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LICENCIATURA EN DOCENCIA DE IDIOMAS

Course:
Diseño y Elaboración de Medios Educativos

Subject:
Final Project: Design of a Fun Activity

Course Tutor:
Lic. Margarita Sarlat

Student:
LINDA E. ARCE GOMEZ

6th Semester

May 23rd, 2009.

The project exposed in the present work, was developed in regard to a necessity to review and consolidate the acquired knowledge of my second grade students of Secundary School within a specific unit. The purpose is to do it in a fun and interactive activity in which the students can work together and help each other in a relaxed atmosphere where they are willing to demonstrate their newly acquired knowledge.

There are many reasons to use games and fun activities in a classroom:
According to Wright, Betterdige and Buckby (1984), “games help and encourage many learners to sustain their interest and works. They also help the teacher create contexts in which the language is useful and meaningful. The learners want to take part and in order to do so they must understand what others are saying or have written, and they must speak or write in order to express their own point of view or give information. If students are amused, angered, intrigued or surprised the content is clearly meaningful to them. If it is accepted that games can provide intense and meaningful practice of language, then they must be regarded as central to a teacher’s repertoire”.

According to Su Kim (1995) There are many advantages of using games in the classroom:
1. Games are a welcome break from the usual routine of the language class.
2. They are motivating and challenging.
3. Learning a language requires a great deal of effort. Games help students to make and sustain the effort of learning.
4. Games provide language practice in the various skills- speaking, writing, listening and reading.
5. They encourage students to interact and communicate.
6. They create a meaningful context for language use.’

Deciding what game is suitable for a class depends on information about the learners’ age, culture, social status purposes and goals; the learning approach and some other characteristics. These are all components of the curriculum and the syllabus of a language course that is systematical and meant to meet the expectations of the institution and students Nunan (1986). Therefore in my opinion these same aspects must be considered when choosing a game.

The context in which I centered this project is for second grade students of secondary school, their ages are around 13 to 15 years old, the school’s name is Escuela Secundaria Tecnica 43,

The school: The characteristics of this school are; low to medium socio-economical level, groups of 30 to 40 students per class, situated in a new urban area of the city (suburbs), the majority of the students come from dysfunctional families and live in neighborhoods whit lots of social problems.

The teacher: I am the only English teacher in school, I give classes to first, second and third grades, I have worked there since the school started in 2001. Other teaching experiences are two other Secondary Schools in the city, for two years, Secundaria Diurna No.2 and Secundaria No 9. I get along very well with my students, although the majority is not interested in learning English; I do my best to try to keep them motivated.

The syllabus: The English classes in Secondary School are based on a program designed by the Ministry of Public Education; the classes are given in 50 minute modules three days a week per group. The level used is basic and the syllabus has a communicative approach.

The selected activity is a grammar game in which the students have to work in teams to elaborate correct sentences and put them on the board. I selected this activity because I consider there is a lot of team effort involved. Students review the words in their deck of cards they are using, and at the same time they are reviewing, they have to organize themselves, be tolerant, and work together. These are some of the social competencies that are important to develop in adolescents, aside from the knowledge learned in class.

Procedure:
• Activity: “Giant Steps” (Sentence Structure Competition)
• Aim: 2nd grade Ss of Esc. Sec. Tecnica 43
• Group size: 32-36 Students per class aprox.
• Ages: 13-14 years old
• Background Knowledge: prepositions of place, rooms in a house, furniture, sentence structure
• Topic: House and home
• Objective: To practice the use and form of sentence structure in teams and in a fun way, and review the topic.
• Materials needed: chart cards (images and words), chart holders.

Description:
• Students will select a member of the team to represent them at the front of the classroom.
• Each team will have a deck of chart cards with written words (25 of furniture, 8 parts of the house, 7 prepositions of place, 2 indefenite articles, 2 verb to be).
• The teacher will have another deck of cards with images (rooms, furniture, etc.)

The teacher will show two images to the students, and according to them, they have to construct in teams a correct sentence with the given set of word cards. The team who finishes first and gets the sentence right will advance a giant step (a classmate at the front of the class). But since these are large classes with six teams in each one, while three groups are participating at the front, the other three will be the judges. The member of the team that gets to the finish line first is the winner.

I presented this activity in the four second grade groups I give classes to. The students made a real effort to work in teams, they were very much involved in the activity, they participated actively and produced overall good sentences. Some small mistakes were made, mostly by missing the article “the” and in isolated cases misplacing a word. The corrections were made by other students who came to the board and rearranged the word order, but they were minimal. Overall the activity was very successful, the students worked in a cooperative atmosphere, the environment in class was relaxed and fun, but at the same time they worked together in a very positive way.

As I was developing this activity, I first started by selecting the words, I changed the list several times, living what I considered to be most useful ones. After that, I printed them in white paper sheets, but then decided that it would be best to separate the words by color, so I printed them again but now using color sheets: blue for the furniture, yellow for the parts of the house, grey for the prepositions, and beige for the verb to be and the article “the”. In total I printed 44 words for each of the three teams, a total of 132 cards.. After that I stared to cover each card with “contact paper”, but then decided to do it differently because it was taking a lot of time. Then I would put groups of 20 cards down in the contact paper, first by one side, and then the other and finally separating them by carefully cutting each card, this process alone took more 4 hours. I had a lot of help from my children; my husband and my grandma who helped me make special boxes with six divisions in each, to put the cards in to form the sentences.

This activity was meaningful and successful because it meet its purpose: to review and consolidate the acquired knowledge in a fun and interactive activity in which the students can work together and help each other in a relaxed atmosphere where they are willing to demonstrate their newly acquired knowledge and at the same time acquire social competences by working in teams in an organized and tolerant way.

• Nunan David, Syllabus Design (1986)

• Lee Su Kim ‘Creative Games for the Language Class’ Forum Vol. 33 No 1, January – March 1995, Page 35.

• Wright Andrew, Betteridge David and Buckby Michael
‘Games for Language Learning’ Cambridge University Press, 1984