My original ideas

My original ideas were quiet vague at the beginning. They were not clearer until I had to share them with my classmates. At the very beginning of the creation of my teaching sequence, I had hundreds of ideas but there were no time, not enough resources to carry all of them out. In addition to that, they were not connected and I had to pick up those ones that were coherent and made sense according to my goals.

Finally, when I had to define in a clearer way my starting point, I decided that I wanted to teach without using books. It was not because I thought they are boring or not useful, it was because I wanted to create and carry out completely by myself the sequence.

The topic I was going to carry out was food. I did not choose it, it was my placement teacher who told me to do it and I agreed and, actually, I found out that is an interesting and useful topic that allows you to work a lot of different areas, real situations and cultural aspects.

The format I wanted to give to my teaching sequence was PBL (Problem Based learning) in order to create a small project. It was due to that I wanted to allow and “force” my students to communicate. Consequently, the approach I wanted to use was cooperative learning, dividing the class in groups and allowing that communication in the target language could take place. I also bore in mind the activity on which I wanted to focus the sequence and that will be the main final product of it. I decided that a supermarket role play where they had to use food vocabulary, some structures when talking with the shop assistant and little of mathematic competence when they had to pay, would be I nice chance to encourage them to use the language in a dynamic way and showing comprehension of the sequence.

The only thing that was missing was the purpose and I thought that it could be a fun purpose that could catch students’ attention and could motivate them and me at the same time. Finally I thought of using film characters and it was Shrek who came to my mind. I decided that children were going to receive a letter from Shrek asking for help because he was tired of eating always the same things and it was said that in Spain there are a lot of nice food.