First ideas from our project

MAIN IDEA: WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

-  The main purpose is to make the children be in touch with English in a natural way.

-  Improve the communicative competence of students, especially oral       skills.

-    Activities to promote active participation of children.

CONTEXT

The school that we choose for our project is situated in Ibarra. It is a small town which has approximately 4500 habitants and the Basque is the main language in this town. Generally there is a middle socio-economic level. The name of the school is Uzturpe ikastola, to this school go child between two to sixteen years old. This school works with Urtxintxa project and they start learning English when the children are 4 years old.

Our students are five years old. They started learning English last year, so we know what they know and the behaviour of the children. We are going to be only English teachers, in this way the children could connect a language with a person. This project is going to start in the second trimester of the year. The relation between family and school isn´t very close, but they are there when somebody need them. Also they organize meetings with parents every trimmest to speak about their child development.  

Our Role Play activities

The three activities we had created for Uxue´s project are the following ones:

1.      Calendar 

We will tell and draw in the calendar in which day was Uxue born. After, we will ask to each student to do the same one by one. Finally we are going to have all the birthdays in the calendar so know when we have to sing the happy birthday song.

2.      Season

After that activity we are going to say that Uxue was born on summer, so we will explain about seasons and their characteristics. We will use photographs to be easier for the children. Then we will give one image to each student and they have to connect with the correct season.

3.      Which season am I?

We will choose a child and we will put a flash-card in his back. So he or she would have to guess what season has in his or her back. For these, they would have to make questions to the other children.

Our child´s profile

The profile of the child that we have created for the roll playing is a five years old girl, shy and quiet.  She pays attention in English lessons because she likes English but sometimes she has some problems to understand.

ELEANITZ

These are the ideas that we like and we will take it in account for our project:

• It is a project whose objective is to complement the bilingual system.
• The Basque language continues being the main language.
• It is better to start learning English early and little by little, instead of start when we are older and a lot of hours per week. In this way we spend the same time learning English and Basque.
• An early start doesn’t automatically confer major advantages, the early start factor needs to be accompanied by other factors such as, quality of teaching and time for learning.

NEW CRITERIA FROM ADVICES AND ENGLISH EXERCISES

• Dynamic lessons
• Real concepts, avoid abstractions.
• Active participations, involve all children.
• Combine different type of activities.
• Prepare the class before.
• The importance of routines.
• Relaxed and friendly atmosphere.
• Use songs and stories.
• Concentrate on speaking practice.
• Be flexible.

AGE

There are some important ideas to take account when children start to learn English. One of them is that, when children are younger they have more capacity to learn a language. Other is that the exposure it isn’t enough, the quality and intensity also are very important. And finally we had to decide our goals to each language.  

To take account all this we decided that Our project is aimed at 5 years old. We think that they embrace the mother tongue so is good time to start being in contact with English. Our main objective is to get the first contact with English, to listen to a new language and get children used to it.

CLIL

Before that class we have never heard about CLIL, we don’t know anything about it. But when we read about different real projects, we understand better the idea. One of the projects is from Cataluña and the other is from Zerain, that isn’t officially a CLIL project but it has a lot of same characteristics. So, here are some interest elements and ideas from the readings that are useful to our final project.

 

CLIL

• CLIL: contents learning and language learning, both integrated.
• They learn contents in English, not just learn language. 
•     Focused on communication.
• It doesn´t exist the best method, because each method has to be adapted to each situation, school, class, children and etc.
• The context is very important; we create the method from the context, so we can´t use the same method to all context. We have to see what I have (children, school, resources) and then I create the project.
• It must be centered on students. 

 

INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH

• They work one topic in all the subjects.
• English is used to learn other subjects.One of the objectives of this project is to improve the communicative competence of students, especially referring to oral skills.
• When children answer in their mother tongue, teachers have to answer always in English, so students can repeat it.
• In oral activities, always try to use the same grammatical structure.
• The visual support is very important in this stage. Extra elements; like films, photographs, illustrations etc.
• The body language is very important too. 

UXUE JAIO DA!

• The activities depend on the children real context.
• They don´t use books.
• They have a very close relation with families so they work with them.
• Children of different ages were together in the same class.
• It is important to focus on the children interests and worrying, like this the students results and behavior are better.