A day in the Life of Amar: Reacting and Reflecting

Amar (all great achievements require time) from Pilgrim Films on Vimeo.

I have always thought that every time we step into the classroom many things happens/can happen, much more goes on than just people learning words, sentences, grammar, etc. But I was not able to verbalize it until I met Juan Uribe. He does it perfectly in his blog and through his blog and chatting with him, I have been learning about the affective domain and its implication for language learning. In this post, Juan Uribe explains beautifully what Affective teaching is.

Providing learning opportunities in March for my Teens (9th graders) through songs, vídeos, Images and stories that promote reactions and descriptive language development as well as reflecting on our reality and other cultures. A Day in the Life of Amar – Thanks to Kieran for such wonderful lesson ideas with this video. I am using the video of Amar right now with my mixed-ability group of 9th graders (from total beginners to A2 level, group size from 1-8 students). I have adapted the suggestions as follow.

Materials & Activities:

Feelings & Emotions worksheet (it can be presented and practiced in a number of ways – I used a worksheet with facial expressions in a format of quiz. Get the right option. Allowed students to look up in a dictionary or talk to each other, then corrected and asked them to play in pairs a memory game using the images on the worksheet and eliciting from each other the right feeling/emotion.)

My main focus is to develop descriptive language with my students this bimester while tackling different aspects of the curriculum and adding new curriculum itens like cultural aspects and investigating reality (critical thinking about life locally and globally). I gave them some examples on my own. And then on their notebooks they wrote some examples about them.

 

Then, from the Feelings & Emotions worksheet, I drew their attention on the ones with -ed endings and we changed the endings to -ing. Once they got the list of words on their notebooks, I elicited the activities I do and shared with them earlier. And on the board, I will share what I feel about them.

 

As I share how I feel and elicit how they feel about those activities themselves, I hope we are creating a learning opportunity, not just to learn about the language, but also to learn about each other as we express our sentiments, ideas and thoughts without judging each other on the choices and preferences we have towards a number of things in our life. In fact, the silence should be the best place for us to reflect and assess ourselves.

Talking about our Routine is usually boring, but saying how we feel about them is not!

Now the reason why I chose the video about Amar is because I want to give them also the opportunity to think of cultures, life styles and reflect on those differences critically considering also, that it may not be part of their reality, but it is the reality of tons of children around the world, including in Brazil. Maybe even near them.

So, after we worked on the board and registered it all on their notebook. I showed the video (around 9 minutes) and the impact of it on them was really surprising. For the whole 9 minutes, their eyes didn’t blink, it lead itself to the following question:

If you could interview Amar, what questions would you ask?

They’ll add their questions here from tomorrow on.