I have a new project for young learners that I hope will take off and continue throughout the year.
At the moment with my two classes of 6 to 7 year olds, we are looking at the topic Healthy Eating and we are learning lots of new vocabulary for food and drink, as well as learning about food groups and health.
Food around the World is an international project I have set up on a wiki, to share information with children in other parts of the world. The idea is for teachers who are covering a similar topic with their class to add information to the wiki, so we can find out about different cultures and what they eat.
There are many ways in which this could be done, but those I suggest are:
a) Record a video of the children talking about food
b) Take photos of the children's drawings of food and add comments to the wiki
Other alternatives are to use digital storytelling tools to present the information.
I have split the wiki into different sections to incorporate different mini-themes. These are:
1) Breakfast around the world
2) Lunch around the world
3) Dinner around the world
4) My favourite food
5) Food I like/don't like
6) Food in my country
7) Food in my region
8) Healthy Eating
I plan to add photos of drawings my learners have made about what they eat and videos of them talking about it. For example, in the first theme I am going to ask them to draw a picture of their breakfast (or they could take a photo at home and send it by email) and to tell me what they have for breakfast. I will upload the resulting videos to the wiki.
There may be too many different tasks but the idea is that everyone can find something they can add to.
The project is aimed at primary learners, but some of the topics may be suitable for older students too.
The project appears on Skype in the Classroom and the link to the wiki is here.
The wiki is private and so anybody who would like to join in will have to ask for approval. This is for safety reasons.
If it time restrictions allow us to have a live Skype chat between classes, that is also a possibility.
If you are interested in taking part in this long-term project with your young learners, add a comment here, ask to join the wiki or add your name to the Skype project page.
