Stephanie Reaume, a fourth-grade teacher at Irmak Okullari in Turkey, shares her experiences of teaching students English using the Primary Years Programme.
Teaching English while adhering to the core tenets of the Primary Years Programme (PYP) can be a challenge. As a department, we are regularly faced with the dilemma: how do we teach our students the English language while using an inquiry based approach?
Our recent unit ‘electricity’ gave us a unique opportunity. Not only could we teach our students about circuits and conductive metals, but also we could use English as the medium to introduce the scientific method. That would allow us to encourage students to ask questions, make their own hypotheses and enable them to discover answers to their own questions.
We started out the unit by watching a short, silent YouTube video where a student used a potato, wires and four pieces of metal to power a small digital clock. Next as a class we used to brainstorm a list of questions in English: How does it work? What materials are involved? What metals are they using? Why does it work?
That evening, the students went home, found answers to their questions, collected the necessary equipment (zinc plates, copper plates, wires and potatoes) and came to school ready to test their knowledge/hypotheses. The students worked in groups to construct a working potato battery. Along the way they made many mistakes, and through their mistakes they solidified their knowledge of how circuits work. For example, it became obvious quite quickly that the wires and metal plates had to be connected in a specific order to make the clock work.
After finishing the experiment the students completed a worksheet in English detailing their hypotheses, the materials they needed to conduct the experiment and the steps they completed in order to get a working clock. Finally, the students used the English vocabulary along with the knowledge they had gained throughout the process to brainstorm different fruits and vegetables and household items which might also be used to power a clock. Many of the students continued the experiment at home and discovered that, amongst other things, cola and tomatoes can also be used to power batteries.
Overall, I feel that using an inquiry based method in the classroom was a very positive experience not only for the students, but for me as a teacher. Instead of teaching the students the vocabulary and telling them how the experiment works, students were able to use English in order to discover the information themselves and learn in a much more meaningful and memorable way in a short amount of time.
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