I was just getting disappointed that I didn't get to try out new teaching ideas at STARTALK this year, not having a class to call my own, when the opportunity presented itself in the last week. One of my teachers suddenly couldn't come in. Despite all the other things I had to do, I was excited about getting thrown a curve ball. After finding out that she was going to teach about nationalities, I decided to try out something I just learned from Laura Terrill at the NNELL summer institute - "The Power of the Image".
Yes, we all use images, but my renewed idea about the use of images is refreshing. We all use clipart, but is clipart the best form of images we can use in the language classroom? I liked emotionally charged images, authentic images, images that convey inter-culturality. (Did someone say "common core"?) So instead of using clipart of stereotypical images that represented the different nationalities, I found pictures of less obvious but interesting authentic street scenes or natural sceneries. I asked the students what they saw. Together, they brainstormed what they saw and deduced where the places might be. This process was intellectually engaging, perfect for the students developmentally. I spread out the large world map for the students to place the flags of each country on the map, connecting our language instruction with social studies. The next step would have to be using this to teach the continents, but I was only just subbing, so never mind.
Two days later, I was called in to cover the same class of 6th graders. This time I had to teach the names of geometric shapes. OMG! I had never taught shapes in my entire Chinese teaching career! I started asking myself why we put the shapes into the elementary curriculum this year??? Did I allow that? What's the communicative purpose in learning to say the shapes? Really stretching it now... How about connecting the shapes with the different flags they learned about in the past two days? That was a weak link, but so be it. It was okay as a mini initiation. But once the class gets rock-and-rolling, I started pulling out Paul Klee's squares, P. Mondrian's rectangles, and many other modern art works on geometric shapes. "How many rectangles do you see?" "How about the big rectangle made up by two little rectangles?" "Is this considered a square or rectangle?" On the semi-circle image, the students said that saw more than just semi-circles. They saw circles made up by two semi-circles and rectangles outlining a row of semi-circles. They are pushing themselves to really "see". The lesson culminated in a closure using another Klee print:
I never had a more engaging lesson teaching something that did not center around "social language". We were using content-based language instead. These are what the kids would be learning in their "normal schools". They would be learning about geometry. What a wonderful sight when all the kids swarmed up to the screen at the end of the lesson, counting the different shapes in the target language, agreeing and disagreeing with one another!
On using these images from the master artists, we are stretching to teach "high concept" and "high touch" as noted by Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind. Are we not teaching 21st-century skills, incorporating ideas of the common core while teaching geometric shapes?
