CHRISTMAS CAROLS

Objectives:

• To use the linguistic and strategic resources suitable to the given situation.
• To automate the knowledge about the English language itself and the rules of its linguistic system to speak in a correct, coherent and cohesive way in order to understand and produce spoken discourses.
• To develop learning strategies in order to use the English language in an autonomous way.
• To know the social and cultural features of the English language in order to understand and interpret better the different cultures that the English language accomplishes.
• To value the use of the English language in order to get access to other kinds of knowledge and cultures, recognizing the importance that the language has got as a tool of communication and international understanding, being aware of the similarities and differences among cultures.
• To enhance self-assessment strategies in the acquisition of the English language communicative competence, showing trust, responsibility and entrepreneurship in this process.
• To be able to teach and share one's knowledge with others and feel empathy. 
• To work cooperatively with other partners and see every student, no matter the age, as equal members of the same community.
• To create links between different educational stages and learn to respect each other's differences.

Contents:
Linguistic contents:  

• Christmas time lexicon extension.
• Revision of grammar structures when reading the text.
• Improvement of pronunciation, intonation and pitch.
• Production and interpretation of different rhythms, intonation and pitches to understand a read text.
• Accuracy when pronouncing in the target language. 

 Learning to learn:

•  Recognition of the different registers of the language: written and oral, formal and informal speech.

• Application of strategies to revise, widen and consolidate lexicon and grammar structures.
• Reflection and application of self-correction and self-assessment strategies to progress in the autonomous learning of the English language.
• Recognition of errors and mistakes as something necessary in their learning process.
• Interest to take profit of the learning chances inside and outside school using Christmas carols.
• Value of trust and cooperation in the learning of the English language.

Socio-cultural aspects

• Social contact with peers showing respect towards other people’s opinions and attitudes.
• Knowledge and value of the most relevant cultural elements.
• Significant similarities and differences among customs, behaviors, attitudes, values and beliefs among speakers of the English and Spanish language.
• Use of suitable registers according to the context, speakers and communicative purpose.
• Interest to establish communicative exchanges to know cultural information of English speaking countries.
• Value of the English language as a tool of communication and understanding among peoples which provides with the access to other cultures and that helps to enrich ourselves personally  
• Value of the English language as a means to access knowledge in students' future academic and professional lives.

Procedure:
Students are told they need to choose a Christmas carol to be taught to Infant Education students. They must choose among a list of famous Christmas carols. The most popular one, will be the Christmas carol to be taught to students. 

To do so, students must work on the lexicon the carol has got, the pronunciation of all the words, intonation, pitch in order to teach it correctly. They must also look for images that can help little students understand the lyrics of the Christmas carol.

When the Christmas carol is completely prepared, students will go to different lessons, with different courses, to teach it. 

Assessment:
Teacher assessment:
Students will be accompanied by the little students' teachers. They will guide and help them if necessary, and will assess them at the end of the activity. This assessment will be reported to the teacher at the end of the session.

Peer assessment:
Little students will report a kind of assessment about how the elder mates did perform the activity. 

Both assessments, teachers' and peers' will be taken into account to finally grade students.
 

ACTIVITIES

READING AND LISTENINGSKILLS:
Choosing the Christmas Carol:
Students must choose from a range of popular Christmas carols. They must pay attention to the lexicon and the grammar structures of the carols and decide, with the teacher's guidance and help, if the carols are appropriate and challenging enough for infant students.
The chosen Christmas carols are the following:

1. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer:

2. Santa Claus is coming to town:

 

 

3. Jingle Bells:

4. All I want for Christmas is you:

Preparing the Christmas Carol:
After analyzing the different Christmas carols, students have chosen one of them: Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. They must prepare some flashcards to help students understand the main concepts of the carol and learn the new vocabulary:

 

 

Thanks to this visual support, students show the little kids the meaning of certain words that can be difficult for them like for example "reindeer" or "shiny".










Speaking:
Students teach the Christmas carol to little students. They are all wearing a Santa Claus hat or Rudolph ears in order to make the activity more attractive for little students. They must be very careful with their pronunciation, pitch and intonation of the different lines of the song.

LISTENING

Objectives:

• To produce a well organized discourse with the appropriate grammar structures and lexicon.
• To enhance fluency and accuracy in the spoken given situation.
• To use the linguistic and strategic resources suitable to the given situation.
• To automatize the knowledge about the English language itself and the rules of its linguistic system to speak in a correct, coherent and cohesive way.
• To develop learning strategies in order to use the English language in an autonomous way.
• To know the social and cultural features of the English language in order to understand and interpret better the different cultures that the English language accomplishes.
• To value the use of the English language in order to get access to other kinds of knowledge and cultures, recognizing the importance that the language has got as a tool of communication and international understanding, being aware of the similarities and differences among cultures.
• To understand different oral texts of general interest (its general and specific information).
• To use the knowledge of the language and its linguistic use rules to speak in a suitable, coherent and correct way, to understand oral texts and reflect upon the use of the English language in communication situations.
• To acquire and develop different learning strategies, using all the available resources, including Information and communication technologies, in order to use the English language in an autonomous way and to progress and develop in the learning process of the language.

Contents:
Listening:

• Specific and general understanding of broadcasted messages in the media where  standard English is used. 
• Understanding of interpersonal communication about general interest topics with the aim of answering and speaking in the suitable moment.
• Use of strategies to understand and infer non explicit meanings to get the general ideas of a speech.
• Consciousness of the importance of understanding a speech globally without the need to understand every single word used in it.

Speaking:

• Participation in informal conversations with their peers to dub the recorded video and describe the features of the American culture.

Linguistic content:

• Celebrations, festivals and civilization lexicon consolidation.
• Improvement of pronunciation, intonation and pitch.
• Production and interpretation of different rhythms, intonation and pitches to understand a speech.
• Accuracy and fluency when speaking in the target language. Use of correct vocabulary and set expressions for certain situations.

 
Learning to learn:

• Recognition of the different registers of the language: written and oral, formal and informal speech. 

• Autonomous use of different learning digital and bibliographical resources.
• Application of strategies to revise, widen and consolidate lexicon and grammar structures.
• Analysis and reflection on the use and meaning of different grammar structures by comparing and contrasting the peers' and your own's.
• Reflection and application of self-correction and self-assessment strategies to progress in the autonomous learning of the English language.
• Recognition of errors and mistakes as something necessary in their learning process.
• Interest to take profit of the learning chances inside and outside school using information and communication technologies.
• Value of trust, entrepreneurship and cooperation in the learning of the English language.

  

Sociocultural aspects:

• Social contact with peers showing respect towards other people’s opinions and attitudes.
• Knowledge and value of the most relevant cultural elements.
• Significant similarities and differences among costumes, behaviours, attitudes, values and beliefs among speakers of the English and Spanish language.
• Use of suitable registers according to the context, speakers and communicative purpose.
• Interest to establish communicative exchanges to know cultural information of English speaking countries.
• Value of the English language as a tool of communication and understanding among peoples which provides with the access to other cultures and that helps to enrich ourselves personally  
• Value of the English language as a means to access knowledge in students' future academic and professional lives.

Procedure:

Students are presented the following activity. It is a smart notebook game in which they are presented the main American symbols. They must work cooperatively to get the correct answers in each of the proposed questions.

Later on, students must listen to a podcast. They will listen to a piece of authentic material, a New York City guide podcast. Since the podcast is a bit long, students will listen just to the first 8 minutes. Students will listen to it twice. The first time, they will only listen to the podcast. The second time, they will try to answer the questions the teacher has given to them in a worksheet. All the answers will be checked and if necessary, some bits of the podcast will be listened to again.
This is the podcast link:
http://www.hostelworld.com/static/episodes/NewYorkCityGuide.mp3
  

Finally, a home-made recorded video on a trip to New York and New Jersey will be watched. The characters of the video are some of their classmates, since they visited the United States last september. In the video they can watch their mates speaking and explaining the places they visited: Pennington, New York, Washington D.C and Philadelphia. They will watch the video and will be divided in four groups of three. Students must dub the video with their own words. This activity takes time, so it will be started within the last part of the class and will be finished at home as a kind of group assignment. The following week, students will present their dubbed version to the rest of their classmates.

Assessment:

• Oral exchanges: asking and answering, participation in the smart notebook activity.
• Answering the proposed questions cohesively and coherently after listening to the podcast. 
• Peer-assessment: in the following week, students must present their dubbed recording to the rest of the group. Students will assess their peers' presentation filling in a chart that will be given to the teacher.
• Teacher's observation: the teacher assesses students' participation in the first activity, their oral and written exchanges in the podcast activity and the final dubbed recorded version presentation.

 Activities:

 SMART NOTEBOOK/ EASEL.LY/ WARM UP:  Students are presented a smart notebook activity. They will play bingo with the basic vocabulary on Thanksgiving that was presented in the previous session. Here is the link:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/d79wt3aprla16y0/Thanksgiving%20Bingo.notebook?dl=0

They will also watch the following infographic on curiosities about the first Thanksgiving celebration:

http://www.easel.ly/viewEasel/2022470

Students are asked to talk about these facts in groups of three and think of other historical events whose information has not been depicted in a loyal way.

Once these activities are done, the basic contents of today's activities are introduced. Students are presented another smart notebook activity in which the main patriotic symbols of the United States are worked. Students must follow the instructions of each exercise (grabbing lines, answering questions...) in order to fulfill the aims of the activity:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3kg98a2wpfjkr4z/American%20culture%20symbols.notebook?dl=0

PODCAST: Students are given a worksheet with the following questions. In pairs, they must try to answer the questions about New York tourism:

CITY FACTS

1. Why is NYC called “the big apple”?

2. How many boroughs are there in NYC? How are the called?

3. NYC has a population of ________________.

4. Which are the main means of transport in NYC?

5. If you’ve got an emergency, you need to dial ________________.

ATTRACTIONS

6. The first attraction mentioned is ________________. What does it represent?

7. The second attraction mentioned is ________________.

8. The main art gallery in NYC is ________________.

9. The second museum mentioned in the guide is ________________.

10. Name three neighbors of NYC mentioned in the podcast.

BEST PLACES TO EAT IN TOWN

11. Where is the best Deli in the Upper Side of NYC according to the speaker?

12. Besides Delis, the second most popular meal in NYC is ________________

Later on, students will listen to the first 8 minutes of the following podcast:

http://www.hostelworld.com/static/episodes/NewYorkCityGuide.mp3

They will listen to it just to get the general idea of the podcast. The teacher will ask the students what they have understood in general. Afterwards, she will ask the students to check if their answers previously written are correct and to complete the missing information. 

VIDEO DUBBING: Students are presented a video on one of the linguistic exchange programmes of the school. They will watch their mates visiting some of the most important eastern cities in USA like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington D.C. They are told they will have to do a similar recording during their prom trip in order to show what they have done there to the rest of the students of the school. They will be given a camera to film what they are doing every day. Each student will be in charge of the camera half a day and at the end of the trip, every single student will have recorded a bit of the video. When they come back to Spain, students, with the help of the teacher, will edit the video in the Communication and Information Technology lesson since it is a cross-curricular project done in the Literacy and ITC lessons.

Once the future assignment is presented, students are told to dub their partners’ video. This activity will be done in the English lab of the school where there are around 20 computers available for students. Students will be split in four groups of three people. They will have to dub their voices with the use of a dubbing programme--------------

They will start this activity in the classroom but since it is a demanding activity, they will continue it at home or in the English lab during their free periods. They will present it the following week to the rest of the class. The teacher will highlight they must use fluent and accurate English in all the given situations of the video and must respect everybody’s feelings and tastes.

 

Pennington web from Beatriz Chaves on Vimeo.