First lesson of CLIL

Today, 21 April 2015, has been performed the first lesson of the Physical Education CLIL Didactic Unit The Little Red Riding Hood in the 1st course of Primary School.

The lesson has started doing a headcount of the students, in which children had to answer “good morning” in English after the teacher said their names. He vocalizes a lot, and always uses body language to make himself understand better. This is a very important point, because although children maybe don’t understand all the words, they can relate them with a gesture, and this way guessing the general meaning of the sentence.  The teacher also used a lot of words that children already knew, like numbers, routines, expressions… in order to make them feel closer and more comfortable with the foreign language.  

After the headcount, the teacher has ordered them to sit in front of the blackboard where he had placed the first five flashcards of “The Little Red Raining Hood” tale. Then, he has asked them if they knew what this tale was and if someone could tell it to the rest of the classmates in Spanish. One girl has told it, and then the teacher has repeated it in English, with the flashcards and the with body language help, using Spanish sometimes, etc. He has also empathized the words he wanted them to learn basket, pick up flowers, grandmother, etc.

Then Juande has explained the first game, whose main goal was to work laterality (right and left). To do so, he has divided the students into two groups: wolves (boys) and Little Red Raining Hood (girls), and he has numbered them. Then, each group has sat down separately making a circle, and when the teacher said a number and a direction, the member of each group with that number had to run in that direction, and try to catch the other (in the case of the wolves) or sit down in her place (in the case of the Little Red Riding Hood). If the wolf caught the Little Red Riding Hood, she had to sit down inside the wolfs’ circle. This game has occasioned many problems as children haven’t developed well the laterality concepts even in Spanish, so they didn’t know how to play correctly, and they just run to catch the other in any direction.

The second game was named “Picking up flowers”, in which the same two groups had to do a relay race consisting of picking up flowers (cones) put them inside a basket (hoop), comeback, and hit the next classmate's hand. So, the first group putting all the flowers inside the basket was the winner.

Finally, they had sat down in front of the blackboard again and had ordered the flashcards that the teacher had previously removed.

From an overall perspective, I think that it has been a good and productive lesson. However, I’ve seen some problems like, for example, that children seemed to be so concentrated on the tale that they were not paying attention to the vocabulary. On the other hand, as I’ve already mentioned, the first game has been a little mess, so the teacher has decided to repeat it in the next lesson, but helping the students to identify better their right and left hand, putting a sticker of a different color in each one.