For some time now, WinWin has been planning to introduce “Creative Classes”. The idea is that:
• These classes will use a content based curriculum.
• Every class will have activities that students can be actively involved in.
• There will be a strong focus on improving students’ independent reading and comprehension skills,
Parents work long hours to provide the best for their children. And children spend long, long hours away from home, in the classrooms. At Winwin, we believe we have a duty, not only to provide high quality, relevant English language instruction, but also to provide
• a caring family environment
• important, holistic, life education
• opportunities for extending knowledge on topical subjects
• encouragement to develop creative and critical thinking
• stimulating, enjoyable, activities
• teaching methods that foster success in the changing education system, and beyond.
We believe that the new Creative Class program can fulfill all these goals. We’re all really excited about getting started!
ABOUT THE CREATIVE CLASS
In 2013, WinWin began a pilot program to test out a new curriculum. We chose 10 new, Grade 1 students to participate. We nicknamed them the “Super Class.” They’ve been studying Math, Science and Reading Comprehension with me for a year and a half now. It’s very exciting to work with them, and we’re very pleased with their progress. They have such a strong interest in learning: they’re super motivated, they’re crazy about math and science, and they’re learning English super well also.
The class has been so successful that now, Ms Hao has decided to offer similar content based curriculum classes to all the grade one and two students.
CONTENT BASED CURRICULUM
Content based curriculum means that students learn from similar subject areas to those they study in school. In traditional ESL classes, most time is spent on "how-to-say" topics – that is, imaginary situations that focus on social language. These topics are able to teach some things well, but they don’t inspire the children’s interest, they don’t add anything new to their knowledge of the world, and they don’t prepare students well for using English well in academic situations. CBC, on the other hand, provides purposeful, meaningful, authentic opportunities for using language.
Students really appreciate this. Some frequent comments that we hear from them are that the CBC text books are “interesting and fun”, because the stories are “real, not made up”, and excited comparisons with things they’ve read themselves, or learnt about at school or home. These stories tap into areas that the children are already familiar with from real life, from nature and the world around them, from their learning at school and from things that catch their interest on tv and the internet.
This means that they are more engaged with their studies. They’re attentive, interested and ready to interact with the teacher and other students. They want to contribute their own ideas, knowledge, questions and stories. This has huge benefits to their language learning - as they strive to communicate in English, they’re motivated to learn, recall and use topic language. The high interest areas provide “hooks” for whole chunks of language to be integrated into their usable lexicon. Students feel purposeful, as they connect with topics that capture their imagination. They learn language, rather than merely learn ABOUT language. Second language acquisition is accelerated as they USE language, in REAL settings doing REAL things, to talk and write for real purposes.
We have seen that language acquisition and comprehension is cumulative over time. There is a better retention rate, natural speaking and writing skills are enhanced, and very importantly, students are encouraged to THINK and discuss their own ideas, rather than merely memorize “correct” answers.
INTERACTIVE ACTIVITIES
The topics also provide opportunities to extend learning by exploring themes in a variety of different ways, as we follow the students’ interests and learning styles. Each lesson has some time for special project activities. We use mediums such as the internet, song, story, drama, art, craft, research and experiments to provide hands on learning and opportunities to practice English. This reinforces the learning, and also keeps students excited about coming to class. Baking bread , making a home composter, planting tree seedlings, creating a magnet-car race track, writing a song, group collage, kite-making, classroom pet, window box garden, balloon powered jet planes – Students can’t wait to find out what might happen when they come into the classroom each day!
INDEPENDENT READING AND COMPREHENSION TASKS
Each Creative Class lesson is based on a text from the book series “Reading for Comprehension”. We chose this series because
• The stories are fact based.
• They cover a variety of subject areas such as history, science, biology, geography, social studies and culture which re-inforce and complement school learning.
• The stories are interesting and inspire students to explore the themes.
• Each text is written in high quality, natural English, such as native speakers use, rather than the simplified, “contrived” texts that are common in most English instruction books.
• The books are graded, from simple stories through to complex at higher levels
• All texts use grammar which is contextually correct
• Phrasing is systematically more complex, which lets second language learners become accustomed to English as it is REALLY used.
• Focus is on COMPREHENSION rather than memorization.
Improving our students’ independent reading and comprehension skills is an important goal of our classes. Nowadays, schools are moving away from simple rote learning of English and testing by multi-choice. Most school English tests now involve open ended comprehension questions on texts that students have not previously read. It’s vital that Winwin supports this by teaching children the skills of independent reading, and ensuring that children have the tools to comprehend what they read, even when there are some new and unfamiliar words in the passage.
Creative classes focus on teaching the STRATEGIES of READING AND COMPREHENSION, rather than feeding students the exact translations of texts. Many students freeze up when they’re faced with unknown words. They have the wrong belief that if they haven’t learnt the word, they can’t understand the text. My job is to help children grow familiar with REAL reading, and to be confident that can do it. The must have the skills they need to excel in testing, and in real English.
One of the major keys to success in independent reading and comprehension is that students
CAN read and understand what they are reading, without the teacher explicitly explaining the whole contents to them. The level of this course material is set so that the reading texts stimulate students’ interest, AND build their confidence.
CONFIDENCE and INTEREST are vital to motivation. MOTIVATION is vital to INDEPENDENCE.. Independence is vital to COMPREHENSION.
We’re looking forward to getting started!!
Teacher Sue Addenbrooke
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