Young Learners and Online Project-Based Learning: Building an Eco-House" width="640" height="360" />Young Learners and Online Project-Based Learning: Building an Eco-House" width="640" height="360" />
It is a pleasure to feature this guest post from Milica Vukadin (Alice) from aliceinmethodologyland.com. I’ve always enjoyed reading her articles or hearing her ideas on motivating young learners to get involved in environmental matters, and I love the way they are so practical and always get students out and about!
Project-based learning sounds scary and like there is a lot of planning involved, but educators start pressing the panic button when they have to do it in distance learning (at least this is how I picture it in my mind). This post will share a full CLIL unit with 3 interactive digital materials, exclusively for ELTsustainable, so feel free to reuse the materials in your classroom. The end of the article will discuss the final project, but if you are interested in the whole unit, it will be linked down below.
These materials are suitable for teenagers and intermediate or advanced young learners. The unit can be conducted online or face-to-face.
With this lesson you will:
1. Brainstorm where does our power comes from?;
2. Listen to the audio and discover what were the most used energy resources in 2019;
3. Watch a video to check the answers;
4. Explore an interactive graph;
5. Sort the energy resources into 2 groups (renewable and non-renewable).
Let’s learn more about the 4 basic types of renewable energy resources and do a fact-check.
Every page has at least 2 mistakes!
Try to fact-check the given information and share the mistakes you found in the live lesson.
Don’t forget to complete the interactive vocabulary review!
In this lesson you will:
1. Explore renewable energy resources in your closest community;
2. Add reliable resources and report back to the class;
3. Have an interactive debate with a spinner;
4. Start developing a plan for your own sustainable home following the given steps.
The students were separated in breakout rooms and they had a task to brainstorm and collaborate in order to make a plan for a sustainable home.
Questions to help you develop your plan:
Chat with other students and see who lives in a similar environment as you if you want to pair up, or join a group.
Create a sketch or a model during the lesson, and then present your main idea in a few sentences. You can do this via audio, video, or text. Post the picture and your idea in the Let’s design the Edmodo group to get feedback.
You can use:
Continue with the development of your renewable resource plan for a house. Make a video using your sketch/model + text OR audio + text with pictures. Present the project in a video or in audio and practice speaking skills. Upload it as a separate post in the project designated folder on Edmodo.
Draw with any online tool you select, draw by hand, or create a 3D model with dough and recyclables. The sketch needs to have a textual explanation, and the specific parts/machines of the renewable energy resource need to be marked in the house.
Alice started this program last year and the program includes having four free workshops every month. She focuses on using drama, storytelling, music, game-based learning, contextual grammar learning, and environmental education to make learning English seamless and engaging. Her passion is CLIL and all of her workshops are thematical.
Milica Vukadin (Alice) is an English teacher with a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Early Childhood Education, with a double minor (English teaching methodology for young learners and Serbian language teaching methodology). She is also a young but published academic researcher, teacher trainer, and material designer.
She is passionate about using storytelling, drama, and music in her language workshops. Her other passions include interculturalism and environmental education.
What activities would you use to introduce renewable energy resources to your young learners? Are there some activities you like? Is there a way to make your English lessons more sustainable? Write in the comments or via the contact page.
