LEARNING THROUGH DOING

 by Judith Hill, LiffeyGroup educator

Firma "invitada" recomendada por Julio Morales

What type of holiday do you like?  Do you like camping in the countryside with a river running through the campsite and cooking on a camping stove?  Do you like backpacking in the mountains, wearing hiking boots to protect your feet and sleeping in bunk beds in a Youth Hostel?  Or do you prefer going to the beach and lying on a deck chair under a sun shade or building sandcastles with a bucket and spade?

When we study different topics in class there are always lots of new words that the children don’t know.  So how can we best get them to memorise the new vocabulary?  Let me tell you the story of how we tried to remember vocabulary in one class about holidays …

The children discussed different types of holidays and the things they needed or did on each one.  Then they drew a small picture to remind them of the new words they had seen.  But just by writing vocabulary beside a picture is no guarantee that the children will remember it.  So the next step was to “go on holiday” in the classroom and in the corridor.  So we set off on a backpacking holiday and, to my surprise, (although after eight months with the same children, nothing surprises me now) one boy, seeing that he didn’t have a backpack, bent down, put his arms backwards and picked up a chair on his back … and off he went with his “backpack” on his back!!  I had to laugh but he really had the right idea – doing is remembering!

The fun didn’t finish there.  If any of the children went home from class reporting to their parents that we had had a striptease in class, they wouldn’t have been far wrong!  You guessed it.  We went on holiday to the beach and immediately some of the boys took off their t-shirts and lay on the “sand” to sunbathe.  The girls were horrified at the sight of the half-naked bodies but I think they will remember the vocabulary!

The general concept of learning through experience is ancient.  Around 350 BC, Aristotle wrote in the Nichomachean Ethics, “for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them”.

Learning English is fun!  Let’s keep it that way so that the new generation will enjoy speaking English instead of dreading it.