Hi, my name is Marta and I am a student of I.E.S Cartima.
Today, I am going to go through the project we have done this term in the English subject during the pandemic. The project calls “Staying up-to-date during a pandemic.”
The main objective was knowing the situation of COVID-19 in other countries. Each group had a country to search information and news about it.
My country was Nigeria.
This project had two parts with different tasks.
The first part was “Teens experiencing isolation”. Here, the final product was to do a post in our blog to say how we felt during this strange situation. Here you have the post in my blog. The difficulty was the vocabulary about feelings, I didn’t know a lot of them so, first I copied some useful expressions in my notebook about feelings.
The second part was “Information during social distancing because of the COVID-19”. This part had three different final products.
The first one was about informal information, so we did a “Catching-up conversation” where we did a video call with our partners to talk about how we were like a normal conversation. Here is my video call. It was a work in groups so, the difficulty was that we had to do video calls to organise everything. It was a little difficult to meet and to do a normal conversation so, we did like a script to record the video.
The second task was with formal information where we did two reports on technical articles about any topic related to COVID-19.
Personally, this task is going to be very useful now and in the future to know how to identify in an article an opinion or a fact because I could understand better an article in other language.
Here is my two articles.
The final task of the second part was “Broadcast 60 seconds news”. In this task we recollected news of newspapers and of the TV about our country. With those news we recorded an individual video like a TV newsreader. This is my video.
Working with real sources was a fantastic experience. For example, in this project we work with current and real news about the coronavirus in Nigeria. So, we learnt all the vocabulary and grammar but using the present situation and learning about it too. Searching information about other countries gave us the opportunity of compare it with Spain and I realised that the problems are very similar in both countries. In addition, I used some articles that I had seen in other subjects to do my “reports on technical articles”. For example, I used this article about ICT to to my tasks in English.
If you want to see some evidences about the grammar we learnt or how I took notes in my notebook, have a look at my grammar portfolio in this link.
I am used to working in groups in the high school. This time, it was strange but I think it was a good experience. The cooperation can be better but it was the first time so we can improve. Anyway, there wasn’t a lot of differences, you can chat with the group, share documents or do video calls so, we were talking every time.
Now, I think that this is going to be my latest post in the blog because it’s my final week in this high school. This subject was very exciting this year. We worked with real sources and we did very interesting projects like this one or the “Women in World War I” project. I didn’t learn only grammar and vocabulary, I have learnt the real situation of coronavirus in other countries, the role of women in the war or how to do a curriculum so, it is going to be useful for me in the future.
To conclude, I think that the best way to learn english is with PBL (Projects-based learning). I have been 4 years studying with this method and I really enjoyed it. Now, I am going to miss this method a lot. It is not only do exercises, study and do an exam, it is a new way to learn. They teach you how to investigate, how to search the best information, how to speak in public and more skills for our future. We worked with real sources that is better than do exercises of a normal book.
This subject has encouraged me to want to study English and you can search much better information if you do it in English.
