TASK DESIGN PROJECT

TASK DESIGN PROJECT

“The Germination”

THE CONTEXT

The public school JUAN XXIII is located at the center part

of Florencia in Caquetá. This school has been working with different programs such as Inclusión and Sabatinos which have been promoted by Ministerio de Educación Nacional. This year, the school opened its door to a ne

w program which has been taken as a pilot to know if it can be implemented at all schools in Florencia. This pilot consists of teaching in English to a whole preschool group during a year in order to make those children bilinguals. As every pilot, it has shown several difficulties that have to be improved in order to the program continue. One of those difficulties has been that th

e teacher who is teaching the children has to teach the whole journey in English. As this group is a preschool, in this stage students have also reinforced their knowledge

in their modern tongue. That is why, looking for ways to teach English without taking away Spanish have been a big difficulty. On the other hand, the teacher has the enough knowledge and experience in teaching English, but has never been involved in teaching children at this stage of education.

THE STUDENTS

I am working with 22 children between 4 to 5 years old. Two of those children are grandsons of teachers at the same school, so, they are middle class. The rest of the children, are poor and some of them are people who had to come from the country to the city because of social problems. Even though economic and social problems this kids come to class to learn and they show a lot of interest in learning English.

THE TASK

In order to make preschoolers bilinguals it is necessary to teach all the content in English that is why I try to introduce new concepts through meaningful activities.

Every period of the year we work with different topics to carry on projects. In the fourth semester we are working with nature. As one of the parts of the content for this period is the germination, I decided to choose this topic to develop the task.

Objectives

 To talk about the germination process.

 To use authentic materials to make a germination project.

 To learn vocabulary relate to the germination process and parts of the plant

The task was divided into three parts. The first one was introducing the children

with the term “germination”. This was made through explanation from the teacher and also, children had to color in a paper in which the germination process was drawn.

The second part was about using a plastic cup, cotton, and water to plant some beans in order to students learn in a more meaningful way how the germination process IS. Children were totally involved in the event, while they were learning the vocabulary of the objects used to make the project. At the same time, they were engaged and responsible of putting water every day IN THE CUP in order to keep the beans safe to germinate.

After a couple days, some beans become to germinate.

While beans a germinating, children realize about the parts of the plants. Now, they can see the roots, the steam, the leaf and the flower.

That is why the next part of the task is to put the names of the part of the plant in the picture and color it.

CONCLUSION

Children learn through repetition and hand making in a meaningful way, that is what this task was divided into three parts to give students the opportunity to reinforce vocabulary every day while they see the plant germinate.

I would implement this task again just changing the place in which the beans are plant. We had a lot of difficulties in managing the cups, and putting water all days. Some children threw their cups and other forgot to put water. Otherwise, students now know which the parts of the plant are; they can name and sign them.