Positives and Negatives

The four positives we chose today were: connection, intercultural competence, engagement, and accomplishment. Among the four, intercultural competence seems to be the most significant one. The ultimate goal of learning a language is to properly interact in the target language culture and having intercultural competence makes us survive this globalized world, while at the same times being capable of using languages as a key to open various doors—different aspects/fields of daily life.

The four negatives were: frustration, boredom, anxiety, and insecurity. Being aware of the fact that anxiety might “greatly influence a student’s language learning” is something a teacher should always keep in mind. Anxiety might sometimes stop students from learning actively; however, it can also be the reason that motivates students to practice more, and to push themselves to a higher level.

-Chung-Hui Kim Liao

1. Description of the activity—— Kathy
2. Our Reflection —Kim
3. Pedegogical Application——Dee

        Reflection on “Cards and Crayons” Activity

1. Description of The Activity

We may call the activity done in class today as “Cards and Crayons”. Each group was given a box of crayons and an envelope with 24 cards, on which there are different tasks to play with crayons. Referring to the Bloomms’ XXXX, we are supposed to divide the 24 cards into 6 different categories, and each category matches one level. I regard this activity as for teachers to outline lesson plans based on scaled materials, since it’s helpful in deciding the level of difficulties of each task. However, in real teaching scenarios, it encourages students to discuss, negotiate and even persuade their teammates to agree on where should these cards go, for some of them can be fuzzy and complex. The highlight of this activity is, in conducting this activity, only several boxes of crayons and index cards will be needed so it’s quite applicable when there is no access to computers and projects in a classroom. After we classified the cards, professor Shaw provided his solutions and explained his logic. Then we were asked to pick 6 activities across the 6 levels to make two lesson plans targeting at kids and adult learns separately.

1. Pedagogical Implications

As mentioned above, one of the take-away points of this activity was that at times when there may be minimal resources in a classroom or at a school, or when unexpected technology issues arise and lesson plans fly out the window, there are endless activities that can be done using something as simple as a box of crayons. After receiving our materials for the activity, we were asked to sort the cards according to Bloom’s levels of taxonomy: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Once we compared our groupings to the suggested ones, we were asked to rearrange the cards once more to create a lesson plan for young and adult learners (using 6 of the cards for each lesson plan). We were told that these lesson plans did not necessarily need to incorporate activities from each of Bloom’s levels. For this blog post, we will focus on our lesson for young learners, since admittedly we rushed through the creation of our adult lesson plan.

For the young learners, the order we decided on was MOAUWN. The kids would start with something quick and simple to get them warmed up: looking on the box to find out where Crayola Crayons are made. Then, they would choose their favorite crayon in the box and explain why they like it/what it makes them think of. This would then move them into identifying something in the world that is the same color as each of the crayons. This also transitions smoothly into completing a set of comparison sentences (Ex. red is to apple as yellow is to ____). The final two activities become more hands on: experimenting with mixing colors/guessing what color a certain combination would create and then creating a “crayon log pyramid” with a pile of crayons. In this lesson plan for young learners, we tried to create a balance of fairly simple written/verbal activities with some more hands-on ones.

After all of the groups finished organizing their lesson plans and we put the orders on the board, it was really interesting to see the overlap. For example, there were certain activities that a lot of groups felt would make a strong beginning/closing to a lesson. This shows that a lot of us have similar ideas about the structure of a “good lesson”.

III. Reflection
There are six levels in Bloom’s taxonomy: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Some certain cards can be intrepreted differently and subjectively, and then being put under different categories. This is all depending on a teachers’s idea when he or she is addapting this activity to students of different age and with different languae levels. We found the discusssing process really inspiring and thought-procoking, which was not only benefitial for future class use, but also for the “thinking cultivation” of teachers. As futrue teachers, it’s always important to listend to other teachers’ opinions and try to figure things out by collaborting with each other–colleagues. We learned how to convey our own interpretaitons  in a more tactful way when we saw things differently.

(for Dee’s reference, our lesson plan for kids are: MOAUWN;

for adults: TCDSGV)

Coauthors: Kathy Yang, Dee Doucette, Chung-Hui Kim Liao