Monday, October 25, 2010
Building Language Awareness
In this video, we are able to see a variety of activities and multiple intelligences displayed by the students. I was very impressed by the teachers/facilitators in this video because they used activities that would allow students to actively engage in the learning process. In addition, all of these activities could have been used for a different subject, but could have been part of one thematic unit. For example, the skit about the Pilgrims coming to the United States could have been a fine arts lesson, the discussion afterwards could be part of language arts, and using travel brochures to find information could be used for social studies. These sorts of lessons and activities are great examples of the types of lesson that I have been learning about in my education classes, especially my bilingual education classes. Allowing the students to make connections to their own personal lives is one way to help students better learn and understand the material. Also, including kinestetic activities in the classroom is especially helpful to ELL students because they are able to learn through movement. Also, going back to making personal connections is one way for teachers to incorporate cultural diversity into the classroom. Since the lesson was focusing on the Pilgrims journey to the new land, teachers could allow their students to talk about their experiences leaving their home countries and coming to America, just like in the video. This gives a student a chance to practice their language skills and share a personal story and it allows others in the class to learn more about their peers. Overall, I found this video to be a reinforcement of what myself as a future bilingual educator should be doing in my classroom as well as a great tool as to how I can incorporate cultural diversity into my curriculum.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I agree that this video did a great job showing the use of multiple intelligences actually being put into practice. In education classes, we talk a great deal about catering to different intelligences in our lessons, but it was even better to actually see it happening.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI certainly agree that this video illustrates an excellent lesson. I wholeheartedly agree with all of the positives that you have listed above. The teachers did do a fabulous job of incorporating those multiple intelligences, multiple content areas, authentic language practice, etc.
ReplyDeleteI did, however, question how it was building language awareness. Language was never explicitly talked about in the lesson, nor was the idea that language is/was/has been used in situations like that of the Pilgrims and the Indians to create power structures. Granted, I am fully aware that these children are only 9 years old, and, therefore, a discussion of that caliber would most likely not be found in that classroom. I question whether my ideas and definition of language awareness are right if this video is truly a good demonstration of it.