Discussion task #1: Design a writing activity in which young learners can experience both grammar and writing in a...

Discussion task #1: Design a writing activity in which young learners can experience both grammar and writing in a creative way using concrete props. 
                 
My 8-year-old students are learning colors, food, numbers and basic structures, such as “What is your name?” How old are you? “I like/ I don’t like…./ Do you like… To start working on writing, they had to create a ‘this-is-me poster, where they glued a picture of themselves on a poster and wrote information about them using the structures they are learning. They had never done such activity, so it was a little bit challenging to get them to write the correct structures, or remember the right word order.
 
To make the word order more attainable, I cut the structures into small pieces and glued them to lego bricks. Before writing, they had to put each word, or parts of speech. Together to form the right structure. As a result, not only were they able to  remember the structure, but some of them even remembered the order just because of the size of the lego brick. I was so proud of them that I displayed their posters around the schools so that all the other students could see their effort being recognized by teachers and other students

Comments

  1. Carolina Brenes BurgosApril 29, 2016 at 7:30 AM

    Very nice! I like the inclusion of lego bricks, it mixes both tactile and visual students!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Carol FerlineApril 29, 2016 at 1:08 PM

    Uau, very nice Danilo Ribeiro​!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Danilo RibeiroApril 29, 2016 at 1:17 PM

    It sure does. You know, I had to think it through carefully, and in the end,they all loved it Carolina Brenes Burgos

    ReplyDelete
  4. Carolina Brenes BurgosApril 29, 2016 at 1:51 PM

    Very very nice!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Juan UribeMay 3, 2016 at 2:29 PM

    Danilo,

    That seems to have been fun!
    Playing with lego connects the new world of English to their inner world. The richness of lego is that one can literally play and form lots of different structures. As you have mentioned the size and colors also helped learners attain the language. Brilliant!

    The posters have made concrete the language I assume they had worked orally before. An important moment here is letting them talk to each other based on their posters and give them the language they need to communicate. They can go around finding similarities, spotting differences, and also asking why.

    Grammar like this is fun!

    ReplyDelete

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