational resources and innovative teaching methodologies. In my blog called If you read they read I am going to talk about how to use child’s literature. In my opinion, it is one of the best sources we have to teach our learners. Through tales or songs they are learning new content, vocabulary and grammar at the same time and with a bit of imagination we could make this process really funny and educative.
The first thing I would like to share with you is this video:
I watched last week in one of the subjects I am studying this term. As you could see, it is a lesson for Infant Education children and although they do not talk a lot they are able to understand almost everything. I think it is because the teacher is using scaffolding continuously. First of all, she did a warm-up were the students learnt all the unknown words that appear in the story. From my point of view the best resource used in this part is bringing objects, which is an example of modeling scaffolding. Also, before they started reading they practice phonics through a song . Secondly, the teacher read the story but it was in an interactive way because she was asking questions continuously. In this part, students are acquiring all the content because they are recognizing all the new vocabulary in the tale. Finally, the learners made an activity where they had to put in order the sequences of the tale.
I watched last week in one of the subjects I am studying this term. As you could see, it is a lesson for Infant Education children and although they do not talk a lot they are able to understand almost everything. I think it is because the teacher is using scaffolding continuously. First of all, she did a warm-up were the students learnt all the unknown words that appear in the story. From my point of view the best resource used in this part is bringing objects, which is an example of modeling scaffolding. Also, before they started reading they practice phonics through a song . Secondly, the teacher read the story but it was in an interactive way because she was asking questions continuously. In this part, students are acquiring all the content because they are recognizing all the new vocabulary in the tale. Finally, the learners made an activity where they had to put in order the sequences of the tale.
Now that we have analyzed this activity, I would like to share with you a second video
This belongs to a lesson of second year of Primary Education. In this case the teacher have prepared several activities where she is going to check if the students have understood the story. As it shows, the teacher is making questions and there is a few use of scaffolding because they should already comprehend the vocabulary. During the lesson we could also appreciate three parts. In the first one, the students started remembering the tale content through Laura’s questions. Before start reading it, they check phonics repeating words. All along the second part, they read the story together, however there are some words hidden, those they learnt previously. Using this good activity you could see if they students have comprehend and acquire the meaning of the word. Finally, they finish the lesson putting in order the sequences, the same activity of the first video.
From my point of view, they are two good examples of dealing with stories in class. With the first video we have seen that is essential make a previous reading activity where students could see the new grammar structures and words. And in the second video, we saw a good example of how checking student’s comprehension and phonics.
However, I would like to change a little bit the ending activity that the two teachers used. For example, in the second video once the students have recognized the different parts of the tale (minute 4:45) they could performance the story. In this point they are able to do it because they have already matched the main sentence with the picture. I think that if we let students create by themselves we will see that they have understood the tale and it is a creative activity to check if it is true. Moreover, students would enjoy doing it because they will take an active role.
Before I finish this post I would like to ask you if agree with me, do you think it is a good way to finish the lesson?
Thank you for reading my post,
See you soon
Hello Carla:
ResponderEliminarWhat interesting videos! Thank you for sharing them with us!
I am going to answer your question because I totally agree with you.
According to the end of the activity shown in the second video, I think that after having matched the sentences with the pictures, we can check that children have understood completely the tale, so I think they can performance the tale perfectly.
Therefore, I would give to each one a character to create a role-play because with this kind of activities children are involved and they develop many of the skills such as their imagination, their social development, encourages friendship through cooperation, listening and turn talking, etc. Moreover, role-play encourages expressive language; this gives them the opportunity to extend language skills by paraphrasing what the child has said using more descriptive language and exchanging conversations using expressive language examples.
Good suggestion Carla, we must not destroy the imagination of children.
Nuria
Creativity and scaffolding are two basic ingredients of good teaching and learning! Oh, yes! :)
ResponderEliminar