Joy in school

Yesterday I read a phrase by Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) that is: “…flow learning, he defines it as the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it at even great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it…” I related to one of my experiences in primary. I was dealing with the parts of the animals and I had to test communicative. So I adapted some pictures that were on the internet to the reality of my class, for the Ss. to describe it. The pictures were animals doing human things. They were so nice and attractive that the students were really involved in the activity and they worked brilliantly. So I think that is our responsibility to create this atmosphere to learn. Because they were working as if they were playing, and the spontaneous speaking was great. We need to rethink how and what we teach. The power is in our hands; help your students find the pleasure in learning. 

These are some images that I used. 

• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow. New York: Harper Perennial.

Material Design

Hello everyone! Today I want to share an experience that we had at the teacher training college. We presented a poster about our experiences in teaching with material design in communicative activities. In order to do this we read two authors; Howard J. and Major J., both of them say that we have to take into account some things to do it. For example: our material has to be in contex. Also, it has to be adapted to the individual needs of the students. It has to show your creativity and you have to add something that makes it personal.  In my case I worked with the daily routines, so my idea was to make a poster with my own routines. I can say that it was a great idea, because the Ss. Felt very curious about the topic and they felt comfortable telling their owns routines. So this was a nice communicative activity. Another example was from my mate Luciana Riquelme, she did a video with audio and sentences about her family and their feelings that was called “how is my family feeling today?” in both cases we create something personal and nice to work with the Ss. In addition, we worked with adaptation of material design. In this case we use flashcards and cartoons that were already done, in our classrooms and realities. In my opinion, we can do great things with little, this takes time and money, but I can say that it is worthwhile and creates meaningful knowledge. 

• Howard, J. Major, J. (2005). Guidelines for Designing Effective English Language Teaching Materials.