One of our main concerns as language teachers is giving students our best strategies for them to learn. In some cases, we can notice that even though we make huge efforts in our classes, our students are not able to transfer knowledge into real life circumstances. In this post I will tell you my experience teaching kids in an environment different from the classroom.
Going to a farm and developing english activities in it was one of my duties as language teacher in a kindergarten called Liceo Santo Ángel. The farm is an opportunity
for children to have contact with farm animals, to sow food and basically to be in a space
different to the school. I took advantage of these visits to the farm in order to develop some
activities in English.
In the first times that we went to the farm, I started to observe my students and I designed an observation format to write the aspects that I was finding there in regards to the students’ attitudes, disposition, behaviors and motivation towards the target language and towards a context that was different from the one they are used to be immersed.
Looking at students’ attitudes in the development of language activities showed that it is very
positive the fact of having a different space to work. It enables curiosity about the assignments proposed by the teacher and students demonstrate enthusiasm, motivation and disposition in the development of them. It is also a comfortable space to sing, play and enjoy.
In the same way, the farm served as an articulation of topics seen at school. Working in a different space allows to do a more practical and real exercise and some thematics seen at school can be reinforced in the farm by using real materials to learn the foreign language. A student affirmed that:
“When we went to the farm, we started to Paint some rocks with several colors. Then,
the teacher asked us again about colors and we said them in English”. (Focus groups’
transcription. March 22 nd , 2018).
The previous statement evidences the fact that going to thhe farm and developing activites
there is an opportunity as well for language learning. The farm allows the teacher to review the topics that are seen at school in a more realistic way.
Cite this blog post
Tiria, Y. (2019, April 2). Providing students meaningful learning opportunities [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://yohantiria.wixsite.com/blog/post/providing-students-with-meaningful-learning-opportunities
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