Getting ready to meet your new class? Creating your new roleplay areas and setting up your reading corners? Here is a resource that all teachers could create for their classess no matter what level their own foreign language skills. A box of wonders!
Remember how tiny some of your young language learners are. Don't forget that for some of them their worlds are built around their families, their street, their local area ....Others bring a world of experiences to your class.Let's broaden their horizons and share experiences.
Why not begin to make a "box of wonders" for your classroom and your new classes this next year? The box will make a great "talking about" resource too.Remember it's the touchy , feely actually looking at,exploring and investigating for ourselves moments that sometimes stay as clear memories.Nothing therefore is too small or too silly - think out of the box and think about things that the children may be interested in.
A box that the children can independently explore,kept in the role play or reading area.A box for quiet time or an activity for those who finish work early etcetra. A box that you can occasionally bring out and share as a class activity ,linked to a cross curricular theme e.g foods, cities, buildings, rhymes , stories from around the World etc......
Start building your box of wonders from items you may not even realise you already have at home, have access to on the internet and maybe already in your school...
My box of wonders would contain....
- Birthday cards
- Maps of cities, countries, continents
- A globe
- Old passports
- Tickets - for travel/ planes/ trains/ buses
- Food wrappings with other languages written on them
- Photos of shops in our own town that have writing in other languages and scripts
- Magazine and newspaper front pages- I will be putting in my box my Winnie Puuh German magazine, my old Okapi and Astrapi French magazines , my son's Spanish football magazines etcetra
- Pictures of famous people from other countries- singers, sports stars, people from history
- Traditional dress pictures and items - may even add my own (quite old) traditional Welsh dress doll
- Pictures of famous monuments and items- I even have a small Eiffel tower that I would put in my box of wonders and a toy Merzedes car , a beret, an apron with World foods on it, a german Didl , minerals from Mount Vesuvius, dutch clogs,model Lufthansa plane, my Nepalese beads ....etcetra
- Holiday pictures/ photos of views etc-
- Pictures of foods
- Pictures of sports from around the world
- Postcards from other countries
- Familiar stories in other languages books
- Printed off fronts covers f books that are familiar in different languages
- A CD with sounds of other languages - maybe a familiar song in lots of languages
- Target language DVD sleeves of familiar films
And what could the children contribute to the box of wonders too....? A treasure chest that could grow and grow.
Sent from my iPhone
