Special Projects 生活化英語 ACTIVE English
3rd-4th grade Storytelling Performance
Students will plan, rehearse, and perform a storytelling as a group project. The group project will take one semester to complete. This year's 4th and 3rd grades are very large, so groups will be formed within grade levels. Each grade will be responsible for planning and performing 1 children's picture book. Third graders will perform Brown Bear, Brown Bear and fourth graders will perform The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The groups in each grade level will compete for best performance as determined by scoring rubrics similar to those used in the county wide English contests.
Students will need to learn basic elements of stage performance. They will also have create props and speak lines from memory. This project will combine English Language Arts, Performance Arts and Visual Arts.
The students' art work and performance is inspired by the Read Aloud videos on Youtube below. In the photo slideshow you can see the students are making paper & stick puppets. They are sizing their puppets by holding their drawings up to the puppet stage that the local English teacher (LET) is making.
Students have a lot of inertia that we struggle to overcome. They made changes grudgingly and incrementally. During the process of making the paper puppets, we let the groups do some performances. They learned how to give and receive peer feedback. They slowly internalized such concepts as speaking loudly and clearly, moving the caterpillar around to show walking and eating actions, laying out the paper puppets under the stage in order of appearance, etc. After getting feedback from classmates, they began to internalize the concepts for making a good performance. The first rehearsal videos below were made to let the students see themselves for the first time. The next step will be for them to self-critique and make further refinements. Later we will rehearse (and record) again with the puppet stage.
Vocabulary Set for The Very Busy Spider
The Very Busy Spider
英語說故事:
1.語音(聲、韻、調、語調):占 50%。
2.內容(見解、結構、詞彙):占 30%。
3.臺風(儀容、態度、表情):占 10%。
4.創意:占 10%(表演形式、互動程度、道具等)
*本項比賽不可攜搞,攜稿隊伍視同表演賽不予評分。
English storytelling:
1. Pronunciation (sound, rhyme, tone, intonation): 50%.
2. Content (interpretation, structure, vocabulary): 30%.
3. Stage style (appearance, attitude, expression): 10%.
4. Creativity: 10% (performance form, interaction, props, etc.)
*The team that brings in the script will not be evaluated as a performance competition.
The team will not be scored.
5th-6th Grade Cooking Show
Students work in groups of 5 to create plan, script, direct and film a Youtube cooking show. The recipes are included as part of a picture book about food, which the students will read to learn necessary vocabulary and phrases. Fifth graders will learn about making pizza from Pizza at Sally's, while sixth graders will learn to make spaghetti with Tyler Makes Spaghetti. Students will then learn some video techniques and practice cooking their dishes. They will finish by filming their show and uploading to Youtube.
Students have already learned basic vocabulary and begun to write their scripts. Each group has also decided the role for each group member, e.g. Cook/Talent, director, videographer, etc. In early October, students had their first hands-on cooking experience to provide realistic practice for the activity that they will do on camera later. They had a first attempt at making pizza and spaghetti which tasted great, but more importantly, it let them understand that cooking while no one is watching is normally a messy and haphazard experience. Their next challenge is to make a tasty treat, AND look and sound professional while doing so. The spaghetti recipe they used was my very own Spaghetti John-Michaelese. It is explained in the PPT below. The pictures in the slideshow are from the spaghetti cooking lesson and the second pizza cooking workshop. One pizza team from the second workshop was outstanding for great taste AND using all English to work together. They will go to a local pizza shop to learn from an expert pizza chef and practice filming their show.
The pictures above show the progress of students in the fifth and sixth grades. Fifth graders make very slow progress. They move reluctantly and tentatively through every step of the process. There are still groups of boys who remain uncommitted to the project goals and passively resist during each period, perhaps with some vain hope that the project will never be completed. Although they have already cooked pizza, they are unwilling to apply English skills to move to the next step of creating the Youtube video. We teachers have regrouped and applied a different tactic to gain an advantage over recalcitrant students. Now we are having the students create a short video from a slideshow pics and subtitles as a way to scaffold them upwards towards an actual performance in front of the camera. After this little detour, we hope to get the fifth graders back on track to making the pizza cooking shows. In contrast, sixth graders are making great progress. In this slideshow, you will see that sixth graders started to use iPads as teleprompts to help them deliver the monologue. You will see the techniques of two groups of sixth graders. One group places the teleprompting iPad on the table in front of the main talent, and the other group has the cameraperson hold the prompting iPad together with the recording iPad. These students brainstormed and came up with these ideas themselves. These techniques demonstrate their goal-oriented, autonomous learning behavior.
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