Primary school materials portfolio 1

For the English Language Communication Project in SJKT Ladang Semenyih, we have design several activities for the first week and first visit.
 
The activities that we designed were ball throwing, bingo,  fears in the hat, Name Place Animals and Thing, A4 paper, connecting story and explain about the followings final product.
 
We as a group designed the activities where it will suit mixed ability students in that school and we also redesigned the actual activities into a new activities so that it serve the purpose of this project. The purpose of this project is to improve student's all language  skills.We also tried to design the activities where all the students will be able to participate (create active learning environment).

• ball throwing game - students have to shout the name of the person whom they want to throw the ball to.
• bingo - students have to read the sentence from each box and try to get signature from the particular person's information.
• fear in the hat - students are required to write all their fears that they think might face in secondary school. All fears will go into a hat and teacher will randomly pick students to pick one of the fears n discuss with the students.
• Name Place Animal and Thing - students will be given a letter and they have to say Name Place Animal and Thing  that starts with the letter.
• A4 paper - paper will be folded into four parts. In each part, they will have to either write or draw about their ambition, subjects that they need to focus more to achieve their ambition, ideal secondary school and future dreams.
• connecting story - teacher will start off with a sentence and each students need to come up with either two or more words sentence to continue the story which must be related.
• Final product - teacher will explain to the class on what they are going to do for the following week.

when we used our materials for these activities, students feedback were positive. I observed that students are very interested in learning all new activities which probably they would not have done during school hours, and also they are willing to learn more. For example: students will ask the teachers for help if they do not know how to spell words like 'electricity'. Instead of speaking Tamil to their peers, they are communicating in English which is a good start of the lesson.
 
During the processes of designing and using materials, there are many theories we applied. For example, vygotsky believed that children build their langauge through interaction with others which stimulated the development of the thought. Moreover, it is mentioned in vygotsky's theory that the zone of proximal development occurs when the students interact with aldult or more knowledgable other will increase the level of a child's potential developmental level under the guidance of an adult (Eggen and Kauchak, 2012). It is known as scaffolding.
 
Jean Piaget believes that children tend to learn more when the are actively involved in learning were children are encourage to discover things themselves through interaction.During interaction, checking student's understanding is crucial rather than checking correct answers from them. "Discovery Learning" allows opportunities for students to explore and experiment, while encouraging new understandings. Opportunities that allow learners of different cognitive levels to work together often help encourage less mature students to advance to a higher understanding of the material. One future implication for the instruction of students is the use of hands on experiences to help students learn (Wood, 2008, Piaget.weebly.com, 2014).


VAK learning theory are about visual ( seeing), auditory(listening)  and kinaesthetic(moving/ doing). 

Visual learners learns best by puzzle building, reading, writing, understanding charts and graphs, a good sense of direction, sketching, painting, manipulating images, constructing, fixing, designing practical objects, and interpreting visual images.

Auditory learners learns best in listening, speaking, writing, storytelling, explaining, teaching, using humour, understanding the syntax and meaning of words, remembering information, arguing their point of view, and analysing language usage.

Kinaesthetic learners learns by physical coordination, hands on experimentation, using body language, crafts, acting, miming, using their hands to create or build, dancing, and expressing emotions through the body.
 All the activities that we designed have the elements in the theories such as interacting with peers as a group and teachers. Teachers scaffold the students instead of giving direct answer when they face difficulties in spelling or speaking or writing or listening. we teachers ask the students if they ask us questions like " what is scrapbook". teacher can engage a conversation asking them " what do you think scrapebook is? do u think it will look like a book or not" By doing this, teacher can figure out what the student's opinions and try to help them in a way that is needed. Despite that, we teachers provided interesting activities like writing fear about their secondary school and put into a hat rather than just writing it in a paper and collect them and read it aloud. w also try to ask students to draw out their ambition, future dreams and so on. since different student's learning styles are different, we teachers tried to incooperate three main learning styles into our activities.

The confusion that we had was how to develop a material which will suit mixed abiltiy students and also how to create an active learning environment. we did not want the students to sit at one place and write and listen. Beacause normally malaysian

The consideration that we paid attention to was the ability of the students, we try to guess approximately how would it be and what kind of activites should we provide them because it is after their UPSR examination. we want them to enjoy and learn at the same time. Their level of English in all four langauge skills. I would like to improve my materials in terms of time management. I could have prepare some task for the students whom finish task very fast and also learn more how to scaffold and teach the slow learners. Maybe the activities could a bit more interesting according to their level because my class student's English proficiency level is above average. We could have prepare something more challenging and exciting because these students are excited to learn more and can finish all activities before time.

references:

• Eggen, P. and Kauchak, D. (2012). Educational psychology. 1st ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Education.
• Piaget.weebly.com, (2014). Educational Implications & Activities - Jean Piaget. [online] Available at: http://piaget.weebly.com/educational-implications--activities.html [Accessed 17 Oct. 2014].