Teaching Unit
This Practicum V was implemented during the English lessons in Year 5, specifically on 5B class. This group is formed by 21 students (10 boys and 11 girls). They are a calm group with really well behaviour and attentive. But, there are different paces, some children have high level of English while other present more difficulties when following the class. Moreover, there are four main cases of learning difficulties:
A girl and a boy presenting learning difficulties, understanding almost nothing of what is taking place during the lessons.
A boy with ADHD, who does not pay attention to the explanations and spends the time playing with the objects around or distracting the peers.
And, finally, a boy with a low cognitive disorder, he is the only one that goes with the special needs teacher (he misses one of the two English lessons of the week because of that).
This Teaching Unit was done through co-teaching, four schools were working together. The main objective of this TU is to teach English in a funny and engaging way. To do so, we posed an investigation case, that students had to solve. While doing this they were learning content without realising. This case was the following:
An Australian rich woman, Rose Mary Connor, went to Holland to visit her family; this woman was Van Gogh’s great grand-daughter. During the days that she was abroad someone entered her house, but she didn’t know who was, when it was, what was stolen and where was this object hidden. The four schools were in charge to investigate the robbery, focusing each school on a different topic, linking it to the school topic that was asked.
This way the four schools and their objective were:
Mogent -------------------- Who was the thief?
Guerau de Liost ------- Where was the treasure hidden?
Lluís Millet ---------------- What was the treasure?
Purificació Salas ------ When was the robbery?
Therefore, our driving question was:
Can we solve Rose Mary’s case using English?
And the final product will be a video explaining when was the robbery and what we did to solve the case. This video will be shared with the other schools and Rose Mary in order to see the all the discoveries.
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Next, you can find the template of the planning, with the common parts in black and the specific parts of Purificació Salas in green. It also includes all the materials used:
SESSION 1
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The main objective of this first session was to introduce the case to the children. To do so we had prepared some activities.
We started the lesson receiving a letter, in which an Australian woman (Rose Mary Connor) asked us for help to solve a robbery and offering a reward. But to know more about it we had to watch a video, that was in a USB, inside the same envelope. In this video, appears Rose Mary explaining what had happen, asking for our help and saying what we have to do if we want to collaborate in the case.
After watching it, students had to answer a worksheet in order to see their comprehension, and have an assessment of the listening comprehension. There were two options (A and B), the questions were the same, but the answers were in different order, so they didn’t copy the peers, and we didn’t need to move the tables only for 3 minutes.
When we had done the listening it was time to do what Rose Mary had asked us to if we wanted to help her, that was to send her an e-mail. The whole class together has to send an e-mail introducing them and offering their help.
To finish the session, they had to look for information about Rose Mary on Wikipedia (we provided the page), read the information and complete some worksheets in group. After that, share the information with the rest of the class in a whole group activity creating a mind map.
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Results: As I thought we didn’t have time to do everything. This lesson took place the first hour of Wednesday morning, so we lost some time waiting for them to arrive, leaving the things and doing the register. Moreover, the day before they had done “Cantania”, so we also commented that before starting.
Knowing that, I had the idea to not do the Wikipedia on this session due to the timing, because at the end we started the lesson at 9:15, having 45 minutes instead of 60. So, I preferred to not do it, or commenting briefly if we had time rather than doing it quickly and bad.
So after reading the letter, watching the video for the first time and talking briefly about it, I delivered the worksheets for the listening comprehension, commenting the questions in order to be sure that everybody understands them, (6 multiple choice answers and 2 short answers to write). Then we watched it again, and I gave them some time to finish answering the questions. After that, we watched the video for the third time to check the answers.
Then we had to write the e-mail offering our help. To do so, I did an explanation of how an e-mail has to be written, interactively, asking the children and noting it on the board. After that we wrote the real one. One volunteer was in charge to write on the computer what the others said. So, this way, if one student is writing the teacher can pay more attention to what is going on in the class. In my case one girl wrote the first part and another one the final part.
To finish, we take a photo of the group to send it to Rose Mary and we take a quick look to the Wikipedia page, because we didn’t have time for more.
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Attention to diversity: this day the boy with lower conginitve delay was not in the classroom, because he was with the special needs teacher. Apart from that, the video had subtitles in order to make the comprehension easier.
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SESSION 2
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In my case it was a recap session, where after checking Rose Mary’s answer asking as for more time to make the decision, we had to continue investigating about her. To do so, we corrected the listening, all together out loud, so they could see their mistakes and know the right answers. I had corrected the listenings beforehand, so I knew where they had more problems, being that on the writing answers.
After this, we did the Wikipedia activity, I made six groups of 3 and one of 4, I gave one topic every two or three groups, this way, three groups had to do personal information, two groups background and the other two properties. Each group had a paper to fill in and a copy of the Wikipedia page (which was also projected on the digital board). When the groups finished we did a mind map all together on the blackboard with the information about Rose Mary.
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Results: the development of this session was as planned. The groups for the Wikipedia activity were made putting together the children seating close to each other, this way we didn’t lose time moving around. During this activity I realised that the students are very diverse, regarding to paces, I have never seen this big difference before; but some groups were finished when other had hardly started. This made me improvised something to not make them be there doing nothing, so I gave them a copy of one of the other parts; so if they were doing personal information I gave them the paper about the background. It was like a kind of activity for fast finishers.
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Attention to diversity: in the way that children are seated in class the ones with more difficulties are sitting with peers that don’t have many difficulties, so they can help them. So, when doing the groups, they were more or less equal. I tried to attend the diversity putting the boy with cognitive delay in the group of four, so he could have more help.
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I created the mindmap of Rose Mary’s information using this website: bubbl.us transferring the answers that they gave me when we did it all together in the class. I put in different colours the information about the different topics, writing also the title as a legend, the order is not following this, I put them in a way that the information has more sense. This web allows the creation of mind maps, it can also be used in the classroom with the pupils, it’s very easy to use, and also has the option to add videos, images and links,
SESSION 3
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The purpose of this session was to do the activities related to my topic, which was to discover the moment when the robbery happened. And also, to come up with six possible moments. I mixed the activity with the past, in order to continue doing the past simple, which was the topic that they were supposed to do.
So, we started the session reading the e-mail that Rose Mary sent us with the final decision of the selected schools. We were one of them, so we checked the blog to see the task that we had to do.
The Australian police had sent to Rose Mary the personal diary of her neighbour, but the days were out of order and some verbs had disappeared. So in groups, they had to put the verbs on the texts and the texts in order. I made five groups of four students.
As a support, I gave them a glossary with the verbs that they could use. In this glossary they had the infinitive, and image and the past simple. But before starting, we went together through all the words to be sure that they understand the meaning of all of them. The infinitive of the verbs had different colours, and so did the 6 texts. So, each verb has to go to the text with the same colour, having with this a guide.
When they had put the verbs on the right place, they had to put the texts in order, and then fill in a table with the correct order.
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Results: As it was the first hour of the day I had a little bit less of time, but it went very well, children understood the activity very good and they did it without problem. We didn’t have time to correct everything, we only checked the order of the texts, having to check the verbs on the next session. Because, one more time the different paces could be widely seen, one group was finished while others were still writing the verbs on the right place, so I have some more time to this groups to finish. And I had to improvise something for these fast finishers, which was that they had to read the texts aloud in the group, each person a day.
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Attention to diversity: on Wednesday the boy with intellectual disability is not in class because goes with the SEN teacher, but this day she had a meeting so he stayed in class. I didn’t have anything prepared for him, because he was supposed to not be in class, so I put him on a group making a group of five. He was following more or less, because his peers explained him the things in Catalan, but he also took part writing the verbs of his part of the text with the help of the group, so he followed the activity on his own rhythm.
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SESSION 4
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The first part of the session was dedicated to correct the verbs on the activity of the previous lesson. After that, we had to create six hypotheses about the possible moment when the robbery happened. To do so, we did one as an example; we read with the whole group the first day of the diary, and then think in which possible moment it could have happened. The same had to be done with the rest of the days, for that, I provided them a language support to follow when writing the hypotheses. They did the activity in the same groups of three as in the session 3. When each group had 4 sentences, more or less, we shared it with the whole class, in order to come up with only 6.
Finally, we looked the poster of the possibilities found by the other schools, commenting each one briefly. After that, in the group they had to answer a Google form, with their thoughts about the possibilities.
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Results: the development of the session was as planned. Some groups had some difficulties when writing the hypotheses, and only used the examples provided. About the Google form, we were running out of time, and therefore, the questionnaires were answered per group, on form per group instead of one per person, so we didn’t spend time changing the respondent and refreshing the form. We couldn’t talk about it with the whole class because of the time.
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Attention to diversity: the groups were the same of the previous session.
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SESSION 5
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We checked the results of the questionnaire and commented them briefly. The aim of this session was to discover when happened the robbery, to achieve that, we did different activities. First of all, we read Rose Mary’s e-mail, she told us that she had sent us boxes with different activities that we had to solve in order to discover the right answer. The procedure was the following:
In the same groups of the previous lessons, each group had a box with the number of the group, the boxes had 5 envelopes with the different activities. In the envelopes they had the explanation of the task, and moreover, each one of the members of the group was given a paper with the task, so at the end they could keep the activities as a dossier. Each time that they solved a task they got a part of a hypothesis, but all the members of the group had to have the task finished in order to get the clue, when they solved all the activities they got the complete sentence. Each group had a different hypothesis.
It has to be said that in total we came up with 6 hypotheses, but we had 5 groups, so when everybody finished, one hypothesis was missing. So, this missing hypothesis was the correct answer to solve the case.
The 4 activities that students had to do were the succeeding:
1. Differences: inside the envelope they found jigsaw’s pieces, they had two colours (blue and green) because they belonged to two different images. When they did the jigsaw they had two images of Rose Mary’s living room, one from the first day that Rose Mary was out, and the second one from the last day. I gave them a paper with both images printed, so all of them had them and another paper with some lines in which they had to write the differences between both days. We did one as an example in the blackboard, to show the phrase “there was… there wasn’t” (but other phrases could be also used).
2. Enigma: students had to solve a mathematic enigma. They had a text talking about the birthday celebration of the neighbour’s daughter, which was mention on the diary. They had to calculate how many people were in the house at a certain time.
3. Free time activities: Students had to do a crossword and an alphabet soup, they did that using Educaplay with the iPad.
4. Decode: They had to decode a code using the letters that belonged to each number.
After these four activities, all the groups had a different hypothesis, they were also given a paper with all the hypotheses written, and they had to cross the one that they had. Then, the purpose was to do new groups with one member of each of the previous groups. Talking and asking each other, they had to cross the hypotheses that they had, at the end, one would not be crossed, this one will be the solution.
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Results: the length of this session was longer, we changed the English lesson for the arts and crafts session, in order to have more time to do the activities, and enjoy them. The session was as planned, but at the end we didn’t have time to put in common the hypotheses with the new groups, because the activities took longer than expected and not all the groups finished at the same time.
One thing that I have to improve, and that I didn’t realise when planning the session, is that the session promotes cooperative work not collaborative. In some groups, children that have difficulties did the activity after their peers, copying their answers, and the whole group had to wait for them to get the paper and change the activity. Instead of that, the activities should require everybody’s participation in order to complete them, so all the members of the group are essential. For example, in the first activity, some members have a picture and the others another one, so they need the information of the rest to write the differences. The same with the code, some members could have different numbers, so everybody is necessary. It is important to plan the tasks promoting collaboration to not leave anybody out of the activity.
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Attention to diversity: none extra activity was created for the boy with special needs. The groups were created taking into account that the children with more difficulties were not in the same group.
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SESSION 6
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In this session we had to create a video explaining Rose Mary and the other schools what we had found and the process to reach the solution. But, before we had to discover when happened, because on the last session we didn’t have time. Due to time limitations, we didn’t do the activity that I planned for the previous lesson, in which we mixed the groups and they had to ask each other the hypotheses in order to find the solution. Instead of that, we did the activity with the whole class, I projected on the digital board the same table with the hypotheses that I gave to them. Then, one person of each group said aloud the hypothesis found after solving the tasks, one of them was not crossed, this one was the correct answer.
Once we had that, we read Rose Mary’s e-mail, asking us to record the video. First of all, we talked about the process done, and what we could say to Rose Mary, writing the script with all the class. I had another script prepared in order to safe time. Even that I had this prepared one, it was essential to try to do one with them in order to help them be aware of the steps that they did and to practice the explanations. After finishing the script with them, I showed them the one that I prepared and we went through it all together. After that, I gave each one of them a paper with one of the sentences. They had 10 – 15 minutes to practice their sentence and the pronunciation. After that time, we recorded the video, two or three children per take.
Results: We had time to do everything, I was afraid that we would run out of time, due to the great amount of things that we had to do, but we achieved to finish all.
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Attention to diversity: When delivering the sentences I had into account the children that have difficulties and I gave them the easiest ones. Also, during the time that they had to practice I went with them in order to help them more, practicing and pronouncing with them.
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SESSION 7
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This last session was an extra session, that was not planned at the beginning, the aim of that was to watch the final video of all the schools together plus the one of Rose Mary thanking them. After that they received the reward, that in my case was a diploma for the whole class and a medal to each one of them, because the school doesn’t allow to give food to the children.
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Results: This session took place during the intensive period, so the lesson lasted 45 minutes. We watched the video stopping it in some points in order to comment it, for example after they said their discovery or after the explanation of a similar activity, etc.
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Attention to diversity: This session didn’t need of any special adaptation.
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