Today in my blog I´m going to explain you how I will turn 2 of my project activities into super learning missions for the students¡¡ That is, the students will be totaly motivated with these activities, as well as they will enjoy doing it. These learning missions are designed so that the students create their own knowledge and work by their own. The students will work on pairs or in groups, and the teacher will support them. Also, the activities that I´m going to turn into learning missions are alligned with The ESL Time way of working.
First of all, I have to remind you my Open Digital Educational Project which is aimed to students of First grade of Primary Education and the topic is "The weather".I have based on the Project Based Learning (PBL) to create my learning missions in order to relate the tasks with the real world and with my topic which is : The weather. The students will be more motivated when they will see the conection between the task they have to do and the real world.
The steps that I have followed to create my learning missions are:
1. Choose a flat activity.
2. Check how this can be meaningful and motivating for the students
3.Explain the instructions
4. Set goals
5. Explain the online tools and digital artifact
To start by talking about my first learning mission, what I´m going to explain are the steps that we have to follow to carry out the activities with the students, the goals that the students have to achieve, the online tools which the students have to use to achieve the final outcome, the final digital artifact that students have to create, the competences involved in this activity, and finally how I´m going to align my activities with The ESL Time .
My first learning mission is called "What´s the weather like?". What I want the students to do in this activity is a poster with Canva where put different cities in the world and the weather in each one at the same hour. The steps that students have to follow to carry out this activity are:
What´s the weather like? by María José Hidalgo-Barquero
As you can see on my slide created with Emaze (which I recommend to use it) the activity is very simple, the students only have to follow 3 steps. Firstly, they have to choose 6 important cities of the world, such as París or New York; Secondly they have to search on the internet the weather of each one at the same hour, and finally, when they have all the data they have to create a poster with Canva. This is a very simple activity because the children are in first grade of Primary Education.
I have chosen this activity so that the students learn that not every place in the world does the same temperature and even though it is the same day and the same time, at the other side of the world they can be in a different season. That is, this activity is related to the real world and is an activity that can teach students things from day to day.
Below, you can see an example of the digital artifact that I want students to do. For this I have used Canva to create this poster. This is an online tool quite simple to use for children of this age and with a great variety of resources to be able to create posters at your whim.
A Brief Historyof Sports by Maria Jose Hidalgo
Now, in order to follow the steps I have explained before, let's set the goals that I want the students to achieve with this activity
- Know different important cities of the world.
- Realize that not in all places does the same weather.
- Realize that not in all places is the same season.
- Look for information through the internet and choose the useful one.
- Carry out a very simple investigation
- Make a poster with online tools.
Finally, the skills the students have to work are the 4 main skills: listening, writing, reading and speaking. This is because they have to work in groups, therefore they should communicate with each other (speaking), read the information they are looking for (Reading), listen to the opinion of other colleagues (listening) and write the information they have find to then be able to make the poster with the most important information (writing). These are the 4 main skills that I found with The ESL Time in my last post In search of my partners.
To conclude I have to say that this process of turning the flat activity into a super learning mission has been very interesting and funny to create. I am learning how to turn the simple and boring tasks of the past into true learning missions for the students with whom they are going to have fun while doing the tasks and at the same time they are learning. With these challenges I am learning many useful things to be an innovative, fun and motivating teacher for the students.
