Let's learn with Phineas and Ferb
THE VALUE OF GRATEFULNESS IN TEACHING.
One of the characteristics that makes this project and pedagogical proposal situated is the fact that it is meaningful to the pupils through the usage of values as a transversal axis to teach EFL. Therefore, one of the main values that will serve as a basis to accomplish this goal is gratefulness.This, because of the fact that kids need to raise awareness of the importance that saying thank you to others is part of growing up for them as human beings. Thus, it is important to define what gratefulness is. According to Cameron, Duton and Quinn (2003) To be grateful is defined as "being aware of and thankful for the good things that happen" (p.82). So, It does not matter the language that kids or even any person is learning, the first thing that they have to learn using a foreign or a second language is to say thank you to other individuals because this value and these words are the ones that are going to base successful interpersonal relationships in his/her social context.
Foremost, this has to with with the spiritual domain that each kid needs to develop in his/her childhood to achieve becoming an intergral human being. Quoting Toulouse (2011) The spiritual domain is related to "all those thoughts, activities, intercations and rituals that intimately connect a person to the world" (p.10). In this case the interactions and activities that the students will do are going to be focused on the language which is English in which they are going to express themselves either orally or in a written way and in the situated aspect that in this case is going to be the importance of saying thank you to others. This, with the intention of helping the learners have a greater purpose than the self.
After having explained the connection that exists among the value of gratefulness as a situated term that is important for the development of the kids while they learn EFL it is iportant to examplify some activities that learners can do to internalize this value.
Tell your students to write short senteces using the phrase "I am thankful for" to show that they are grateful for something or with someone.
You can download this material for your class, clicking here
After this is done, tell your students to try to express what they wrote to a partner maintaining the phrase. "I am thankful for... or I am thankful with..."
THE EMOTION COMMOTION
One of the introductory topics to based the core of this class is the use of some emotions or as they are known in the virtual world emoticons or emojis. This, as a source for them to relate the emotion that they are seeing with what they can feel in their daily life. This is supported by the idea of Oro and Varela (2004) who pose that "emoticons are used to express emotions which reinforce what is said, or clarify the way in which a statement is to be taken" (p.398). Therefore, kids or any human being can go through different sirtuations and they might not know the words in the foreign language that they are learning to express themselves, Thus, an emoji or emoticon can communicate others their feelings and sensations.In complement the use of emojis in the classroom can contribute to communicate your intended meaning which can be imperfect, but it might help others figure out your mood (Erwin 2016). Then, emojis can help the learners to interpret and speculate about the context or better the reason why other human beings are feeling the way they do which can be a medium to teach EFL to to children in a different way.
On the other hand, the use of emotions in the classroom can encourage learners to express the way they feel as a routine that is part of their learning process (Carole, 2014). If this is done daily, implicitly pupils are going to want to tell others their mood and by doing this the facilitator or guide is going to have a chance to introduce new and refreshing vocabulary to them everyday. What that being said, I suggest to do thge following activities with your pupils:
Show this emojis to your students for them to guess what emotion is being shown to them. Tell them to say out loud the emotion when they see it. Afterwards, do this exercise again. But, this time ask them to repeat after you so that, you can correct their pronunciation.
In this class, the students will be asked to watch a video which involves their favorite characters, they will show them different feelings or emotions that are part of the daily life. Once an emotion is shown, the teacher will stop the video for the students to tell what the emotion is. Afterwards, the pupils will do an activity where they will join some emotions with their words for the to manage and remember the vocabvulary well.
Tell your students that tey have 10 minutes to join the images and color the faces that they have on the sheet of paper
Download this material for your classes clicking here
Let's check what we understood from the episode "Mom's Birthday"
To respond this exercise, you need to watch the episode first. Please, click here to do it.
Please answer the following questions taking into account the episode thay you watched before
This is a very good exercise for checking comprehension. May you insert the episode on the blog's body, so it gets easier to access
ReplyDeleteThank you Juan, the thing it is that is because of the author rights Iit does not allow me to do it. I tried but I got locked. That's why I used the youtube link.
DeleteI tink that the video about emotions is really creative and show us a new way to teach the English vocabulary. Maybe you can find some short videos such as gifs to get more clear some emotions as "excited".
ReplyDeleteExcellent episode, it was a smart decision to choose it for the purpose you needed.
ReplyDeleteOscar, I think that working with this dynamic is meaningful because it combines the students' pleasures and the need of helping them to have a better cohabitation in the classroom. It could be useful for our exercise as teachers, to know the real impact of using this method in a classroom in order to analyze how it can be adapted in differents learning environments.
ReplyDeletethank you Oscar for the information you posted.
Currently, it is a little harder to get the attention of students and that they create meaningful experiences with knowledge. It is in these moments, where we make use of our creativity and we use elements that are part of everyday life to attract their attention, so, this is the importance of using this type of methodologies. However, it is important not only to give relevance to the images; what do you think if after showing an emoji you also use non-verbal language?. Thanks for the information, I hope you post other activities related to the sitcoms.
ReplyDelete