As an English teacher for Young Learners, I run a private language centre offering extra-curricular English language courses to children. To ensure full enrolment of the study groups by September and smooth operation throughout the academic year, I start marketing my courses mid-summer.
The idea of a short summer CLIL course helped me to expand the student base. Additionally, I implemented a student’s achievement portfolio to showcase their progress, which was well received by parents and students alike.
When the summer comes, many teachers start thinking about extra-curricular clubs, fun and creative workshops to fill in the pay gap for the quiet holiday months; for my first summer camp season, it was different. I had an idea that had been sitting to one side throughout the year, waiting for the first summer sun, the vibrant lush of the softly rustling leaves, and the refreshing shade of the trees in the early June days after the tiring academic year. It was insistently alluding to the fact that learning can be different, especially in the summer when the school break starts.
This idea was something that had been sitting inside and waiting for the answers. How could we make a collage or do a science experiment in an exam preparation class? To which lesson could the students bring their basketball or a hockey stick to practise balancing the puck in front of their groupmates? And in which context could we bring in litres of gouache paint and have a four-hour art class?
This is how we started ‘Picasso Lab’ – a CLIL day camp for children who want to enjoy their summer holidays, learn about art, science and culture in a creative environment, and try out their English outside the classroom.
The programme of the five-day camp consisted of a mixture of theory and practice in science, art, history and culture and was flavoured with some nameable kitchen science experiments.
Planning the programme was a disaster as the groups were totally mixed ability – levels from A0 to A2, ages 6 to 10. However, the unspoken rule of the programme was the use of L2 only. As a teacher, I planned a day, not a lesson. This was the first time I had to plan a sequence of activities for more than 90 minutes. Each study day was four hours, making the whole week into a twenty-hour course.
The programme aimed to give the learners maximum fun and help them use the language. The first challenge was to make them communicate and try out any language they could use. Some children knew each other, others were newcomers from the neighbourhood, and some were my friends’ kids. Establishing a safe environment, the necessity to speak – to ask, to share, to say ‘Thank you’ – was possible through tasks they had to fulfil together. The aim was to plan those tasks and provide them with the language beforehand: communication language and topic vocabulary.
Here’s an example of what a typical camp day looked like. Kids came at 10am to be greeted in the front yard with some games to mingle and warm up; the games focused on making them feel at ease and use their English casually. Looking back, I ask myself how it was possible not to offer any reward charts, like house points or stars, but it was not needed back then as they were involved in a different learning environment.
After fifteen minutes of games and greetings, we went to the class to get the instructions for the day. The days were thematically labelled and taken away from the course; this day, let’s say it was Outdoor Lab, meant we had to explore whatever grows in the alley, the backyard and the neighbourhood. For sure, we had to explore everything in full – identify, inspect, detect, label, do some treasure hunt activities and, by the end of the day, bring whatever we found packed like actual lab samples to the ‘laboratory’ to investigate further under the microscope, especially answering the question: ‘Why do nettles sting?’. By the way, June is when you can find caterpillar eggs under the oak leaves. This big story stirred our imagination of how the caterpillar goes through the magical lifecycle and turns into a beautiful butterfly. To round up the day, children played quiz games to consolidate what they had learnt.
This short course aimed to entertain, and led me to discover how holistic learning differs from atomistic, language-based and class or homework-related learning. It helped to unveil how much we can relate to the children’s background knowledge in our everyday academic teaching, as they do know a lot from reading and from what their parents and schools tell them. It also revealed how far their critical thinking is developed at the age of 7, 8, 9 and 10. However, in their state schools, they have never learnt this way – trying to find the cause-effect reasoning for the concepts surrounding them, for example, how is art or music related to science. And this was the perfect moment to talk to the children about how they see the world around them and whether they can find this relation in what they see and know.
The idea of using the Fibonacci numbers in lessons is not new. Still, this concept can clearly demonstrate to children how the things created by nature (shells, sunflowers and even cats) and human-made objects (architecture or art) are related to each other. These are lightbulb moments when children’s critical thinking comes to the scene, and language is just a tool which helps them hypothesise, reason, argue, explain and demonstrate.
The magic of project-based learning in a CLIL classroom is immeasurable. It completely erases the effect of using the language for the sake of language and miraculously opens up the opportunities of using the language for the sake of expressing ideas. The magical spell word in a CLIL classroom is ‘why?’. For every task you plan in such a classroom, there is always a question, for example:
‘Why is Hokusai’s or Leonardo’s artwork beautiful?’
‘Why did some dinosaurs have long necks and long tails?’
‘Why do we hear sounds?’
And the answers to all these questions are in experiences and experiments. Instead of reading a paragraph on gravity in a book, isn’t it much easier to experiment with two balls, different in size and weight, take a slow-motion video to measure their falling time, just to make sure or wonder whether the time is the same? Take, for instance, optical illusions – look at objects in pictures and question yourself, am I sure the lines are the same length? What do the students think? And how much debate can these questions arouse?
How much help do students need to carry out experiments, observe and share? In task-based learning and learning by doing, a lot depends on groupwork and meaningful collaboration, so the simple language for interaction, what we call ‘classroom language’, can be provided: templates for asking questions, sharing opinions, turn taking, agreeing and simple vocabulary to evaluate the work of others.
Topic-related vocabulary is also needed, we can call it ‘target language’: names of things, chunks related to the topic and action verbs to describe processes. Visuals and realia are the core elements of every CLIL classroom – learning by doing, not learning by hearing. Instead of watching videos about balance, why not give students a pile of pebbles to compete in making pyramids. Hopefully, some students have their own ideas for experiments, our young hockey player can give everyone a masterclass on balancing a puck with his hockey stick, and a basketball player can spin the ball on a fingertip for a minute.
Who needs the assessment on a summer extra-curricular course, the aim of which is to have fun and practise some English? In fact, we all need it, as students can be amazed by how much they have learnt and we, as teachers, can understand how much we have taught. Children adore web-based quizzes, such as Kahoot, for example, and we used topic-related, multiple-choice games to summarise what we have done, learnt and understood.
During team competitions, at the end of a topic, learners did quizzes to consolidate their understanding of different concepts, and it was fun, helping them understand and remember. By the way, they practised a lot of classroom and topic vocabulary while choosing the answers.
On the course’s final day, I suggested they make a journal of their discoveries. The journals were made of three A4 sheets folded in half and stapled together into a book. The sheets had prompts like ‘draw your favourite experiment, puzzle, place to go, book’ etc. The journal was a blast as the children immediately started drawing everything they could recall from the activities – precisely what they did with their hands – science and art experiments, things they brought to the classroom from home: books and even a caterpillar-to-butterfly growing kit. Never in my practice had I seen such motivation to create and share as when the children were completing their journals. And yes, when we teach language and content, we need to assess both, so it was a pleasant surprise to see in their journals the names of the plants, for example, or the places we’d learnt about, and to know that they have internalised so many ideas from the course. Another blessing was when a child shouted excitedly while drawing a cubism-inspired portrait, ‘I can do it! I am Picasso!’.
The course has shown that task-based learning can make amazing transformations to students’ perception of the whole learning process. Firstly, they showed the desire to engage their critical thinking and see the results of hands-on experiments. In a mixed-ability class, the students can easily communicate, as they perceive the language as a medium, not a standalone goal. Outshined by the learning process and engaging content, language is used as a tool to communicate ideas with the help of some appropriate scaffolding. The doing and creating part of the course, which brought learners’ ideas to the foreground of the learning process, helped them understand and learn better.
My name is Katia Balaganskaya, and I am a teacher of English with over ten years of experience working with Young Learners in Russia and Cyprus. I have the following qualifications: TKT, Celta, Delta 1 and 3, IH-CYLT, IH-CAM, BA (Ed), and I am currently doing an MA in Education.
In 2015, I founded a Russia-based private language club for Young Learners focusing on integrating content- and task-based learning into the curriculum. I am interested in facilitating children’s language learning through critical thinking and CLIL.
In addition to my teaching work, I also provide teacher training.