OUR SCHOOL
Mas Rampinyo is a Primary school which is located in Mas Rampinyo, a Montcada i Reixac’s neighbourhood.
As far as the centre is concerned, it is a two-line school with 30 teachers and about 400 students, from Reception (3-year-old students) to Year 6.
The shool was created in 2006 and since then, the learning approach has been project-based.
The school is involved in different community projects such as “Escola nova 21” and “Xarxa XIEP”. Moreover, this year, the school has started to implement GEP (GEneració Plurilingüe).
INTRO
The school will be implementing the GEP programme, from the Department of Education, during the three following academic years (2018-2021). The main objective of the programme is to improve the linguistic and plurilingual competence of students. This objective will be achieved by increasing the exposure of English language from other non-linguistic fields of knowledge (CLIL). Our school is already teaching parts of the curriculum in English, such as parts of class' projects.
GEP
GEP 1 & GEP 2
During the first two years of this project, a few teachers from our school got training sessions on methodology by the group of teacher trainers from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).
The first training year (2018-2019) was focused on CLIL (content and language integrated learning).
The second training year (2019-2020) dealt with PBL (project-based learning).
In the following sections, you will find the Tasks.
GEP1
TIMETRAVELLERS,
THE TASKS
Each year students have the opportunity to watch an English theatre play in the school. Consequently, one of the lesson plans of the school year is based on this event. It is a good opportunity for students to listen to English native speakers.
Having the theatre play in mind and as the core learning process, we have design different learning experiences to deal with different historical facts. We will have the objective to write biographies of historical characters in a dynamic and cooperative way. Finally, students will design a time-line with famous female characters from the present and last century. They will also use this information to create a “guess who” game with these famous female characters.
Therefore, it is a lesson in which students can learn English in a cross-curricular way and taking into account gender equality.
FINAL PRODUCT
REFLECTION AFTER IMPLEMENTING GEP1
After implementing these activities that were created having the TimeTraveller play as the excuse to learn about biographies and historical facts, the next ideas can be highlighted as the most important ones:
The communicative competence is the main aim of primary education. Therefore, creating group work and promoting social interaction increase the opportunities and enrich and expand the outcomes. In our opinion, we have provided students with a great variety of collaborative and cooperative activities in order to encourage them to use the language within a context.
Having the opportunity to implement the same activities to different class groups, it allows us to see the different ways students/group classes deal with the same activity. This diversity gives us the chance adapt the activities attending the specific students’/group classes’ needs.
Although we plan in advance, we are aware that some adjustments need to be done. This case has not been an exception.
Dealing with biographies it has lead students to talk about female characters. Due to the necessity to visualise the role of women within our society, we consider these activities to be a positive excuse to go deeper into this matter.
Finally, we would like to highlight the fact that the topic has been treated in a Cross-curricular way. That means, our objective was not only to teach English but also to deal with different domains and the 4C (Cognition, Culture, Content, Communication).
GEP2
In our school, we have a backbone project called 'Projecte-Junts'. It is a way of organizing students and teachers around a topic.
Each year a topic is chosen as the thread of the project. This year's project is based on 'Healthy Eating.'
With regard to students, they are arranged in mixed-age groups from Year 4 to Year 6.
As far as teachers are concerned, all of them are involved -class-teachers, special teachers. Consequently, the groups have an average of 18-19 students.
Taking into account this environment, we resolved that it would be a great context for implementing our GEP2 project.
"Do Children Eat Too Much Sugar?" became the driving question, which led students to read labels, check the amount of sugar in some food and be aware of some of their food choices.
Moreover, from a piece of news, students were to guess the maximum amount of daily sugar intake and the differences between natural and added sugar.
All in all, it became an opportunity to cope with realia and inquiry-based activities that promote the use of English as a means of communication.
REFLECTING ON SUGAR PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION
Once we have implemented part of the proposal we agree that it has become an interesting opportunity to observe how students get involved when the topic is meaningful for them. They were not only focused on learning English but on using it to deal with the driving questions.
The lesson plan gives students opportunities to build 21st-century competencies such as critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity, which will serve them well in life. Therefore, the essentials of project work have been considered.
Student’s daily intake of sugar became an excuse to contextualize a challenging question that arose at the very beginning of the project ‘Do Children Eat Too Much Sugar?’.
Therefore, authenticity was one of the key features of the whole proposal since it is socially relevant on the grounds that it brings them the opportunity to critically think about their food choices.
With regard to voice and choice, students’ opinions have been taken into account by being involved in the designing of the final product and in some of the assessment tools, such as the checklist and the oral presentation rubric assessment.
Eventually, the proposal seeks to find a public audience to foster the learning process more meaningful and to make students face the challenge to communicate and put into practice what they have learned.
On this occasion, students took advantage of the Projecte-junts exhibition, to show to the whole community their sugar display.
In our opinion, we found a very balanced group of activities that allow all students to achieve their goals. Learning a language requires creating opportunities to use that language in a very rich context. The richness of our project came from two ways: the diversity of activities and the topic of our project.
The topic allowed all the students to participate because it is a very current topic in our society and the diversity of activities included conversations, interviews, cooperative structures, different ways of grouping, variety of texts, games, different ways to organize and expose the information, diversity of ways to be aware of their learning.
From our view, to provide students with a solid scaffolding during the project is a key factor to assure the achievement of the goals we planned. That’s why we were so much careful about language scaffolding. Along with the project you can see a variety of pieces of evidence to support students’ language needs.
With regard to motivation is an intrinsic need every student has in order to interact in a context. In a project, you can feel that motivation arises from each student from two sources, their interest in the topic and/or their involvement in the activities. In our case, we observed both ways. Nevertheless, as we could see, students have opportunities to find motivation during the project as their knowledge about the topic increases.
As we commented on GEP1 implementation, one big change or opportunity we live in is teaching group work. Planning any learning situation along with another teacher is an enormous chance to enrich our practice and knowledge, our teaching abilities, in short, to learn as teachers. It is something that should be promoted and increase for every teacher, allowing and fostering teachers to work together with some shared goals. Surely, it implies to organize a time to meet and think together. Therefore, emphasizing the teacher's cooperation has become an essential feature. And, in our opinion, it positively reinforces the students' learning process.