The City Tour Project

The City Tour Project 

by Andrés Chousal, Gabriel Estrada, Ayleen Gallardo, Nicole Lizama & Josefa Toledo 

Context

Grade: 5th grade 

Type of School: Public

N° students: 25

English Level: A1

Lesson 1 “The City”

Length: Each lesson 90 minutes

• Content  Standard:
  
  

  Ministerio de Educación, Chile.Idioma extranjero, Programa de estudio 5° básico.

  
  

  Eje de aprendizaje: Reading and writing.

• Language Standards
  
  

  Reading OA 5: Leer y demostrar comprensión de textos adaptados y auténticos simples no literarios, que contengan palabras de uso frecuente, familias de palabras, repetición de palabras y frases.

  
  

  OA 6: Leer comprensivamente textos no literarios, como notas, postales, invitaciones, tarjetas de saludo, menús, recetas, diálogos, instrucciones o emails, identificando  propósito del texto, ideas generales, información explícita, y palabras clave.

  
  

  Writing OA 14 : Completar y escribir, de acuerdo a un modelo y con apoyo de lenguaje visual, textos no literarios con el propósito de compartir información en torno a los temas del año.  

• Content Objective
  
  

  By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

           Recognize key places in their city and how to ask and give directions.

• Language Objective
  
  

  By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

  
  

  Use sentences to provide directions, such as: “turn left, turn right, go across the roundabout, go   across the street”.

  
  

  Apply vocabulary unit such as: “traffic lights, railway station, underpass, zebra crossing”. 

           Use prepositions of place such as: “next to, in front of, behind, between.”

           

Into: The teacher will hand a sheet of paper with the new vocabulary they will see throughout this unit. Then, students will talk  with a partner about the places that appear in the sheet that can be found in their city and if they have been there. This sheet of paper contains a city map of Viña del Mar, so students have to work in pairs to find the places in the map, using the vocabulary and the sentences previously seen.

Through: Students will practice the new vocabulary seen in class through an activity designed by the teacher using the application Kahoot. Students will recognize the pictures and match it with the correct word in English.

Beyond: Later on, the teacher will hand over a cardboard and other materials needed for the next activity. Then in groups of five, they will create a piece of a city with one main street and two small ones. The group will choose three places they saw in the vocabulary (3 different places p/group) and they will locate them in the streets. Finally, they will add any other details to their maps, such as names, traffic lights and signs, trees, etc.

Strategy: students do Think-pair-share to identify  the places of the map given by the teacher.

Materials: Sheet of paper, pencils, cell phones or tablets to play with Kahoot.

Lesson 2 “My City Map”

• Content Standard: 
  
  

  Eje de aprendizaje: speaking, reading.

• Language Standards
  
  

  Speaking OA 12: Participar en diálogos con pares y profesores al realizar las siguientes funciones: dar instrucciones, identificar y describir lugares, dar información.

  
  

  Writing OA 14 : Completar y escribir, de acuerdo a un modelo y con apoyo de lenguaje visual, textos no literarios con el propósito de compartir información en torno a los temas del año. 

• Content Objective
  
  

  By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

           Recognise key places in their city and how to ask and give directions.

• Language Objective
  
  

  By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

  
  

  Use prepositions of place such as in front of, between, next to, behind, etc., in order to give directions.

           Use Wh questions to ask for the direction or location of a place.

Into: Students will continue working on their maps from the last class.

Through: A short video about prepositions of place will be displayed to the class. With this new content students will be asked short questions about directions and how to get to a particular place in their town. For example: Where is the bank? Finally, in the same groups, students will create a brochure containing the directions of their city’s main places. 

The teacher will put a cardboard on the board and students have to write inside of the circle the prepositions of place learnt in the class.

Beyond: Once they finish their group maps, the teacher will ask for each map and then they will be pasted in one of the class wall. The idea is to try to create a small town with each map students created.  

Strategy: Graphic organizer with prepositions of place.

Materials: A cardboard, markers, data projector, speakers.

Project Final Result: Using ICTs

• ICTs Objective

         By the end of this project students will be able to: 

         Create videos related to tourist places in their city in order to transmit and share information. 

         Discriminate among information on the internet in order to choose the most suitable for their video creation. 

     Finally, students will make out of this activity something real by making a video related to their city. They will choose among different tourist places in order to use the content studied in the unit, such adjectives to describe these places and prepositions of place to give directions.

Pixton: Creating your own comic book

Hello everyone!

     One of the things I really like are comic books and mangas. Thus, Pixton really caught my attention. The description is quite simple, Pixton allows you to create your own comic books since the characters, the background scenes, and the speech bubbles. You can sign up to the website using your Google account or creating a Pixton account as well. 

     If you go to the link, you will see that Pixton was created by a marriage couple. Their names are Clive Goodinson, and Daina Goodinson. Both of them combined their abilities in order to deliver this amazing website to all of us. 

These are the founders' descriptions shown on the website. 

Once you enter the website, you need to choose among these options.

After you sing up, you need to choose among these options.

     Later you need to complete some details about your own class, activity, people, and create your own avatar. Once this process is finished, you are ready to go. 

LANGUAGE LEARNING  

     Comics are really attractive to the humans' eyes, since they have a vast amount of drawings. Therefore, they catch the attention and interests of learners (Yang cited in Yunus, Salehi & Embi, 2012). Comics can provide to the classroom the necessary motivation for the reluctant readers, while the experienced one gains confidence and inspiration. (Yunus et all., 2012). At the same time, students can also develop writing skills by making their own stories, and then creating the illustrations. This is an important factor, since some students really enjoy reading comic books or graphic novels, but they struggle when they are asked to write something. Moreover, they need to use images in order to organize their ideas properly (Yunus et all, 2012) In this regard, websites such as Pixton can really motivate students to learn English while developing their reading and writing skills. Furthermore, is a creative way to connect the English subject with the Arts. For instance, they can work in the English class in their speech bubbles, and in their Art subject they can create illustrations that can be later transform into digital format. At the same time, you can ask students to do a presentation or even a play of their stories, which allows you to foster the English language in several and entertaining ways.  

LIMITATIONS

     The only limitation I can think about, as always, is the Internet connection and the lack of necessary supplies to do the task. However, the good thing about this website is that even when you do not have the resources to apply it, you can do it either way. You can ask students to bring materials in order to create their own comic books. They can watch tutorials on how to do notebooks on their own and then present their stories as actual comic books. It is always important to have in mind a Plan B, that can allow students to have fun when technology fails. 

     I hope this brief review was helpful to all of you. As for me, I would love to use this website with my future students. 

REFERENCES 

     Yunus, M., Salehi, H., & Embi, M. (2012). Effects of Using Digital Comics to Improve ESL Writing. Isfahan.

Songs for all

Hi everyone! 

     Today, I want to talk about a web site called Lyricstraining. Our teacher showed us this last week, and I found it quite interesting and fun. This web site helps you to practice your listening skills while learning pronunciation and different languages as well. 

     When I was in school, our teacher turned on the radio and played some song I had never heard before. In front of me, I had a sheet of paper with blank spaces that I had to fill in while listened to a random musical theme. I'm not going to lie, it was pretty boring as well as impersonal. I didn't understand the lyrics, the context and of course the song's meaning. I was completely clueless on how this could actually be effective learning. Now, you can ask the following: Isn't lyrics training the same thing? Yes, it is. However, don't blame on the tool, blame on the methodology.

     Most of the time, there are perfectly good technologies that are used poorly. It is our job to find ways to make learning fun and effective to our students. For this reason, I believe that this technology can help students with their listening skills as wells as their pronunctiation and spelling. The most important thing is that they can choose any song they want. Thus, their interests are actually involved in the learning process. That's pretty neat, don't forget that your students are the main characters of the story.

     Now, lyrics training is also about filling the blanks, something that has been used million of times with students, and it keeps failing in caughting out their attention. Mainly, because there is no connection between the song and students' personal interests. 

Lyrics training gives students the posibility to choose any song they want.

To choose different levels of difficulty.

Students can choose the modality of the game.

Students keep a score of their hits and fails.

     Moreover, by using this web site you can foster self-learning since students can use it whenever they want. You can even upload material for them, in order to inmerse your students into the English language in a fun and creative way. 

PLAYING LYRICS TRAINING

     I would love to use lyrics training with little kids (6-8 years old). I have noticed that most teachers try to make their classes in English, which is perfectly fine because students need to be exposed to the language. However, it would be a nice idea to complement it with this web site. Lyrics training can be used as a warm up activity to lead students into the English language. 

     For instance, let's work with the song "Let it go" from the original movie "Frozen". We can select the choice mode to make students start practicing their listening skills, then we can give meaning to the isolated words, and ask students if they know what they are (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, etc) By doing this, we can start learning the way words can be classified, and next time we can change the choice mode in order to practice spelling. Moreover, students can express their opinions about the movie and the main topic that was exposed in it. The posibilities are many, it is our job to make something good out of every new experience. Don't forget to ask students their thoughts, and how would they improve the activity, if needed. 

LIMITATIONS

     As all the activities, if it gets too repetitive, it will get boring too. The idea is use the tool but not exaggerate with its usage. Complement your classes with the web site and upload fun and creative materials for your students. Remember it all starts by yourself! 

Cheers to all of you!