*Teaching Primary Level Students:
Teaching at Primary Level requires hard work, willingness and commitment from the teacher, in order to create a good atmosphere and establish rapport in their lessons. I mean that we (as future teachers) may facilitate learning by establishing a relationship with students, keeping learning resources organized and creating a positive learning environment in the classroom. It is the teacher's role to develop and foster the appropriate skills and social abilities to enable a positive development of children, according to the Level, their abilities and interests. In addition, it is important to take into account that teachers at Primary Level must provide a good communication and interaction with students, and to be able to organize the amount of time that the different stages will require during lessons, in order to follow coherence and cohesion between stages of a lesson plan.
Moreover, the use of Web Tools and digital resources play a key role nowadays, as it gives teachers the opportunity to create interactive activities which make students feel motivated and enthusiastic to participate actively and take part in the learning process. It is highly important to introduce technology in Primary Lessons, as it provides teachers useful resources during their teaching process, and as a result, it helps in motivating students to develop the tasks provided and to improve their skills during their learning process.
* DIDACTIC UNIT: "What are you wearing?"
During the development of the Lesson Plans I designed for this Didactic Unit, I considered to reach the following learning aims on students: identifying and recognizing several clothes' items, describing clothes' features and people' clothing, designing people' clothing, developing listening and speaking skills, describing people' appearance and interacting with their classmates and teacher through individual and collaborative work.
The activities I designed are focussed on promoting creativity over students, improve their skills, and take an active role in the learning process through participation, communication, interaction and exchange of information, ideas and opinions. In addition, I consider that it is important to create a positive and suitable atmosphere in which students may feel confident and motivated to participate during the development of the activities provided.
Furthermore, the use of technological tools and resources played a key role to develop these lesson plans, as they allowed me to elaborate creative tasks which may involve students in the learning process. I used new web tools which I discovered and explored before putting into practice and designing the activities. As a result, I found a lot of teaching functions which helped me to motivate students and engage them in the learning process.
The activities I prepared to develop this Didactic Unit, were grouped into four weeks, and organized in the different stages of each lesson plan (following the cohesion and coherence which is required), in order to achieve meaningful learning in students.
- WEEK 1:
- During the development of Week Nº 1, I designed activities about clothes which are connected to seasons, in order to develop seasonal clothes' activities and allow students to work on this topic, identify new content vocabulary and introduce new sentence structures.
- WEEK 2:
- In Week Nº 2, students have to develop different activities about coloured toys by identifying colours of different clothes, and describing clothes' items. Also,they have to develop activities related to different clothing' styles about the characters of a cartoon. In these activities, they have to analize and identify specific features of the characters' clothing.
- WEEK 3:
- In Week Nº 3, students work with activities connected to characters' clothing in which they have to identify different clothing styles and describe them. During the development of this Lesson Plan, I presented another cartoon in which they also have to identify and recognize features in relation to characters' clothing.
- WEEK 4:
- During the development of Week Nº 4, I introduce to students my clothing style and describe it. I invite them to introduce and describe their clothing styles. In addition, I introduced two activities in which they have to select clothes' items to design different clothing styles and describe them. In this way, they introduce their own designs in relation to their favourite clothing styles.
* FINAL REFLECTION:
The
Didactic Unit of Primary Level “What are you wearing?” was designed with the
aim to allow students to learn and acquire new knowledge in relation to the
selected content, through different activities designed with the purpose of
incorporating new vocabulary and new grammar structures connected to the
content previously mentioned.
The
development of the different activities provided were focused on engaging
students to interact with their mates and teacher, by taking part actively in
the activities designed. I prepared different kinds of activities in the
following web tools: Padlet, Wordwall, Educaplay,Genial.ly, You Tube. I also
made use of authentic material and real objects in order to allow students
associate vocabulary with its belonging meaning visually.
I used some scaffolding strategies
to reach this purpose, such as ‘show and tell’ (which helps students to understand commands and
instructions in a better way and also allows them to make visual connections in
order to acquire knowledge easily). I also used ‘modeling and gesturing’ when
giving instructions. The use of ‘visual aids’ such as graphic organizers, pictures,
and video presentations which I designed
to develop some activities, is other important strategy which helps students
visually to relate contents, represent their ideas, guide and shape students’
ideas.
Furthermore, I found it useful to
‘connect to background knowledge’ as a scaffolding strategy which allowed me to
have coherence between stages and between the previous lesson and the following
one. In addition, I made use of “giving time to talk” as a necessary strategy
when asking the students individually to participate, in order to give time to
each student to process new information, acquire it and elaborate their
answers. Moreover, during the development of activities I put into practice
‘questioning’ by sentence structures such as: “What is it?” “It’s a + (clothes’
name)”; “Are you wearing + (clothes’ name)?” “Yes I am/ No I’m not”; “What are
you wearing?” “I am wearing + (clothes’ names)”; or “What are they wearing?”
“They are wearing + (clothes’ names)”, in order to create an atmosphere which
allows communication through questioning and answering (short dialogues) and
doing some review on the topics learnt.
On the other hand, I realized that
some issues require to be analized carefully before assigning the activities to
students, such as the activities’ development, I mean if they will be assigned
to be developed individually, in pairs or as a group. It is an important
feature as it defines the students’ performance, and as a result, their improvement
in their learning process. In addition, there is other issue I have to take
into account for future lessons, which has to do with the organization and
distribution of grammar structures among the lesson plans designed, in order to
avoid repeating the same structure in different lesson plans.
As a result, I found all the
advices and feedback from the tutor very useful and important to take into
account for the design and development of future lessons, because they guided
me and helped me to improve during my learning process. Furthermore, the
resources and tools online I employed in the lesson plans, were really essential
and helpful as they helped me to elaborate the different activities provided.
For this reason, I consider that it is highly important to include all these
virtual resources in our future lesson plans, because they also allow us to
innovate and improve in our lesson plans’ development for Primary Level.
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario