Project work

This last week we have been learning about project work. A nice way to introduce the topic to students is using “a mystery box”. The students do not know the content of it and they need to guess what there is inside through questions. This technique activates their cognitive skills, curiosity and attention, fosters use of English, and promotes interaction.

After using the box, we can continue working on the topic through different activities (for example, for the project “the family”, we had laminated members of the family and we did different tasks with that material: who is missing?, prepositions, etc.). A good tip we received is that when correcting, you should always do it in front of the student so they can see it.

The structure of the project is based upon two questions:

-          What do we know? (previous knowledge)

-          What do we want to know?

Having all this information into account, the teacher has to close the gap between these two stages by creating engaging tasks and activities. As teachers, we also need to decide the outcomes, including structures, of the project. Attractive activities can be storytelling, videos, songs, role-plays, pictures and drawings, etc.

The project should always conclude with a final task. This task needs to provide information for their learning and can be used with assessment purposes. Also a grid and observations are good tools for evaluation.