STUDENTS’ NEEDS


Hi guys! Happy New Year!

In the first entry of this year, we are going to talk about the linguistic needs of our students in our class. Although I’m an Early Childhood Teacher, I have chosen the second year of Primary School as ‘my course’ (as the exercise required) and the subject of Natural Science because I think it’s a global subject which includes all the areas in the official curriculum, we can do lots of different activities and finally, because I like this subject. It is quite wide subject divided into five blocks so that’s why I’m going to choose the block number 3: Living Beings to focus my examples and activities.

I think that the type of linguistic exchanges we would need in this part of the subject could be the following ones:
  • Questions and answers
  • Definitions and descriptions
  • Experiments (expressing hypothesis and the possible solutions)
  • Different games and quizzes
  • Investigations and experiments or projects
All these linguistic exchanges would be adapted to the students’ level so we would set different difficulty grades and most of them would happen in team tasks.

According to the official curriculum for Primary Schools in the Valencian Community (Decree 108/2014), the required contents for this level (2nd year) and this block of ‘Living Beings’ are:
  •  Living beings characteristics, for example, plant’s growth observation
  • Animals physical characteristics
  • Parts of a plant: root, stem and leaves
  • Herbs, bushes and trees
  • The ecosystems as the living beings’ natural environment
  • Extinction reasons of species related to their natural habitat
Getting back on track, the linguistic exchanges in a typical class could consist in the next examples. Talking about plants, we could plant a seed in a plastic cup and talk about expectations at the beginning, describing the process and then discuss the conclusions. If we were with the ecosystems’ topic, we could create a project. Each group could choose a different ecosystem, search for information and make a poster drawing the ecosystem and explaining the food chain for example. When the posters are finished, we would do a presentation in class.

In general, this topic and the subject give place to many activities and linguistic exchanges.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THESAURUS

After task 3 we have a new entry for a similar task, in this case, the number 4. Here we have explored a ‘Thesaurus’. Thesaurus are dictionaries of synonyms and antonyms and this is exactly the information I have found when I have looked up the word ‘really’ in http://thesaurus.com/ In the case of ‘really’ we only find one tab with different synonyms and antonyms down these but for other words, we have as many tabs as meanings of the word. This way you can choose the best word depending on the meaning you are interested in. My results when I looked up the word ‘really’ were: Synonyms for really adv   without a doubt absolutely legitimately admittedly for real no ifs ands or buts actually literally as a matter of fact in actuality nothing else but certainly surely assuredly in effect of course easily truly authentically in fact positively ...
Read more

COMPARISION OF DICTIONARIES

In task number 3 we are going to compare different dictionaries and talk about their advantages and disadvantages. For this task I have chosen the word ‘really’ and I have compared the following dictionaries: Oxford Dictionary: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/ Webster Dictionary: http://www.merriam-webster.com/ WordReference: http://www.wordreference.com/es/ I prefer the Oxford Dictionary because it gives full of information. In this dictionary we can find different definitions classify by the function of the word (in this case adverb and exclamation) with some examples and phrases, and at the end, it shows the pronunciation of the word. I think this is the ideal way to learn the meaning of a word. The only disadvantage I could find is that it’s a bit messy with too much information but it’s great when you get used to it. However, from my point of view, the Webster Dictionary is the most innovative as it includes the first known use of the word, synonyms and even ...
Read more

WHAT'S A BLOG?

Today we are going to talk about blogs. Nowadays all of us have visited a blog at least once. Probably it would have been to read about fashion or cooking but, Could you give a definition? After have visited some blogs and have been researching in different websites where the notion of blog is explained, my personal reflection is the next: A blog is a personal journal or diary where people express their thoughts expecting someone is going to read them. The readers can also comment the entries. In this way, we could say that the main objective of a blog is to share information with other people. The person who writes in a blog is called ‘blogger’ whereas his/ her text entries are called ‘posts’. Posts are typically displayed in chronological order; the most recent post appears at the top of the website. At the beginning, blogs were usually personal sites covering a single topic of interest. These people tried to reach a thousand readers.  However, very soon...
Read more