Suggestions To Ham to Improve His School Life - Apptivity

App - SocketPuppet

Learning Goal: Engage students into problem-solving situation, in which they are supposed to use the target language from the lesson to help solve “Ham’s problems”. By the end of this class, students will be able to use have to + verb to talk about obligations.

Procedures

Stage 1: contextualizing

• Show students a PPT slide which contains pictures of Ham, a teenage boy. (PPT slide attached) Tell them Ham has a problem that you’ll tell them about soon.

• Give them some time to think about the pictures while you forward the illustrations on the slides.

• Ask them to talk to a partner and say what happened in the story. Give them some time and elicit possible answers.

• After eliciting, tell the “real story” (an adaptation of a story in the book The Art of Changing the Brain). Since he was young, Ham has liked to watch educational programs on TV. His parents, both of them teachers, valued learning. However, he struggled in class and his grades were poor. He was very inactive in class. His grades got worse and worse until he finally dropped out of school. Now, he is a mechanic in SIA.  He has realized he needs and wants something better for his life.

Dani Lyra - Ham's Story-1-1

More PowerPoint presentations from Daniela

Story from The Art of Changing the Brain

James E. Zull

• Tell students they need to help Ham go back to school. To do so, they have to come up with sentences using have to and don’t have to, and solutions on how to improve Ham’s school life and attitude towards school.
• Teacher writes on the board 3 or 4 examples provided by students to be used as a model.

Stage 2: hands-on

• Teacher tells students they will record a dialogue in Socket Puppet app. Show them a sample.
• Deliver instructions and check understanding. Project socket Puppet and go over  features in  the app. Hand iPads out.
• Have students open the iPads and start working. (Teacher monitors)

• Students watch some of the videos and select the best or most common suggestions.
• Connecting:
  Students email their work to their parents and to the teacher to let them know they’re able to solve problems from everyday life. The final digital production is often very funny because the app reproduces voices at a different tone, so students and parents might have lots of fun watching the videos. They will surely know that at Thomas we have fun studying!
  
  
  
  

Flickr and the Learning Process

Show Me

 Here is an activity to have students reflect upon their learning process
Intermediate +

Speaking/Listening

Cameras

Flickr

A.    Many people believe that an image is worth a thousand words.  Go to flickr.com and choose 5 pictures that talk to you. Prepare a short presentation about them so that your classmates can get a picture of who you are.

     

B. Are you familiar with the rule of thirds? Read the definition below and decide which picture below applies the concept well.

Rule of Thirds

a composition rule that divides the screen into thirds horizontally and vertically, like a tic-tac toe grid placed over the picture on a television set. Almost all of the important information included in every shot is located at one of the four intersections of the horizontal and vertical lines

c. Now it’s time to take some photos. Grab your cell phone and go on a photo taking tour. Write a short text about your photo relating it to your own learning process, and make it available for the other students in class.

See an example here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danilyra/sets/72157629747572598/

Watching Learning Taking Place

As a mother of three, I have experienced firsthand the development of my children with enthusiasm and wonder. How do they learn? How could my tiny little babies become bilingual, strong human beings? The question of how children acquire language is still a mystery even after so many years of research. One thing is true: Children will not only learn the basic but also push themselves to master the target language or languages which they are exposed to from early years. How much of their understanding of the world around them is innate? How much of their understanding is actually built from scratch? There are many theories to explain what a mother can only observe and relish. What do babies know?

In an article from Time, Michael Bruton writes about an experiment that took place at the university of Manchester that was set up to investigate and challenge current thinking on what young children do know and how they construct knowledge. According to the article, Daniel, a 9 year old was shown video clips of a train on a circular track. The train would disappear into a tunnel and reappear on the other side. There were hidden cameras recording Daniel’s eyes and measuring the diameter of his pupils at very high speed. The process was set up to measure the babie’s level of interest and attention spam. Whenever some novelty was introduced, he would register it and notice by becoming more alert.

In an attempt to understand children’s development, theorists have come with different explanations. “nativist” psychologists theorize that children are born already equipped with internal concepts about how the physical world. This idea can also be observed in the innatist prespective on first language acquisition. Noam Chomsky claimed that all human languages are fudamentally innate; He argued that children are biologically programmed to learn languages and that language develops in the child in just the same way that other biological functions. The study carried out at the baby lab mentioned in the Time article challenges this ‘nativist” view and supports the ideas of the Swiss pioneer Jean Piaget whose work led to the conclusion that development precedes learning. According to Piaget, Children construct knowledge through their interactions with the world.

Babylab director Sylvain Sirios has been challenging “Nativists” Beliefs and experiments.

How does my child learn two languages simultaneously? How does she make sense of the world and is able to make herself understood if only two years ago all she could do was cry? According to Piaget and Babylab director they have to through mental schema allowing them to make sense of the environment. Learning happens when facing situations or mental schemas cannot process. Our brain find disequilibrium. In an attempt to find balance the mind either assimilates the new piece of information or adapts by using new skills. Piaget called the process of assimilating new information to our schemas learning. In othe words, Children construct knowledge through their interactions with the world. Either way, a mother rests assured that her child will learn, and besides sitting and watching the magic take place, we, parents, should propose challenges and interact with our children as much as we can in order to help them develop as much as they can.

Learning Taking Place

In class we could:

Show the video and ask students to discuss what learning is.

Write the words: Motivation. strategies,automaticity, purpose, reward,investment, risk-taking, self-confidence, positive attitude, positive feedback. Ask students to find examples of these ideas in the video and how they can relate to learning a language.