"I'm going to teach my parrot the good stuff!” And with that remark the little Year One student joyfully proceeded to ‘teach’ her parrot to repeat the repertoire of kind words we had decided as a class we wanted to use with each other in our language lessons. In every corner of the classroom, parrot puppets were undergoing serious instruction from their young owners and squawking back their replies. The parrots were being prepared to go home to ‘teach’ a family member how to say kind words in Italian. It was a delightfully noisy way to begin cultivating the culture of hospitality I was hoping to develop over the course of our year together. With very young students, it can be difficult to progress beyond simply ‘parroting’ words. Time is short, allocation for languages is often minimal – sometimes as little as 30 minutes per week – and as a non-mandatory subject it risks becoming merely 'tokenistic window dressing' in the context of a crowded curriculum. So the selection of what content to teach and for what purpose is critical. In other words, what they learn to ‘parrot’ needs to count.
After reading The Gift of the Stranger (see resources), I was motivated to try to use lesson time to build a good foundation for language and intercultural understandings in a way that would foster respect and love for one’s neighbour. I decided that the culture needed to start from within the classroom itself before we could look beyond. Il Papagallo (the parrot), a character from a well-loved book I had read to classes time and again, became the vehicle. As the year progressed the 'kind words' were woven into the fabric of our classroom conversations adding context and meaning. It was a small shift in focus (read details of the process here) but I believe it really made a difference. We moved from just 'parroting' words to reflecting on the effect words can have and then deliberately choosing to speak 'the good stuff'. Libby Colla
2 Comments
Chrissy Clay
22/9/2016 08:58:36 pm
Love this post Libby. Relevant points for home life too.
Reply
Libby
22/9/2016 10:13:24 pm
Thanks Chrissy!
Reply
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorHello, I'm Libby. Categories
All
Let's keep in touch.
Subscribe |