4th year ESO

1.  PHOTOGRAPH DESCRIPTION, by Isabel Natalia Revenga

OBJECTIVES:

-        To practice oral skills (listening and speaking).

-        To practice and revise vocabulary already seen in previous units.

-        To foster teamwork so weaker students can be helped by stronger ones.

-        To introduce participle clauses when making descriptions and compare them with relative clauses.

GROUPING:

-        The class consists of 17 students organised in 5 groups of 3 (1 high-level student, 1 medium and 1 low-level) plus 1 group of 2.

TIMING:

-        30-35 minutes in total.

-        10 minutes in small groups to prepare questions and discuss the topic.

-        20- 25 minutes to exchange questions and answers. Discuss about possible topics and subtopics that may arouse.

DESCRIPTION OF THE ACTIVITY:

Students had ten minutes to prepare questions related to the pictures in small groups, not only focusing on what they were seeing but on people’s feelings, suppositions and other aspects that could be inferred by different objects, background and people’s faces.

Then, each group asked the questions to the other students. In this way, they described the pictures and thought more on suppositions than in physical and obvious characteristics and we spoke about related aspects. This part lasted for 20-25 minutes.

The students really got into the activity making reference to aspects and details that could hardly be noticed, leading to a conversation beyond physical characteristics shown on the pictures.

We have also worked on this activity splitting the whole class into two groups, each one with another colleague. In our high school for some levels at the English Department, the teachers are used to sharing and dividing the whole group into smaller ones - having agreed what and how to do, what the students´needs are at that moment… beforehand-at least once a week, depending on the students’ needs and the schedule (these are the so called “desdobles”). Thus, we offer them the chance to improve their weaker performances in small groups with their own classmates, and, to a large extend, their self-confidence. As explained at the beginning of this activity in “grouping”, in this class of 17 students, one of the teachers would take a group of 8 and the other 9, keeping in mind their different levels: thus, each teacher should organise her groups in 4 or 5 high-level, medium and/or low level learners so that they can help each other in a cooperative way.

Once more, not only the two teachers, but also the students are pleased with the results on working on this type of activity in smaller groups.

CONCLUSION:

This activity was really useful to avoid the normal type of picture description in which a single student describes a picture following a pattern and fixed expressions.

In this way, students have had the opportunity of working in groups helping each other and they have exchanged good ideas that not all of them had thought about.

To some extent, students have developed the skill of analyzing an image looking at it in real depth, not only saying what they have seen at first sight, but inferring information, making suppositions and predictions.

Apart from boosting the oral skills of students, this activity has also helped them to learn that not everything we see at first sight can be taken for granted; we need to analyse and look deeply into images, adverts, slogans, etc. to see what they really want to transmit.

2.Working with art images and titles,by Francisco Javier López.

Grade level: B1 students

Time: about 30 minutes

Context: The class is made up by about 25 students who are from all walks of life and belong to different age groups, although there are a high percentage of teenagers.

Materials

I have chosen the following pictures:

1.      A Still Life, by the Dutch artist Floris van Dyck, because it clearly represents what it is understood by ‘still’ and it shows commonplace objects that are both natural (there are grapes, apple, nuts, olives, etc.) and manmade (a knife,  a glass, a plate,…).

2.      The Self Portrait Yo Picasso, because he painted himself as he was feeling at that time, a proud and confident artist who was at the rise of his career.

3.      Always Together, by the surreal painter Vladimir Kush, as it is a very imaginative piece of art and open to interpretation.

4.      Genesis, by the professional photographer Sebastião Salgado (the picture selected shows a line of penguins jumping off an iceberg in the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands), as his black and white artwork tries to take us back to the origins of the our planet, while showing us images of raw nature.

5.      Procession, by Norman Lewis, which shows a colorful representation of abstract work.  

Activity

I gave students the titles of the above mentioned works of art. First, in pairs, they had to write down a description of the type of work of art they expected to see. When I saw that most people had finished, I asked them to sit in groups of four and discuss with the other pair the different descriptions provided.

After some minutes, I showed them the real pictures and we had a general discussion about if the title fits the artwork and what they thought of the images.

Follow up

Each student is asked to select two pieces of artwork from the activity and has to write a paragraph stating:

1.      Their attitude to the piece of art and understanding of it before knowing its title.

2.      How their ideas changed after knowing the title of the picture.

3.MUSIC

Activities proposed by Esther Arranz:

As a Music teacher, after Easter holidays and especially during May my students are involved in the rehearsals for the annual concert. It took place yesterday. Taking that into account, and considering that my main goal in class is to teach music I am sorry and concern because at this moment I cannot offer an activity to share with the other teachers. However, I would like to comment on the ideas, tips or resources in general that I highlighted during the course because I consider I can take advantage of them for teaching the more theoretical contents in my Music class.

·        Prompts: I suppose every experienced teacher gives cues in order to help students to elicit ideas, answers. My reflection on this point is to use prompts in a more explicit and written or visual way, in state of just providing students with a few oral or improvised tips.

·        Visual literacy:  My students spend most of the class time with performing activities, playing instruments, singing or dancing. However, I will take this advice into account when we address more theoretical contents, such as the History of Music. I use to arouse their curiosity with music, just sound; I will try with images or, probably even better, with music and images. It is very easy to find Classical music in films and commercials.  

·        Videos: “not more than 2 minutes long”.  I must confess that I was surprised with this statement. Definitely, I have to divide the selected videos for the bilingual groups into smaller sections.

·        Kidspot: the activity you chose “Same name. Each of the items on the left shares its name with one shown on the right. Match the names” made me consider the possibility to work cooperatively with the English teacher looking for words or pairs of homonyms where one of the meanings or one of the homonym is a musical term: horn, pipe, organ, brass, triangle, movement, scale, tonic, dominant, tie, hold, flag, bar, key, meter, peg, neck, bridge, (finger)board

·        Sounds of American English - The University of Iowa

·        Hot English Magazine: I have been surfing into its web page and I found a free article with its corresponding mp3 about the music industry in the UK (http://blog.learnhotenglish.com/learn-8-useful-business-english-expressions-and-find-out-about-the-importance-of-the-music-industry/). This topic matches the contents in 4º ESO. There are many others that seem interesting (e.g. Culture – world dances, Music – controversial stars) but I could not read them yet.

·        Let students give short presentations in groups: I learned in your course that it is not necessary to have individual presentations –that is, more than 20, even 30 presentations per group-. I have highlighted this tip because it was the activity I have planned for today. The previous week the students were asked to prepare at home different topics from their book. The idea was that they make groups of 6 students and each one gives their presentation to the other five. However, today class was the first class after the concert. They were excited, they wanted to see the recording and to talk about the other classes’ performances, we watched the recording and just at the final part of the class time we tried to organise the groups. I knew it was not the right day, they felt like in a party. First idea as feedback, it is important to choose the right day and evaluate the mood of your students. The positive part is that now they know what they are going to do next day and they will be able to focus on the task as soon as they are divided in groups.